Now, no one should never take back a servant what has given notice and then says he's sorry, for if he does the sorrow will be on the other side before it's all done; and much less should he take back a _fiancee_ (Quick said a 'finance'), on the whole, he'd better drown himself--I tried it once, and I know.

So that's the tail of the business.
"But," he went on, "it has a couple of fins as well, like that eel beast I caught in the Nile.

One of them is that the Captain promised and vowed to go through with this expedition, and if a man's got to die, he'd better die honest without breaking his word.

And the other is what I said to you in London when I signed on, that he won't die a minute before his time, and nothing won't happen to him, but what's bound to happen, and therefore it ain't a ha'porth of use bothering about anything, and that's where the East's well ahead of the West.
"And now, sir, I'll go and look after the camels and those half-bred Jew boys what you call Abati, but I call rotten sneaks, for if they get their thieving fingers into those canisters of picric salts, thinking they're jam, as I found them trying to do yesterday, something may happen in Egypt that'll make the Pharaohs turn in their graves and the Ten Plagues look silly." So, having finished his oration, Quick went, and in due course we started for Mur.
The second incident that is perhaps worth recording was an adventure that happened to us when we had completed about two of our four months' journey.
After weeks of weary desert travel--if I remember right, it was exactly a fortnight after the dog Pharaoh, of which I shall soon have plenty to say, had come into Orme's possession--we reached an oasis called Zeu, where I had halted upon my road down to Egypt.

In this oasis, which, although not large in extent, possesses springs of beautiful water and groves of date-trees, we were, as it chanced, very welcome, since when I was there before, I had been fortunate enough to cure its sheik of an attack of ophthalmia and to doctor several of his people for various ailments with good results.