“Why not go and see?” I suggested.

“Ilhamdul’illah, they are good men.  I know them.  If there is trouble they will come and tell me.”

The door opened softly.  The gorgeous old-rose parasite slipped through.  I had a mental vision of Mahommed ben Hamza lying face-downward with his new coat stained with blood.  There was nothing for it, it seemed, but the magic formula to move Anazeh.

“Jimgrim says, ‘See that ben Hamza gets safely away!"’

“Dog of a Hebron tanner’s son—­let him die!  What is that to me?”

“It is Jimgrim’s command.”

“Wallahi haida fasl! (By God, this is a strange affair!) Wait here!”

Old Anazeh, with the name of the Prophet of God on his lips, cast an envious glare at the bottle of liquor and seized action by the forelock.  There was nothing to excite comment in his getting up to leave the room.  A dozen men had done that and come in again.  He strode out, straight down the middle of the carpet.  Suliman ben Saoud—­Jimgrim—­went on talking, and to judge by Abdul Ali of Damascus’ increasingly restless retorts he was getting that gentleman’s goat as promised.  Finally Abdul Ali got to his feet and said that if the Ichwan would see him alone he would show him certain documents that would satisfy him, but that it would not be policy to produce them in public.  He offered to send for the documents, and to show them during or after the banquet.

So Jimgrim sat down, and there was a good deal of quiet nudging and nodding.  Every one seemed to understand that the Ichwan was going to be bribed; they seemed to admire his ability to get for himself a share of the funds that most of them had tapped.

A man nearly opposite me leaned over and said in fairly good French, with the manner of a doctor assuring his patient that the worst is yet to come: 

“It has been decided that you are to be detained here in the castle until there is no danger of your carrying away important news.”

While I was turning that over in my mind Anazeh came back, grinning.  Something outside had tickled him immensely, but he would not say anything.  He sat down beside me and chuckled into his beard; and when his neighbour on the right asked what had amused him he turned the question into a bawdy joke.

“Did ben Hamza get away?” I whispered.

He only nodded.  He continued chuckling until the man on duty by the door announced to the “assembled lords and princes” that the muezzin summoned them to prayer.  All except three Christian sheikhs trooped up the narrow stairway in Ali Shah al Khassib’s wake, Anazeh going last with a half-serious joke about not caring to be stabbed in the back.

I expected the three non-Moslems would take advantage of the opportunity to ask me a string of questions.  But they took exactly the opposite view of the situation.  They avoided me, withdrawing into a corner by themselves.  I suppose they thought that to be seen talking to me was more risky than the amusement merited.