Bread, butter, and eggs were brought for the muleteers, and I was greatly surprised by the cleanliness of the men.  Before they broke an egg for the omelette they washed it with greatest care.  They themselves stood far more in need of a washing than the eggs did, but perhaps they could not be expected to think of everything.  Barley was bought, at half the price charged at Ain el Baidah, and I noticed that the cunning Susi hid some of it in the long bag they kept at the bottom of one of the shwarris.  Clearly they intended to make the supply we paid for serve to take them all the way to Tiensiert.  This was annoying, since one of the objects of ordering a good supply each night was to enable the long-suffering beasts to compass a better speed on the following day.

That evening there was great excitement in the douar.  The elders came round our fire after supper and sought to know if it were true that the “Sons of Lions” had blotted out Sidi el Muktar, and put all its inhabitants to the sword.  When we declared that the little town was still where it had stood since they were born, they appeared distinctly surprised, and gave the praise and credit to the patron saint.  They said the kaid’s hand was a very heavy one, that his men went to the Wednesday market and were the terror of the country folks who came to buy and sell.  The absence of the Court Elevated by Allah was to be deplored, for had my Lord Abd-el-Aziz been in residence at Marrakesh some other kaid would have made him a bid for the place of the ruler of Sidi el Muktar, basing his offer upon the fact that the present governor could not keep order.  A change might have been for the better—­it could hardly have been for the worse.  One or two of the men of Ain Umast spoke Shilha, and the Susi men, hearing the cruelties of Sidi el Muktar’s ruler discussed, claimed to have a far better specimen of the genus kaid in Tiensiert.  He was a man indeed, ready with fire and sword at the shortest notice; his subjects called him Father of Locusts, so thoroughly did he deal with all things that could be eaten up.

It was a curious but instructive attitude.  These miserable men were quite proud to think that the tyranny of their kaid, the great El Arbi bel Hadj ben Haida, was not to be rivalled by anything Shiadma could show.  They instanced his treatment of them and pointed to the young boy who was of their company.  His father had been kaid in years past, but the late Grand Wazeer Ba Ahmad sold his office to El Arbi, who threw the man into prison and kept him there until he died.  To show his might, El Arbi had sent the boy with them, that all men might know how the social scales of Tiensiert held the kaid on one side and the rest of the people on the other.  The black slave who accompanied them had been brought up by the late kaid’s father, and was devoted to the boy.  In his mercy El Arbi allowed him to live with the lad and work a small farm, the harvest of which was strictly tithed by Tiensiert’s chief—­who took a full nine-tenths.  Before the evening was over the elders of Ain Umast had acknowledged, rather regretfully I thought, that the tyrant of Sidi el Muktar must hide a diminished head before his brother of the Sus.  The triumph of the grimy men from Tiensiert was then complete.