I was stunned and shaken, but not hurt by the impact, and had small difficulty in climbing from the wreckage. The broken cab was lying on its side, its frosted windows shattered and its door staved in. Horse and coachman were nowhere in sight, but inside the carriage I caught a glimpse of huddled black silk, the woman's faradje or over-mantle, and a little flash of white which was her face-veil. As I leant across the opening of the broken window to assist her the black eunuch rushed at me with a drawn saber. "Allah ijjiblah rehba rama!" he shrieked at me in a high, sexless falsetto—"may Allah send an earthquake to destroy thee!"
He was so fat he waddled like a duck and shook like a great bag of mush each step he took, but if he was ridiculous, and his high, thin, piping voice was comic, there was nothing droll about the scimitar he swung at me. I'd seen those things in action at our diggings. Razor-sharp and freshly honed each morning, they sheared through almost anything they struck. They could cut a three-inch hempen hawser as easily as if it had been twisted putty, and I knew if he got in one stroke at me I'd turn up with a missing hand, perhaps a missing head.
I dodged his blow and reached down for my crank-handle, which providentially was in the emergency. Then we went at it hammer and tongs, he intent on killing me, my only thought to tire him out. Finally he drew his saber back as if it were an ax, and I knew I'd have small chance of dodging it; so I swung the iron handle to his stomach, hitting him with every ounce of strength I had. He went down as if he'd been a blown-up bladder which I'd punctured, hugging himself with agony, his face thrown back, mouth squared, eyes goggling horribly, and I turned to run, but found my every exit blocked.
The street which had been quiet and deserted as a country churchyard at midnight was boiling full of mad humanity, Arabs, Negroes, Copts and Jews, and some who blended all four races in their blood. They pressed on me from every side and I realized I was in deadly peril. "Swine, dog, feringhi!" I heard them screaming. "Drunkard, killer, oudj al-ghass—countenance of misfortune!" Here and there a knife showed, and some of them had picked up stones, but I might have fought my way through them with the crank-handle, though I should have been pretty well hacked up. Just then, however, I saw the top of a tarboosh come bobbing through the mob, and caught the hail: "Make way, O Moslems, give way, thou sons of noseless mothers, naughty sisters' brothers!"
The insults might seem comical to Western ears, but the insulter was no laughing matter. He was a "Gyppie," a Cairene policeman recruited from the giant Sudanese, and to fight him off would be impossible as wrestling with a wild bull-elephant. Also, he represented law and order, and would undoubtedly arrest me. I had no way of knowing how much I had hurt the woman in the carriage, but I realized she belonged to an important household, and the scandal they would raise would be terrific. I was not drunk—not very drunk, at any rate—but the fact I had been drinking when I drove a car would weigh against me at the hearing. I looked around me panic-stricken, and the voice that whispered in my ear seemed like that of a messenger from heaven: "This way, effendi, ere the policeman arrives. I will hide you so no one can smell you out, though he call upon the seven mystic names of Allah in his search!" He seized me by the
