Wednesday.—­Last night I bored Sheykh Yussuf with Antara and Abou-Zeyd, maintaining the greater valour of Antara who slew 10,000 for the love of Ibla; you know Antara.  Yussuf looks down on such profanities, and replied, ’What are Antara and Abou-Zeyd compared to the combats of our Lord Moses with Og and other infidels of might, and what is the love of Antara for Ibla compared to that of our Lord Solomon for Balkees (Queen of Sheba), or their beauty and attractiveness to that of our Lord Joseph?’ And then he related the combat of Seyyidna Mousa with Og; and I thought, ’hear O ye Puritans, and give ear O ye Methodists, and learn how religion and romance are one to those whose manners and ideas are the manners and ideas of the Bible, and how Moses was not at all a crop-eared Puritan, but a gallant warrior!’ There is the Homeric element in the religion here, the Prophet is a hero like Achilles, and like him directed by God—­Allah instead of Athene.  He fights, prays, teaches, makes love, and is truly a man, not an abstraction; and as to wonderful events, instead of telling one to ‘gulp them down without looking’ (as children are told with a nasty dose, and as we are told about Genesis, etc.) they believe them and delight in them, and tell them to amuse people.  Such a piece of deep-disguised scepticism as Credo quia impossibile would find no favour here; ‘What is impossible to God?’ settles everything.  In short, Mohammed has somehow left the stamp of romance on the religion, or else it is in the blood of the people, though the Koran is prosy and ‘common-sensical’ compared to the Old Testament.  I used to think Arabs intensely prosaic till I could understand a little of their language, but now I can trace the genealogy of Don Quixote straight up to some Sheykh-el-Arab.

A fine, handsome woman with a lovely baby came to me the other day.  I played with the baby, and gave it a cotton handkerchief for its head.  The woman came again yesterday to bring me a little milk and some salad as a present, and to tell my fortune with date stones.  I laughed, and so she contented herself with telling Omar about his family, which he believed implicitly.  She is a clever woman evidently, and a great sibyl here.  No doubt she has faith in her own predictions.  She told Mme. Mounier (who is a Levantine) that she would never have a child, and was forbidden the house accordingly, and the prophecy has ‘come true.’  Superstition is wonderfully infectious here.  The fact is that the Arabs are so intensely impressionable, and so cowardly about inspiring any ill-will, that if a man looks askance at them it is enough to make them ill, and as calamities are not infrequent, there is always some mishap ready to be laid to the charge of somebody’s ‘eye.’  Omar would fain have had me say nothing about the theft of my purse, for fear the Karnac people should hate me and give me the eye.  A part of the boasting about property, etc.,