They all rose at a signal, and left us to our slumbers.  We were to share the tent with the sheik; and when we had laid ourselves down on the cushions and covered ourselves with our overcoats, the sheik came anxiously to my friend and asked “if we would not be very cold with nothing over our heads.”  The Oriental lets his feet take care of themselves if only his head is warm.  The flap of the tent was not lowered, and we could look from where we were lying on the Eastern hills and the stars above them.  It was long before I could sleep in such surroundings.  We were unprotected in the tent of a Bedawin sheik on the waters of Merom, and all the past faded away:  for the moment I did not believe that there were such cities as New York and London and Paris,—­they were buried deep under the streets of Jerusalem and Tiberias and Safed.  I was no longer an American, but the son of this sheik, destined to be the ruler of all the tribes that dwell in black tents of hair-cloth.  My friend lying at my side groaned in his sleep, and the baseless fabric of my dream crumbled.  I was myself again, and felt a sharp blow from my own familiar conscience when I found myself smiling with vengeful satisfaction at certain movements of my sleeping friend that made it apparent he was being visited by certain inhabitants of the night that find their way to Bedawin tents as well as peasants’ huts.  He had been almost untouched when I suffered so at Jenin; and I found my confidence increased in the law of compensation as I watched his struggles, wholly unscathed myself.

Our next day’s work was the longest and hardest we had yet had.  We were to crowd two days into one.  We were well on our way before it was fairly light.  We crossed the Jordan on a little stone bridge, and rode straight over the plain to Banias, the Caesarea Philippi of apostolic times.  We left our horses in the little village near which the Jordan comes pouring out of a rocky opening in the hills, and, with an Arab boy, hurried at our best pace up the mountain to the magnificent ruins of a mediaeval castle, the finest of its class in the Holy Land.  Our Kurd and muleteer were waiting for us as we came down the hill like veritable mountain-goats, and the latter pointed triumphantly to something wrapped in an Arab newspaper under his arm.  As soon as we were out of sight of the village he stopped and displayed his prize:  it was a chicken, cooked in some unknown but most savory way.  It was long since we had eaten anything of the sort, and, leaping to the ground, with the help of a clasp-knife bought in Nablous, the only eating-utensil our party could boast, we bisected our dinner, and, sitting under a gray old gnarled olive, ate it with such expressions of satisfaction as would not be honest, even if allowable, at the grandest civilized banquets.