This is a Fiction Action and Adventure Story Book. It tells that I was not the only passenger aboard the S. S. Mandalay who perceived the disturbance and wondered what it might portend and from whence proceed. A goodly number of passengers were joining the ship at Port Said. I was lounging against the rail, pipe in mouth, lazily wondering, with a large vagueness. What a heterogeneous rabble it was!--a brightly coloured rabble, but the colours all were dirty, like the town and the canal. Only the sky was clean; the sky and the hard, merciless sunlight which spared nothing of the uncleanness, and defied one even to think of the term dear to tourists, "picturesque". I was in that kind of mood. All the natives appeared to be pockmarked; all the Europeans greasy with perspiration. But what was the stir about? I turned to the dark, bespectacled young man who leaned upon the rail beside me. From the first I had taken to Mr. Ahmad Ahmadeen.
