XXXII

At Kafr ed-Dowâr Muhammad was kept drilling conscripts, relieving older officers who were required for actual fighting. Almost every day he heard the boom of cannon, the stirring noises of attack and skirmish; and often in his leisure moments he would perch in some high nook and watch the flashes, the white puffs of smoke, dispersed upon the green of level fields between the seacoast sandhills and the lake⁠—a pretty sight. Beyond the plain of water skimmed by white-winged birds the town of Alexandria basked in sunlit haze. Upon the land-plain doves were wheeling round deserted villages, kites and vultures hovered high in air. Franks from the seaport rode out in the rearward of the English troops, and from the vantage-point of dykes and hillocks watched the operations through their field-glasses. The assaults, as he had told his mother, were not serious; mere “fantaziyeh” the old soldiers called them. The aim of the assailants was to keep a portion of Arâbi’s troops from joining the main army on the banks of the Canal, where war was being waged in bitter earnest. Muhammad fretted at his dull employment. The atmosphere of strife, the bugle-calls, the march of men, no longer satisfied him as at first. He wished to fight, and begged the general-in-chief, who favoured him, being a close friend of his uncle Hamdi, to move him to some post of danger. The great one laughed and patted him upon the back.