From any point along the broken walls or the castle roof you can see for fifty miles over scenery invented by the Master-Artist, with the Jordan like a blue worm in the midst of yellow-and-green hills twiggling into a turquoise sea.

The villains stalk on-stage and off again sublimely aware of their setting.  The horses prance, the camels saunter, the very street-dogs compose themselves for a nap in the golden sun, all in perfect harmony with the piece.  A woman walking with a stone jar on her head (or, just as likely, a kerosene can) looks as if she had just stepped out of eternity for the sake of the picture.  And not all the kings and kaisers, cardinals and courtezans rolled into one great swaggering splurge of majesty could hold a candle to a ragged Bedouin chief on a flea-bitten pony, on the way to a small-town mejlis.

So it was worth a little inconvenience, and quite a little risk to see those chiefs arrive at the castle gate, toss their reins to a brother cut-throat, and swagger in, the poorest and least important timing their arrival, when they could, just in advance of an important man so as to take precedence of him and delay his entrance.

Mindful of my charge to keep Anazeh sober, and more deadly afraid of it than of all the other risks, I hung about waiting for him, hoping he would arrive before Abdul Ali or ben Nazir.  I wanted to go inside and be seated before either of those gentry came.  But not a bit of it.  I saw Anazeh ride up at the head of his twenty men, halt at a corner, and ask a question.  His men were in military order, and looked not only ready but anxious to charge the crowd and establish their old chief’s importance.

Mahommed ben Hamza, not quite so smelly in his new clothes, was standing at my elbow.

“Sheikh Anazeh beckons you,” he said.

So the two of us worked our way leisurely through the crowd toward the side-street down which Anazeh had led his party.  We found them looking very spruce and savage, four abreast, drawn up in the throat of an alley, old Anazeh sitting his horse at their head like a symbol of the ancient order waiting to assault the new.  My horse was close beside him, held by Ahmed, acting servitor on foot.

The old man let loose the vials of his wrath on me the minute I drew near, and Mahommed ben Hamza took delicious pleasure in translating word for word.

“Is that the way an effendi in my care should be seen at such a time—­on foot?  Am I a maskin* that you do not ride?  Is the horse not good enough?” [Poor devil]

I made ben Hamza explain that I was to attend the mejlis as Sheikh Abdul Ali’s guest.  But that only increased his wrath.

“So said ben Nazir!  Shall a lousy Damascene trick me out of keeping my oath?  You are in my safekeeping until you tread on British soil again, and my honour is concerned in it!  No doubt that effeminate schemer of schemes would like to display you at the mejlis as his booty, but you are mine!  Did you think you are not under obligation to me?”