But Umm ed-Dahak answered, “True, wallahi. What dismays thee? A woman’s task is to produce. We leave the rest to Allah.”

And to console her hearer she went on to tell of broods of thirty, even forty, reared successfully; when Barakah’s dismay was turned to laughter.

In her moments of depression she was haunted by two terrors on her son’s account. One was ophthalmia, a disease so prevalent in Egypt that half the population was composed of blind and one-eyed persons. The other was the plague, of which the women told grim stories with a strange complacency. Many of her friends had been through epidemics of the pestilence and, by their own report, had known no panic. It was a swift and cruel illness, by which they had lost dear ones in despite of careful nursing; it was from Allah; no one’s thinking could avert or cure it. The horror the mere thought of it inspired in Barakah, her futile worry, filled them with a placid wonder.