Durrance found his body-servant waiting up for him when he had come across the fields to his own house of "Guessens."  
"You can turn the lights out and go to bed," said Durrance, and he walked through the hall into his study. The name hardly described the room, for it had always been more of a gun-room than a study.
 
He sat for some while in his chair and then began to walk gently about the room in the dark. There were many cups and goblets¹ scattered³ about the room, which Durrance had won in his past days. He knew them each one by their shape and position, and he drew a kind of comfort from the feel of them. He took them up one by one and touched them and fondled them, wondering whether, now that he was blind, they were kept as clean and bright as they used to be. This one, a thin-stemmed goblet², he had won in a regimental steeple-chase at Colchester; he could remember the day with its clouds and grey sky and the dull look of the ploughed fields between the hedges. That pewter, which stood upon his writing table and which had formed a convenient holder⁴ for his pens, when pens had been of use, he had acquired very long ago in his college "fours," when he was a freshman⁵ at Oxford⁶. The hoof⁷ of a favourite horse mounted in silver made an ornament⁸ upon the mantelpiece. His trophies⁹ made the room a gigantic diary; he fingered his records of good days gone by and came at last to his guns and rifles.
 
He took them down from their racks. They were to him much what Ethne's violin was to her and had stories for his ear alone. He sat with a Remington across his knee and lived over again one long hot day in the hills to the west of Berenice, during which he had stalked a lion across stony¹⁰, open country, and killed him at three hundred yards just before sunset. Another talked to him, too, of his first ibex shot in the Khor Baraka, and of antelope¹¹ stalked in the mountains northward¹² of Suakin. There was a little Greener gun which he had used upon midwinter nights in a boat upon this very creek¹³ of the Salcombe estuary¹⁴. He had brought down his first mallard with that, and he lifted it and slid his left hand along the under side of the barrel and felt the butt¹⁵ settle comfortably into the hollow of his shoulder. But his weapons began to talk over loudly in his ears, even as Ethne's violin, in the earlier days after Harry¹⁶ Feversham was gone and she was left alone, had spoken with too penetrating¹⁷ a note to her. As he handled the locks, and was aware that he could no longer see the sights, the sum of his losses was presented to him in a very definite and incontestable way.
 
He put his guns away, and was seized suddenly with a desire to disregard his blindness, to pretend that it was no hindrance¹⁸ and to pretend so hard that it should prove not to be one. The desire grew and shook him like a passion and carried him winged out of the countries of dim stars straight to the East. The smell of the East and its noises and the domes¹⁹ of its mosques²⁰, the hot sun, the rabble²¹ in its streets, and the steel-blue sky overhead, caught at him till he was plucked from his chair and set pacing restlessly about his room.
 
He dreamed himself to Port Said, and was marshalled in the long procession of steamers down the waterway of the canal. The song of the Arabs coaling the ship was in his ears, and so loud that he could see them as they went at night-time up and down the planks²² between the barges²³ and the deck, an endless chain of naked figures monotonously²⁵ chanting and lurid²⁶ in the red glare of the braziers. He travelled out of the canal, past the red headlands of the Sinaitic Peninsula, into the chills of the Gulf²⁷ of Suez. He zigzagged²⁸ down the Red Sea while the Great Bear swung northward low down in the sky above the rail of the quarterdeck, and the Southern Cross began to blaze in the south; he touched at Tor and at Yambo; he saw the tall white houses of Yeddah lift themselves out of the sea, and admired the dark brine-withered woodwork of their carved casements²⁹; he walked through the dusk of its roofed bazaars³⁰ with the joy of the homesick after long years come home; and from Yeddah he crossed between the narrowing coral-reefs into the land-locked harbour of Suakin.
 
Westward³¹ from Suakin stretched the desert, with all that it meant to this man whom it had smitten³² and cast out—the quiet padding of the camels' feet in sand; the great rock-cones rising sheer and abrupt³³ as from a rippleless ocean, towards which you march all day and get no nearer; the gorgeous momentary³⁴ blaze of sunset colours in the west; the rustle³⁵ of the wind through the short twilight³⁶ when the west is a pure pale green and the east the darkest blue; and the downward swoop³⁷ of the planets out of nothing to the earth. The inheritor of the other places dreamed himself back into his inheritance as he tramped to and fro, forgetful of his blindness and parched³⁸ with desire as with a fever—until unexpectedly he heard the blackbirds and the swallows bustling³⁹ and piping in the garden, and knew that outside his windows the world was white with dawn.
 
He waked from his dream at the homely⁴⁰ sound. There were to be no more journeys for him; affliction had caged him and soldered⁴¹ a chain about his leg. He felt his way by the balustrade up the stairs to his bed. He fell asleep as the sun rose.
 
But at Dongola, on the great curve of the Nile southwards of Wadi Halfa, the sun was already blazing and its inhabitants were awake. There was sport prepared for them this morning under the few palm trees before the house of the Emir Wad El Nejoumi. A white prisoner captured a week before close to the wells of El Agia on the great Arbain road, by a party of Arabs, had been brought in during the night and now waited his fate at the Emir's hands. The news spread quick as a spark through the town; already crowds of men and women and children flocked to this rare and pleasant spectacle. In front of the palm trees an open space stretched to the gateway⁴² of the Emir's house; behind them a slope of sand descended⁴³ flat and bare to the river.
 
Harry Feversham was standing⁴⁴ under the trees, guarded by four of the Ansar soldiery. His clothes had been stripped from him; he wore only a torn and ragged⁴⁵ jibbeh upon his body and a twist of cotton on his head to shield him from the sun. His bare shoulders and arms were scorched⁴⁶ and blistered⁴⁷. His ankles were fettered⁴⁸, his wrists were bound with a rope of palm fibre, an iron collar was locked about his neck, to which a chain was attached, and this chain one of the soldiers held. He stood and smiled at the mocking crowd about him and seemed well pleased, like a lunatic.
 
That was the character wh............