a breath as soon as I reached Cairo. I was much disappointed in the reception awaiting me; so also was every other released captive, and not a few Mahdists. Perhaps I am to blame for delaying at Berber for the purpose I have "admitted" in my chapter "Divorced and Married," when my arrival had been announced by a certain train; but I have been punished for this, though even now I am too uncivilized to feel ashamed of the action, or to appreciate the justice of the strictures passed upon me in consequence.
When at last I did reach Cairo, it was but to learn that although I had taken as "jokes" the compliments which I received on my way down, on the "manufacture of gunpowder with which to kill English soldiers" — on the "damned clever' design and construction of the forts to oppose the advance of the gunboats," on my "smartness in galloping away from the field when I saw it was all over for Mahdieh, and reaching the prison just in time to get on my chains again before the Sirdar put in his appearance" — yet these, and a great many other tales, were implicitly believed in. Moreover, they had lost nothing in being translated into the many languages spoken in Cairo, which include every language of Europe, with a few of the East.
It was heartrending to me, after what I had gone through, to return to my own flesh and blood to be spurned and shunned as the incarnation of everything despicable in a man. I, who had defied my captors and had looked for death, wished for it more now that I was amongst my own people; but fortunately the persecution I was subjected to, added to my change of
