and strewed along the ground in a thick mass.  A spot for the fire was found with some difficulty, for the earth was moist and the grass high and rank.  At last there was a clicking of flint and steel, and presently there stood out from darkness one of the tawny faces of my muleteers, bent down to near the ground, and suddenly lit up by the glowing of the spark which he courted with careful breath.  Before long there was a particle of dry fibre or leaf that kindled to a tiny flame; then another was lit from that, and then another.  Then small crisp twigs, little bigger than bodkins, were laid athwart the glowing fire.  The swelling cheeks of the muleteer, laid level with the earth, blew tenderly at first and then more boldly upon the young flame, which was daintily nursed and fed, and fed more plentifully when it gained good strength.  At last a whole armful of dry bushes was piled up over the fire, and presently, with a loud cheery crackling and crackling, a royal tall blaze shot up from the earth and showed me once more the shapes and faces of my men, and the dim outlines of the horses and mules that stood grazing hard by.

My servants busied themselves in unpacking the baggage as though we had arrived at an hotel—­Shereef and his helpers unsaddled their cattle.  We had left Tiberias without the slightest idea that we were to make our way to Jerusalem along the desolate side of the Jordan, and my servants (generally provident in those matters) had brought with them only, I think, some unleavened bread and a rocky fragment of goat’s milk cheese.  These treasures were produced.  Tea and the contrivances for making it were always a standing part of my baggage.  My men gathered in circle round the fire.  The Nazarene was in a false position from having misled us so strangely, and he would have shrunk back, poor devil, into the cold and outer darkness, but I made him draw near and share the luxuries of the night.  My quilt and my pelisse were spread, and the rest of my party had all their capotes or pelisses, or robes of some sort, which furnished their couches.  The men gathered in circle, some kneeling, some sitting, some lying reclined around our common hearth.  Sometimes on one, sometimes on another, the flickering light would glare more fiercely.  Sometimes it was the good Shereef that seemed the foremost, as he sat with venerable beard the image of manly piety—­unknowing of all geography, unknowing where he was or whither he might go, but trusting in the goodness of God and the clinching power of fate and the good star of the Englishman.  Sometimes, like marble, the classic face of the Greek Mysseri would catch the sudden light, and then again by turns the ever-perturbed Dthemetri, with his old Chinaman’s eye and bristling, terrier-like moustache, shone forth illustrious.