Despair kept him company at times, and fear always.

But from the sharp pangs of these emotions a sort of madness was begotten in him, a frenzy of obstinacy, a belief fanatical as the dark religion of those amongst whom he moved, that he could not now fail and the world go on, that there could be no injustice in the whole scheme of the universe great enough to lay this heavy burden upon the one man least fitted to bear it and then callously to destroy him because he tried.
Fear had him in its grip on that morning three days after he had left Abou Fatma at the wells, when coming over a slope he first saw the sand stretched like a lagoon up to the dark brown walls of the town, and the overshadowing foliage of the big date palms rising on the Nile bank beyond.

Within those walls were the crowded Dervishes.

It was surely the merest madness for a man to imagine that he could escape detection there, even for an hour.

Was it right, he began to ask, that a man should even try?
The longer he stood, the more insistent did this question grow.