Mabel was honestly scared half out of her wits now.  Not even the smiles of the hotel proprietor in the doorway reassured her, nor his deep bow as she passed.  She was even more scared, if that were possible, when two officers, obviously of high rank, came forward in the hall to greet her, and one addressed her in Arabic as Colonel Lawrence.  Luckily one oil lamp per wall was doing duty in place of electric light, or there might have been an awkward incident.  She had presence of mind enough to disguise her alarm by a fit of coughing, bending nearly double and covering the lower part of her face with the ends of the headdress folded over.

The officers had no time to waste and gave their message to Grim instead.

“The Emir Feisul is astonished, Jimgrim, that Colonel Lawrence and you should visit Damascus without claiming his hospitality.  We have two autos waiting to take you to the palace.”

Well, the luggage didn’t amount to much; Narayan Singh brought that down in a jiffy; and when I went to settle with the hotel-keeper one of the Syrian officers interfered.

“These are guests of the Emir Feisul,” he announced.  “Send the bill to me.”

We were piled into the waiting autos.  Mabel, Grim and I rode in the first one, with the Syrian officers up beside the driver; Jeremy, Narayan Singh and Hadad followed; and we went through the dark streets like sea-monsters splashing over shoals, unseen I think—­certainly unrecognized.

The streets were almost deserted and I didn’t catch sight of one armed man, which was a thing to marvel at when you consider that fifty thousand or so were supposed to be concentrated in the neighbourhood, with conscription working full-blast and the foreign consuls solely occupied in procuring exemption for their nationals.

It wasn’t my first visit to a reigning prince, for if you travel much in India you’re bound to come in contact with numbers of them; so I naturally formed a mental picture of what was in store for us, made up from a mixture of memories of Gwalior, Baroda, Bikanir, Hyderabad, Poona and Baghdad of the Arabian-Nights.  It just as naturally vanished in presence of the quiet, latter-day dignity of the real thing.

The palace turned out to be a villa on the outskirts of the city, no bigger and hardly more pretentious than a well-to-do commuter’s place at Bronxville or Mount Vernon.  There was a short semi-circular drive in front, with one sentry and one small lantern burning at each gate; but their khaki uniforms and puttees didn’t disguise the fact that the sentries were dark, dyed-in-wool Arabs from the desert country, and though they presented arms, they did it as men who make concessions without pretending to admire such foolishness.  I wouldn’t have given ten cents for an unescorted stranger’s chance of getting by them, whatever his nationality.

Surely there was never less formality in a king’s house since the world began.  We were ushered straight into a narrow, rather ordinary hall, and through that into a sitting-room about twenty feet square.  The light was from oil lamps hanging by brass chains from the curved beams; but the only other Oriental suggestions were the cushioned seats in each corner, small octagonal tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a mighty good Persian carpet.