Page:Harris Dickson--Old Reliable in Africa.djvu/138

 "No matter; half of it does the grubby work—then it's label your bedding to the hospital."

Zack Foster, Effendi, posed on the forward deck. Nobody need remind Zack to put on his helmet; he had never once removed it since the Colonel made that gladsome purchase. The Cairene shopkeeper handed it down—dazzling white, with broad blue streamers and polka dots. Zack glimpsed those fluttering speckles crossed fore and aft—and surrendered. He strutted the streets of Cairo for three days, while the Colonel and the Syndicate bought supplies. In that helmet Zack had startled the sleep of Egypt, flitting through Luxor on donkey-back, like a black bat with blue wings. In it he had suffocated on the narrow-gauge train to Shellal, where the windows were of smoked glass to shut out the desert glare, but where nothing could shut out the desert dust. On the mail-boat from Shellal to Haifa Zack donned his helmet and defied the sun.

Beneath the sloping bank at Wadi Haifa they found their special tugboat waiting to convey them to Beni Yeb, where the Southern planter would confer with the Scotch pioneer, before proceeding to yet more savage lands. At two o'clock in the afternoon the pitiless white sunshine glinted on the river and dazzled on the desert. Three white-clad white men in white-clad chairs lounged beneath their awnings on the afterdeck. The