The final pages bring Isa together with a young man whom he had imprisoned during his period as a powerful civil servant. By now, his emotions have been jolted into some kind of reality by the sight of his own daughter and by Riri’s bitter words to him. Past and present encounter each other in the dark under the statue of Saad Zaghlul, the poignant symbol of the past mentioned several times in this book and with equal effect in Miramar. Isa is disturbed and troubled by the young man’s friendly attitude and by his enthusiasm for the revolution. When the latter gives up hope of converting Isa and heads toward the city, Isa follows him. Since it is past midnight, this may perhaps be considered a move away from Saad Zaghlul’s statue, out of the darkness toward some new dawn.

From an artistic point of view, this ending—with Isa running after the young man into an uncertain future—has been regarded as contrived. We have already noted that Isa had given several signs of a dispassionate intellectual acceptance of the revolution. The question to be posed in the current context thus concerns his stubborn adherence to his own past and his emotional attitudes. What is the role of his final encounters with Riri and his own daughter, Ni‘mat, in this process? Has it shaken him into a sense of emotional and moral responsibility sufficient to justify his decision to run after the young man? Is the Indian palm reader’s comment about “recovery from a serious illness” a forewarning of his eventual decision to follow the young man? I must leave it to the readers of Autumn Quail to make their own judgments on the artistic efficacy of the ending vis-à-vis these questions; I would merely comment that I find it less unconvincing than many of its critics do.