year of the birth of Hugh Carden Ali.

Owing to the entreaties of his English mother, the boy had not been
affianced in extreme youth to a little maid of two or three or four
summers, upon whom he would not have set eyes until the night of the
marriage.

His mother had idolised him and he had worshipped her; he obeyed her,
he would willingly have died for her; later, at her request, he even
left his country of sunshine and vivid colouring for hers, so cold and
bleak; but before that and at the age when other high-caste youths of
Arabia settle down in their own house to contemplate seriously the
taking of the reins into their own despotic hands, he had absolutely
refused to go to the House 'an Mahabbha, built for him as his father's
first-born.

Perhaps also it was the English blood in his veins which at that age
filled him with the spirit of adventure.

A desire for solitude, a desire for something sterner than the everyday
existence of his luxurious life had driven him out into the desert,
where, bewitched, as it were of woman, he had followed the Spirit which
ever held out her long fine hand with beckoning finger.

A mere boy? Absurd! Ridiculous!

Not at all; for the high-caste boy of twelve in the Orient is oft-times
as much developed physically and mentally as the Occidental of over
twenty.