That is the Arab way of doing things—­rush and riot to begin with.  The steepness of the stony ravine we rode up soon reduced the horses to a walk, after which there was a good deal of attention to rifle-bolts, and a settling down to the more serious aspects of the adventure.  The escort began to look sullenly ferocious, as only Arabs can.

There was a time, during the Turkish regime before the War, when Cook’s Agency took tourists in parties to El-Kerak, and all the protection necessary was a handful of Turkish soldiers, whose thief employment on the trip was to gather fuel and pitch tents.  Some one paid the Arabs to let tourists alone, and they normally did.  But the War changed all that.  A post-Armistice stranger in 1920, with leather boots, was fair quarry for whoever had rifle or knife.

We passed by a village or two, tucked into folds in the hills and polluting the blue sky with a smell of ageing dung, but nothing seemed disposed to happen.  A few men stood behind stone walls and stared at us sullenly.  The women looked up from their grindstones at the doors, covered their faces for convention’s sake, and uncovered them again at once for curiosity.  There was nothing you could call a road between the villages, only a rocky cattle-track that seemed to take the longest possible way between two points; and nobody seemed to own it, or to be there to challenge our right of way.

But suddenly, after we had passed the third village and were walking the horses up a shoulder of a steep hill-top, three shots cracked out from in front of us to left and right.  Nobody fell, but if ever there was instantaneous response it happened then.  Anazeh and his four galloped forward up-hill, firing as they rode for the cover of a breast-high ridge.  One man on the off-side tipped me out of the saddle, so suddenly that I had no chance to prevent him; another caught me, and two others flung me into a hole behind a stone.  I heard the rear-guard scatter and run.  Two men pitched Ahmed down on top of me, for he was valuable, seeing he could run an engine; and thirty seconds later I peered out around the rock to get a glimpse of what was happening.

There was not a man in sight.  I could see some of the horses standing under cover.  The firing was so rapid that it sounded almost like machine-gun practice.  A hairy arm reached out and pushed my head back, and after that, whenever I made the least movement, a man who was sniping from behind the sheltering rock swore furiously, and threatened to brain me with his butt-end.  Beyond all doubt they regarded me as perishable freight; so I hardly saw any of the fighting.