In 1942, with Rommel driving into Egypt, the American consulate told its citizens to get out. Nearly every missionary in the country went. One woman in Assiout did not. She had seven hundred children, an empty store room, and no way to be sent money from home.

Her name was Lillian Trasher, and by then she had been feeding orphans on the Nile for thirty years without once asking a human being for a penny. Her rule was to ask God and to write down what came, and her letters are a running ledger of what came. In one of them, from the war years, she wrote that they were being fed like the sparrows, who have no barns and no storerooms. Seven hundred little ones, she wrote. We are still looking to the Lord for our hourly needs.

There is a morning from those lean years that the children never forgot. There was nothing in the house. Not stale bread, not sour milk, nothing. So she sat them all down at the long tables in front of empty bowls, and told them to thank God for the good meal he was about to send them. They said amen. And before the room had settled, a lorry came up to the back gate and began unloading sacks of flour and rice and beans, and crates of milk and bread and eggs, sent by somebody who left no name.

But the war was closing in, and no lorry was going to feed seven hundred children through it. And then the American ambassador in Cairo, Alexander Kirk, sent for her. There was a ship, he said. Here the accounts differ, and it is worth saying so. In some tellings it was a Red Cross vessel, the Kassandra Louloudis, loaded with relief for Greece and ordered to turn back when Greece fell, whose cargo a young Scottish soldier on board, who happened to know about the orphanage, talked the captain into unloading at Alexandria. In others it was a German supply ship the British had captured, whose food was offered to the American missionary and her orphans.

What every account agrees on is what came up the river. Within days a convoy was making its way down the Nile to Assiout: food, and thousands of dresses, sweaters, trousers and blankets. Enough, by the accounts of those who were there, to carry the orphanage through the rest of the war. She stayed nineteen more years, and died there in 1961.

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