You can bend him, but you can't break him; and it takes
a lot to bend him. Men desert, but he says others will come to take
their place. And so they do. It's wonderful, in spite of the holy
war that's being preached, and all the lies about him sprinkled over
this part of Africa, how they all fear him, and find it hard to be
out on the war-path against him. We should be gorging the vultures
if he wasn't the wonder he is. We need boats. Does he sit down and
wring his hands? No, he organises, and builds them--out of scraps.
Hasn't he enough food for a long siege? He goes himself to the
tribes that have stored food in their cities, and haven't yet
declared against him, and he puts a hand on their hard hearts, and
takes the sulkiness out of their eyes, and a fleet of ghiassas comes
down to us loaded with dourha. The defences of this place are
nothing. Does he fold his hands like a man of peace that he is,
and say, 'Thy will be done'? Not the Saadat. He gets two soldier-
engineers, one an Italian who murdered his wife in Italy twenty
years ago, and one a British officer that cheated at cards and had
to go, and we've got defences that'll take some negotiating. That's
the kind of man he is; smiling to cheer others when their hearts are
in their boots, stern like a commander-in-chief when he's got to
punish, and then he does it like steel; but I've seen him afterwards
in his tent with a face that looks sixty, and he's got to travel a
while yet before he's forty.
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