I tried him again in Arabic, but he answered without looking at me, in a dialect I had never heard before.  So I offered him a gold-tipped cigarette, that being a universal language.  He waived the offer aside with something between astonishment and disdain.  He had lean, long-fingered hands, entirely unlike those of the desert fraternity, who live too hard and fight too frequently to have soft, uncalloused skin and unbroken finger-nails.

He did not exactly fascinate me.  His self-containment was annoying.  It seemed intended to convey an intellectual and moral importance that I was not disposed to concede without knowing more about him.  I suppose an Arab feels the same sensation when a Westerner lords it over him on highly moral grounds.  At any rate, something or other in the way of pique urged me to stir him out of his self-complacency, just as one feels urged to prod a bull-frog to watch him jump.

He seemed to understand my remarks, for he took no trouble to hide his amusement at my efforts with the language.  But he only answered in monosyllables, and I could not understand those.  So after about five minutes I gave it up, and crossed the room to ben Nazir, who seized the opportunity to show me my sleeping-quarters.

It proved to be a room like a monastery cell, up one flight of stone steps, with two other rooms of about the same size on either side of it.  At the end of the passage was a very heavy wooden door, with an iron lock and an enormous keyhole, which I suppose shut off the harem from the rest of the house; but as I never trespassed beyond it I don’t know.  I only do know that a woman’s eye was watching me through that key-hole, and ben Nazir frowned impatiently at the sound of female giggling.

“The Sheikh Anazeh will have the room on this side of you,” he said, “and the Sheikh Suliman ben Saoud the room on the other.  So you will be between friends.”

“Suliman ben Saoud seems a difficult person to make friends with,” I answered.

Ben Nazir smiled like a prince out of a picture-book—­beautiful white teeth and exquisite benignance.

“Oh, you mustn’t mind him.  These celebrities from the centre of Arabia give themselves great airs.  To do that is considered evidence of piety and wisdom.”

I sat on the bed—­quite a civilized affair, spotlessly clean.  Ben Nazir took the chair, I suppose, like the considerate host he was, to give me the sensation of receiving in my own room.

“He wears the same sort of head-dress you do.  What does it mean?” I asked.

“I wear mine out of compliment to him—­not that I have not always the right to wear it.  It is the Ichwan head-dress.  It is highly significant.”

“Of what?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then seemed to make up his mind that it did not much matter what he might divulge to an ignorant stranger soon to return to the United States.