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He turned to my Druze muleteer and continued:

This was a grim light upon the character of my friend Nah?r, who had exchanged with me hospitality against a kerchief, and the little group round the fire was somewhat taken back. But Mikh?il was equal to the occasion.

"Let not your Excellency think it," said he, deftly dishing up some stewed vegetables; "he shall be a Christian till we reach the Jebel Druze, and his name is not Mu?ammad but ?ar?f, for that is a name the Christians use."

So we converted and baptized the astonished Mu?ammad before the cutlets could be taken out of the frying-pan.

The morning of Sunday, the 12th of February, was still stormy, but I resolved to go. The days spent at ?neib had not been wasted. An opportunity of watching hour by hour the life of one of these outlying farms comes seldom, but my thoughts had travelled forward, and I longed to follow the path they had taken. I caught them up, so it seemed to me, when G?abl?n, Namr?d and I heard the hoofs of our mares ring on the metals of the ??jj railway and set our faces towards the Open desert. We rode east by north, leaving Mshitta a little to the south, and though no one who knew it in its loveliness could have borne to revisit those ravished walls, it must be not forgotten that there is something to be said for the act of vandalism that stripped them. If there had been good prospect that the ruin should stand as it had stood for over a thousand years, uninjured save by the winter rains, it ought to have! been allowed to remain intact in the rolling country to which it gave so strange an impress of delicate and fantastic beauty; but the railway has come near, the plains will fill up, and neither Syrian fellah nor Turkish soldier can be induced to spare walls that can be turned to practical uses. Therefore let those who saw it when it yet stood unimpaired, cherish its memory with gratitude, and without too deep a regret.

Namr?d and G?abl?n chatted without a pause. Late in the previous night two soldiers had presented themselves at the door of the cave, and having gained admittance they had told a strange tale. They had formed part, so they affirmed, of the troops that the Sultan had despatched from Baghdad to help Ibn er Rash?d against Ibn Sa'oud. They related how the latter had driven them back step by step to the very gates of ??il, Ibn er Rash?d's capital, and how as the two armies lay facing one another Ibn Sa'oud with a few followers had ridden up to his enemy's tent and laid his hand upon the tent pole so that the prince of the Sh?mma? had no choice but to let him enter. And then and there they had come to an agreement, Ibn er Rash?d relinquishing all his territory to within a mile or two of ??il, but retaining that city and the lands to the north of it, including J?f, and recognising Ibn Sa'oud's sovereignty over Ri?? and its extended fief. The two soldiers had made the best of their way westward across the desert, for they said most of their companions in arms were slain and the rest had fled. This was by far the most authentic news that I was to receive from Nejd, and I have reason to believe that it was substantially correct. I questioned many of the Arabs as to Ibn er Rash?d's character: the answer was almost invariably the same. "Sh?tir jiddan," they would say; "he is very shrewd," but after a moment they would add, "majn?n" . A reckless man and a hot-headed, so I read him, with a restless intelligence and little judgment, not strong enough, and perhaps not cruel enough, to enforce his authority over the unruly tribes whom his uncle, Mu?ammad, held in a leash of fear , and too proud, if the desert judges him rightly, to accept the terms of the existing peace. He is persuaded that the English government armed Ibn Sa'oud against him, his reason being that it was the Sheikh of Kweit, believed to be our ally, who furnished that homeless exile with the means of re-establishing himself in the country his ancestors had ruled, hoping thereby to weaken the influence of the Sultan on the borders of Kweit. The beginning of the trouble was possibly the friendship with the Sultan into which Ibn er Rash?d saw fit to enter, a friendship blazoned to the world by the appearance of Shamma?i mares in Constantinople and Circassian girls in ??il; but as for the end, there is no end to war in the desert, and any grievance will serve the turn of an impetuous young sheikh.

Though we were riding through plains which were quite deserted and to the casual observer almost featureless, we seldom travelled for more than a mile without reaching a spot that had a name. In listening to Arab talk you are struck by this abundant nomenclature. If you ask where a certain sheikh has pitched his tents you will at once be given an exact answer. The map is blank, and when you reach the encampment the landscape is blank also. A rise in the ground, a big stone, a vestige of ruin, not to speak of every possible hollow in which there may be water either in winter or in summer, these are marks sufficiently distinguishing to the nomad eye. Ride with an Arab and you shall realise why the pre-Mohammadan poems are so full of names, and also how vain a labour it would be to attempt to assign a definite spot to the greater number of them, for the same name recurs hundreds of times. We presently came to a little mound which G?abl?n called Thelelet el ?irsheh and then to another rather smaller called Theleleh, and here G?abl?n drew rein and pointed to a couple of fire-blackened stones upon the ground.

"That," said he, "was my hearth. Here I camped five years ago. Yonder was my father's tent, and the son of my uncle pitched his below the slope."

I might have been riding with Imr ul ?ais, or with any of the great singers of the Age of Ignorance, whose odes take swinging flight lifted on just such a theme, the changeless theme of the evanescence of desert existence.

The clouds broke in rain upon us, and we left Theleleh and paced on east--an Arab when he travels seldom goes quicker than a walk--while Namr?d, according to his habit, beguiled the way with story telling.

"Oh lady," said he,--"I will tell you a tale well known among the Arabs, without doubt G?abl?n has heard it. There was a man--he is dead now, but his sons still live--who had a blood feud, and in the night his enemy fell upon him with many horsemen, and they drove away his flocks and his camels and his mares and seized his tents and all that he had. And he who had been a rich man and much honoured was reduced to the extreme of necessity. So he wandered forth till he came to the tents of a tribe that was neither the friend nor the foe of his people, and he went to the sheikh's tent and laid his hand on the tent pole and said: 'Oh sheikh! I am your guest' "." And the sheikh rose and led him in and seated him by the hearth, and treated him with kindness. And he gave him sheep and a few camels and cloth for a tent, and the man went away and prospered so that in ten years he was again as rich as before. Now after ten years it happened that misfortune fell upon the sheikh who had been his host, and he in turn lost all that he possessed. And the sheikh said: 'I will go to the tents of so-and-so, who is now rich, and he will treat me as I treated him.' Now when he reached the tents the man was away, but his son was within. And the sheikh laid his hand on the tent pole, and said, 'Ana dakh?lak,' and the man's son answered: 'I do not know you, but since you claim our protection come in and my mother will make you coffee.' So the sheikh came in, and the woman called him to her hearth and made him coffee, and it is an indignity among the Arabs that the coffee should be made by the women. And while he was sitting by the women's hearth, the lord of the tent returned, and his son went out and told him that the sheikh had come. And he said: 'We will keep him for the night since he is bur guest, and at dawn we will send him away lest we should draw his feud upon ourselves.' And they put the sheikh in a corner of the tent and gave him only bread and coffee, and next day they bade him go. And they sent an escort of two horsemen with him for a day's journey, as is the usage among the Arabs with one who has sought their protection and goes in fear of his life, and then they left him to starve or to fall among his enemies. But such ingratitude is rare, praise be to God! and therefore the tale is not forgotten."

I was to dine that night in Fell?? ul 'Isa's tent, and when the last bar of red light still lay across the west G?abl?n came to fetch me. The little encampment was already alive with all the combination of noises that animates the desert after dark, the grunting and groaning of camels, the bleating of sheep and goats and the uninterrupted barking of dogs. There was no light in the sheikh's tent save that of the fire; my host sitting opposite me was sometimes hidden in a column of pungent smoke and sometimes illumined by a leaping flame. When a person of consideration comes as guest, a sheep must be killed in honour of the occasion, and accordingly we eat with our fingers a bountiful meal of mutton and curds and flaps of bread. But even on feast nights the Arab eats astonishingly little, much less than a European woman with a good appetite, and when there is no guest in camp, bread and a bowl of camel's milk is all they need. It is true they spend most of the day asleep or gossiping in the sun, yet I have seen the 'Ag??l making a four months' march on no more generous fare. Though they can go on such short commons, the Bedouin must seldom be without the sensation of hunger; they are always lean and thin, and any sickness that falls upon the tribe carries off a large proportion of its numbers. My servants feasted too, and since we had left Mu?ammad, or rather ?ar?f the Christian, to guard the tents in our absence, a wooden bowl was piled with food and sent out into the night "for the guest who has remained behind."

Namr?d turned from these vexed questions to extol the English rule in Egypt. He had never been there, but he had heard tales from one of his cousins who was a clerk in Alexandria; he knew that the fellahin had grown rich and that the desert was as peaceful as were the cities.

"Blood feud has ceased," said he, "and raiding; for when a man steals another's camels, look you what happens. The owner of the camels comes to the nearest konak and lays his complaint, and a zaptieh rides out alone through the desert till he reaches the robber's tent. Then he throws the salaam and enters. What does the lord of the tent do? he makes coffee and tries to treat the zaptieh as a guest. But when the soldier has drunk the coffee he places money by the hearth, saying, 'Take this piastre,' and so he pays for all he eats and drinks and accepts nothing. And in the morning he departs, leaving orders that in so many days the camels must be at the konak. Then the robber, being afraid, gathers together the camels and sends them in, and one, may be, is missing, so that the number is short. And the judge says to the lord of the camels, 'Are all the beasts here?' and he replies, 'There is one missing.' And he says, 'What is its value?' and he answers, 'Eight liras.' Then the judge says to the other, 'Pay him eight liras.' W?llah! he pays."

Fell?? ul 'Isa expressed no direct approval of the advantages of this system, but he listened with interest while I explained the principles of the Fella??n Bank, as far as I understood them, and at the end he asked whether Lord Cromer could not be induced to extend his rule to Syria, an invitation that I would not undertake to accept in his name. Five years before, in the ?aur?n mountains, a similar question had been put to me, and the answering of it had taxed my diplomacy. The Druze sheikhs of ?anaw?t had assembled in my tent under shadow of night, and after much cautious beating about the bush and many assurances from me that no one was listening, they had asked whether if the Turks again broke their treaties with the Mountain, the Druzes might take refuge with Lord Cromer in Egypt, and whether I would not charge myself with a message to him. I replied with the air of one weighing the proposition in all its aspects that the Druzes were people of the hill country, and that Egypt was a plain, and would therefore scarcely suit them. The Sheikh el Balad looked at the Sheikh ed D?n, and the horrible vision of a land without mountain fastnesses in which to take refuge, or mountain paths easy to defend, must have opened before their eyes, for they replied that the matter required much thought, and I heard no more of it. Nevertheless the moral is obvious: all over Syria and even in the desert; whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes that he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government.

As I sat listening to the talk round me and looking out into the starlit night, my mind went back to the train of thought that had been the groundwork of the whole day, the theme that G?abl?n had started when he stopped and pointed out the traces of his former encampment, and I said:

"In the ages before the Prophet your fathers spoke as you do and in the same language, but we who do not know your ways have lost the meaning of the words they used. Now tell me what is so-and-so, and so-and-so?"

The men round the fire bent forward, and when a flame jumped up I saw their dark faces as they listened, and answered:

"M?sha'llah! we use that word still. It is the mark on the ground where the tent was pitched."

Thus encouraged I quoted the couplet of Imr ul ?ais which G?abl?n's utterance had suggested.

"Stay! let us weep the memory of the Beloved and her resting place in the cleft of the shifting sands 'twixt ?d Duj?l and Haumal."

G?abl?n, by the tent pole, lifted his head and exclaimed: "M?sha'llah! that is 'Antara."

All poetry is ascribed to 'Antara by the unlettered Arab; he knows no other name in literature.

I answered: "No; 'Antara spoke otherwise. He said: 'Have the poets aforetime left ought to be added by me? or dost thou remember her house when thou lookest on the place?' And Leb?d spoke best of all when he said: 'And what is man but a tent and the folk thereof? one day they depart and the place is left desolate.'"

G?abl?n made a gesture of assent.

He had struck the note. I looked out beyond him into the night and saw the desert with his eyes, no longer empty but set thicker with human associations than any city. Every line of it took on significance, every stone was like the ghost of a hearth in which the warmth of Arab life was hardly cold, though the fire might have been extinguished this hundred years. It was a city of shadowy outlines visible one under the other, fleeting and changing, combining into new shapes elements that are as old as Time, the new indistinguishable from the old and the old from the new.

There is no name for it. The Arabs do not speak of desert or wilderness as we do. Why should they? To them it is neither desert nor wilderness, but a land of which they know every feature, a mother country whose smallest product has a use sufficient for their needs. They know, or at least they knew in the days when their thoughts shaped themselves in deathless verse, how to rejoice in the great spaces and how to honour the rush of the storm. In many a couplet they extolled the beauty of the watered spots; they sang of the fly that hummed there, as a man made glad with wine croons melodies for his sole ears to hear, and of the pools of rain that shone like silver pieces, or gleamed dark as the warrior's mail when the wind ruffled them. They had watched, as they crossed the barren watercourses, the laggard wonders of the night, when the stars seemed chained to the sky as though the dawn would never come. Imr ul ?ais had seen the Pleiades caught like jewels in the net of a girdle, and with the wolf that howled in the dark he had claimed fellowship: "Thou and I are of one kindred, and, lo, the furrow that thou ploughest and that I plough shall yield one harvest." But by night or by day there was no overmastering terror, no meaningless fear and no enemy that could not be vanquished. They did not cry for help, those poets of the Ignorance, either to man or God; but when danger fell upon them they remembered the maker of their sword, the lineage of their horse and the prowess of their tribe, and their own right hand was enough to carry them through. And then they gloried as men should glory whose blood flows hot in their veins, and gave no thanks where none were due.

"Oh camel rider! Uthail, methinks, if thou speedest well, shall lie before thee when breaks the fifth Dawn o'er thy road. Take thou a word to a dead man there--and a greeting, sure, but meet it is that the riders bring from friends afar-- From me to him, yea and tears unstanched, in a flood they flow when he plies the well rope, and others choke me that stay behind. Raise clear thy voice that an Na?r may hear if thou call on him-- can a dead man hear? Can he answer any that shouts his name? Day long the swords of his father's sons on his body played-- Ah God! the bonds of a brother's blood that were severed there! Helpless, a-weary, to death they led him, with fight foredone; short steps he takes with his fettered feet and his arms are bound. Oh Mu?ammad! sprung from a mother thou of a noble house, and thy father too was of goodly stock when the kin is told. Had it cost thee dear to have granted grace that day to him? yea, a man may pardon though anger burn in his bosom sore. And the nearest he in the ties of kinship of all to thee, and the fittest he, if thou loosedst any to be set free. Ah, hadst thou taken a ransom, sure with the best of all that my hand possessed I had paid thee, spending my utmost store."

And on yet stronger wing the wild free spirit of the desert rose in his breast who lay in ward at Mecca, and he sang of love and death with a voice that will not be silenced:

"My longing climbs up the steep with the riders of El Yemen, by their side, while my body lies in Mecca a prisoner. I marvelled as she came darkling to me and entered free, while the prison door before me was bolted and surely barred. She drew near and greeted me, then she rose and bade farewell, and when she turned my life well-nigh went forth with her. Nay, think not that I am bowed with fear away from you, or that I tremble before death that stands so nigh. Or that my soul quakes at all before your threatening, or that my spirit is broken by walking in these chains. But a longing has smitten my heart born of love for thee, as it was in the days aforetime when that I was free."

The agony of the captive, the imagined vision of the heart's desire which no prison bars could exclude, then the fine protest lest his foes should dream that his spirit faltered, and the strong man's fearless memory of the passion that had shaken his life and left his soul still ready to vanquish death--there are few such epitomes of noble emotion. Born and bred on the soil of the desert, the singers of the Age of Ignorance have left behind them a record of their race that richer and wiser nations will find hard to equal.

There is an Arabic proverb which says: "?ayyeh rubda wa la ?aif mu??a"--neither ash-grey snake nor midday guest. We were careful not to make a breach in our manners by outstaying our welcome, and our camp was up before the sun. To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. The mists lifting their heads out of the hollows, the dews floating in ghostly wreaths from the black tents, were shot through first with the faint glories of the eastern sky and then with the strong yellow rays of the risen sun. I sent a silver and purple kerchief to Fell?? ul 'Isa, "for the little son" who had played solemnly about the hearth, took grateful leave of Namr?d, drank a parting cup of coffee, and, the old sheikh holding my stirrup, mounted and rode away with G?abl?n. We climbed the Jebel el 'Alya and crossed the wide summit of the range; the landscape was akin to that of our own English border country but bigger, the sweeping curves more generous, the distances further away. The glorious cold air intoxicated every sense and set the blood throbbing--to my mind the saying about the Bay of Naples should run differently. See the desert on a fine morning and die--if you can. Even the stolid mules felt the breath of it and raced across the spongy ground till their packs swung round and brought them down, and twice we stopped to head them off and reload. The Little Heart, the highest peak of the Jebel Druze, surveyed us cheerfully the while, glittering in its snow mantle far away to the north.

At the foot of the northern slopes of the 'Alya hills we entered a great rolling plain like that which we had left to the south. We passed many of those mysterious rujm which start the fancy speculating on the past history of the land, and presently we caught sight of the scattered encampments of the ?assaniyyeh, who are good friends to the Da'ja and belong to the same group of tribes. And here we spied two riders coming across the plain and G?abl?n went out to greet them and remained some time in talk, and then returned with a grave face. The day before, the very day before, while we had been journeying peacefully from ?neib, four hundred horsemen of the ?ukh?r and the ?owei???, leagued in evil, had swept these plains, surprised an outlying group of the Beni ?assan and carried off the tents, together with two thousand head of cattle. It was almost a pity, I thought, that we had come a day too late, but G?abl?n looked graver still at the suggestion, and said that he would have been forced to join in the fray, yes, he would even have left me, though I had been committed to his charge, for the Da'ja were bound to help the Beni ?assan against the ?ukh?r. And perhaps yesterday's work would be enough to break the new-born truce between that powerful tribe and the allies of the 'Anazeh and set the whole desert at war again. There was sorrow in the tents of the Children of ?assan. We saw a man weeping by the tent pole, with his head bowed in his hands, everything he possessed having been swept from him. As we rode we talked much of ghazu and the rules that govern it. The fortunes of the Arab are as varied as those of a gambler on the Stock Exchange. One day he is the richest man in the desert, and next morning he may not have a single camel foal to his name. He lives in a state of war, and even if the surest pledges have been exchanged with the neighbouring tribes there is no certainty that a band of raiders from hundreds of miles away will not descend on his camp in the night, as a tribe unknown to Syria, the Beni Aw?jeh, fell, two years ago, on the lands south-east of Aleppo, crossing three hundred miles of desert, Mard?f from their seat above Baghdad, carrying off all the cattle and killing scores of people. How many thousand years this state of things has lasted, those who shall read the earliest records of the inner desert will tell us, for it goes back to the first of them, but in all the centuries the Arab has bought no wisdom from experience. He is never safe, and yet he behaves as though security were his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and indefensible country. He is too far from his fellows to call in their aid, too far as a rule to gather the horsemen together and follow after the raiders whose retreat must be sufficiently slow, burdened with the captured flocks, to guarantee success to a swift pursuit. Having lost all his worldly goods, he goes about the desert and makes his plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats' hair cloth, and another a coffee-pot, a third presents him with a camel, and a fourth with a few sheep, till he has a roof to cover him and enough animals to keep his family from hunger. There are good customs among the Arabs, as Namr?d said. So he bides his time for months, perhaps for years, till at length opportunity ripens, and the horsemen of his tribe with their allies ride forth and recapture all the flocks that had been carried off and more besides, and the feud enters on another phase. The truth is that the ghazu is the only industry the desert knows and the only game. As an industry it seems to the commercial mind to be based on a false conception of the laws of supply and demand, but as a game there is much to be said for it. The spirit of adventure finds full scope in it--you can picture the excitement of the night ride across the plain, the rush of the mares in the attack, the glorious popping of rifles and the exhilaration of knowing yourself a fine fellow as you turn homewards with the spoil. It is the best sort of fantasia, as they say in the desert, with a spice of danger behind it. Not that the danger is alarmingly great: a considerable amount of amusement can be got without much bloodshed, and the raiding Arab is seldom bent on killing. He never lifts his hand against women and children, and if here and there a man falls it is almost by accident, since who can be sure of the ultimate destination of a rifle bullet once it is embarked on its lawless course? This is the Arab view of the ghazu; the Druzes look at it otherwise. For them it is red war. They do not play the game as it should be played, they go out to slay, and they spare no one. While they have a grain of powder in their flasks and strength to pull the trigger, they kill every man, woman and child that they encounter.

Knowing the independence of Arab women and the freedom with which marriages are contracted between different tribes of equal birth, I saw many romantic possibilities of mingled love and hatred between the Montagues and the Capulets. "Lo, on a sudden I loved her," says Antara, "though I had slain her kin." G?abl?n replied that these difficult situations did indeed occur, and ended sometimes in a tragedy, but if the lovers would be content to wait, some compromise could be arrived at, or they might be able to marry during one of the brief but oft-recurring intervals of truce. The real danger begins when blood feud is started within the tribe itself and a man having murdered one of his own people is cast out a homeless, kinless exile to shelter with strangers or with foes. Such was Imr ul ?ais, the lonely outlaw, crying to the night: "Oh long night, wilt thou not bring the dawn? yet the day is no better than thou."

We were off before the rejoicings had begun. I had no desire to assist at the last moments of the camel, and moreover we had a long day before us through country that was not particularly safe. As far as my caravan was concerned, the risk was small. I had a letter in my pocket from Fell?? ul 'Isa to Nas?b el A?rash, the Sheikh of ?alkhad in the Jebel Druze. "To the renowned and honoured sheikh, Nas?b el A?rash," it ran , "the venerated, may God prolong his existence! We send you greetings, to you and to all the people of ?alkhad, and to your brother Jada'llah, and to the son of your uncle Mu?ammad el A?rash in Umm er Rumm?n, and to our friends in Imtain. And further, there goes to you from us a lady of the most noble among the English. And we greet Mu?ammada and our friends. . . . etc., , and this is all that is needful, and peace be with you." And beyond this letter I had the guarantee of my nationality, for the Druzes have not yet forgotten our interference on their behalf in 1860; moreover I was acquainted with several of the sheikhs of the ?ursh?n, to which powerful family Nas?b belonged. But G?abl?n was in a different case, and he was fully conscious of the ambiguity of his position. In spite of his uncle's visit to the Mountain, he was not at all certain how the Druzes would receive him; he was leaving the last outposts of his allies, and entering a border land by tradition hostile , and if he did not find enemies among the Druzes he might well fall in with a scouring party of the bitter foes of the Da'ja, the ?aseneh or their like, who camp east of the hills.

After an hour or two of travel, the character of the country changed completely: the soft soil of the desert came to an end, and the volcanic rocks of the ?aur?n began. We rode for some time up a gulley of lava, left the last of the ?assaniyyeh tents in a little open space between some mounds, and found ourselves on the edge of a plain that, stretched to the foot of the Jebel Druze in an unbroken expanse, completely deserted, almost devoid of vegetation and strewn with black volcanic stones. It has been said that the borders of the desert are like a rocky shore on which the sailor who navigates deep waters with success may yet be wrecked when he attempts to bring his ship to port. This was the landing which we had to effect. Somewhere between us and the hills were the ruins of Umm ej Jem?l, where I hoped to get into touch with the Druzes, but for the life of us we could not tell where they lay, the plain having just sufficient rise and fall to hide them. Now Umm ej Jem?l has an evil name--I believe mine was the second European camp that had ever been pitched in it, the first having been that of a party of American archaeologists who left a fortnight before I arrived--and G?abl?n's evident anxiety enhanced its sinister reputation. Twice he turned to me and asked whether it were necessary to camp there. I answered that he had undertaken to guide me to Umm ej Jem?l, and that there was no question but that I should go, and the second time I backed my obstinacy by pointing out that we must have water that night for the animals, and that there was little chance of finding it except in the cisterns of the ruined village. Thereupon I had out my map, and after trying to guess what point on the blank white paper we must have reached, I turned my caravan a little to the west towards a low rise from whence we should probably catch sight of our destination. G?abl?n took the decision in good part and expressed regret that he could not be of better service in directing us. He had been once in his life to Umm ej Jem?l, but it was at dead of night when he was out raiding. He and his party had stopped for half an hour to water their horses and had passed on eastward, returning, by another route. Yes, it had been a successful raid, praise be to God! and one of the first in which he had engaged. Mikh?il listened with indifference to our deliberations, the muleteers were not consulted, but as we set off again ?ab?b tucked his revolver more handily into his belt.

We rode on. I was engaged in looking for the ras?f, the paved Roman road that runs from ?al'at ez Zerka straight to Bo?r?, and also in wondering what I should do to protect if necessary the friend and guide whose pleasant companionship had enlivened our hours of travel and who should certainly come to no harm while he was with us. As we drew nearer to the rising ground we observed that it was crowned with sheepfolds, and presently we could see men gathering their flocks together and driving them behind the black walls, their hurried movements betraying their alarm. We noticed also some figures, whether mounted or on foot it was impossible to determine, advancing on us from a hollow to the left, and after a moment two puffs of smoke rose in front of them, and we heard the crack of rifles.

G?abl?n turned to me with a quick gesture.

"?arab?na!" he said. "They have fired on us."

I said aloud: "They are afraid," but to myself, "We're in for it."

G?abl?n rose in his stirrups, dragged his fur-lined cloak from his shoulders, wound it round his left arm and waved it above his head, and very slowly he and I paced forward together. Another couple of shots were fired, and still we rode forward, G?abl?n waving his flag of truce. The firing ceased; it was nothing after all but the accepted greeting to strangers, conducted with the customary levity of the barbarian. Our assailants turned out to be two Arabs, grinning from ear to ear, quite ready to fraternise with us as soon as they had decided that we were not bent on sheep stealing, and most willing to direct us to Umm ej Jem?l. As soon as we had rounded the tell we saw it in front of us, its black towers and walls standing so boldly out of the desert that it was impossible to believe it had been ruined and deserted for thirteen hundred years. It was not till we came close that the rents and gashes in the tufa masonry and the breaches in the city wall were visible. I pushed forward and would have ridden straight into the heart of the town, but G?abl?n caught me up and laid his hand upon my bridle.

"I go first," he said. "Oh lady, you were committed to my charge."

And since he was the only person who incurred any risk and was well aware of the fact, his resolution did him credit.

We clattered over the ruined wall, passed round the square monastery tower which is the chief feature of the Mother of Camels , and rode into an open place between empty streets, and there was no one to fear and no sign of life save that offered by two small black tents, the inhabitants of which greeted us with enthusiasm, and proceeded to sell us milk and eggs in the most amicable fashion. The Arabs who live at the foot of ?aur?n mountains are called the Jebeliyyeh, the Arabs of the Hills, and they are of no consideration, being but servants and shepherds to the Druzes. In the winter they herd the flocks that are sent down into the plain, and in the summer they are allowed to occupy the uncultivated slopes with their own cattle.

I spent the hour of daylight that remained in examining the wonderful Nabataean necropolis outside the walls. Monsieur Dussaud began the work on it five years ago; Mr. Butler and Dr. Littmann, whose visit immediately preceded mine, will be found to have continued it when their next volumes are given to the world. Having seen what tombs they had uncovered and noted several mounds that must conceal others, I sent away my companions and wandered in the dusk through the ruined streets of the town, into great rooms and up broken stairs, till G?abl?n came and called me in, saying that if a man saw something in a fur coat exploring those uncanny places after dark, he might easily take the apparition for a ghoul and shoot at it. Moreover, he wished to ask me whether he might not return to ?neib. One of the Arabs would guide us next day to the first Druze village, and G?abl?n would as soon come no nearer to the Mountain. I agreed readily, indeed it was a relief not to have his safety on my conscience. He received three napoleons for his trouble and a warm letter of thanks to deliver to Fell?? ul 'Isa, and we parted with many assurances that if God willed we would travel together again.

The stony foot of the Jebel ?aur?n is strewn with villages deserted since the Mohammedan invasion in the seventh century. I visited two that lay not far from my path, Shab?a and Shab??yyeh, and found them to be both of the same character as Umm ej Jem?l. From afar they look like well-built towns with square towers rising above streets of three-storied houses. Where the walls have fallen they lie as they fell, and no hand has troubled to clear away the ruins. Monsieur de Vog?? was the first to describe the architecture of the ?aur?n; his splendid volumes are still the principal source of information. The dwelling-houses are built round a court in which there is usually an outer stair leading to the upper story. There is no wood used in their construction, even the doors are of solid stone, turning on stone hinges, and the windows of stone slabs pierced with open-work patterns. Sometimes there are traces of a colonnaded portico, or the walls are broken by a double window, the arches of which are supported by a small column and a rough plain capital; frequently the lintels of the doors are adorned with a cross or a Christian monogram, but otherwise there is little decoration. The chambers are roofed with stone slabs resting on the back of transverse arches. So far as can be said with any certainty, Nabataean inscriptions and tombs are the oldest monuments that have been discovered in the district; they are followed by many important remains of pagan Rome, but the really flourishing period seems to have been the Christian. After the Mohammadan invasion, which put an end to the prosperity of the ?aur?n uplands, few of the villages were re-inhabited, and when the Druzes came about a hundred and fifty years ago, they found no settled population. They made the Mountain their own, rebuilt and thereby destroyed the ancient towns, and extended their lordship over the plains to the south, though they have not established themselves in the villages of that debatable land which remains a happy hunting ground for the archaeologist. The American expedition will make good use of the immense amount of material that exists there, and knowing that the work had been done by better hands than mine, I rolled up the measuring tape and folded the foot-rule. But I could not so far overcome a natural instinct as to cease from copying inscriptions, and the one or two that had escaped Dr. Littmann's vigilant eye and come by chance to me were made over to him when we met in Damascus.

To our new guide, Fendi, fell the congenial task of posting me up in the gossip of the Mountain. Death had been busy among the great family of the Tursh?n during the past five years. F?iz el A?rash, Sheikh of Kreyeh, was gone, poisoned said some, and a week or two before my arrival the most renowned of all the leaders of the Druzes, Shibly Beg el A?rash, had died of a mysterious and lingering illness--poison again, it was whispered. There was this war and that on hand, a terrible raid of the Arabs of the W?dy Sir??n to be avenged, and a score with the ?ukh?r to be settled, but on the whole there was prosperity, and as much peace as a Druze would wish to enjoy. The conversation was interrupted by a little shooting at rabbits lying asleep in the sun, not a gentlemanly sport perhaps, but one that helped to fill and to diversify the pot. After a time I left the mules and Fendi to go their own way, and taking Mikh?il with me, made a long circuit to visit the ruined towns. We were just finishing lunch under a broken wall, well separated from the rest of the party, when we saw two horsemen approaching us across the plain. We swept up the remains of the lunch and mounted hastily, feeling that any greeting they might accord us was better met in the saddle. They stopped in front of us and gave us the salute, following it with an abrupt question as to where we were going. I answered: "To ?alkh?d, to Nas?b el A?rash," and they let us pass without further remark. They were not Druzes, for they did not wear the Druze turban, but Christians from ?reyeh, where there is a large Christian community, riding down to Umm ej Jem?l to visit the winter quarters of their flocks, so said Fendi, whom they had passed a mile ahead. Several hours before we reached the present limits of cultivation, we saw the signs of ancient agriculture in the shape of long parallel lines of stones heaped aside from earth that had once been fruitful. They looked like the ridge and furrow of a gigantic meadow, and like the ridge and furrow they are almost indelible, the mark of labour that must have ceased with the Arab invasion. At the foot of the first spur of the hills, Tell esh Sh?? , we left the unharvested desert and entered the region of ploughed fields--we left, too, the long clean levels of the open wilderness and were caught fetlock deep in the mud of a Syrian road. It led us up the hill to Umm er Rumm?n, the Mother of Pomegranates, on the edge of the lowest plateau of the Jebel Druze, as bleak a little muddy spot as you could hope to see. I stopped at the entrance of the village, and asked a group of Druzes where I should find a camping ground, and they directed me to an extremely dirty place below the cemetery, saying there was no other where I should not spoil the crops or the grass, though the crops. Heaven save the mark! were as yet below ground, and the grass consisted of a few brown spears half covered with melting snow. I could not entertain the idea of pitching tents so near the graveyard, and demanded to be directed to the house of Mu?ammad el A?rash, Sheikh of Umm er Rumm?n. This prince of the ?ursh?n was seated upon his roof, engaged in directing certain agricultural operations that were being carried forward in the slough below. Long years had made him shapeless of figure and the effect was enhanced by the innumerable garments in which the winter cold had forced him to wrap his fat old body. I came as near as the mud would allow, and shouted:

"Peace be upon you, oh Sheikh!"

"And upon you peace!" he bawled in answer.

"Where in your village is there a dry spot for a camp?"

The sheikh conferred at the top of his voice with his henchmen in the mud, and finally replied that he did not know, by God! While I was wondering where to turn, a Druze stepped forward and announced that he could show me a place outside the town, and the sheikh, much relieved by the shifting of responsibility, gave me a loud injunction to go in peace, and resumed his occupations.

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