The old men, with their long grey grisly beards, stood shouting and cheering, praying and commanding.  At length the raft entered upon the difficult part of its course; the whirling stream seized and twisted it about, and then bore it rapidly downwards; the swimmers, flagged and seemed to be beaten in the struggle.  But now the old men on the bank, with their rigid arms uplifted straight, sent forth a cry and a shout that tore the wide air into tatters, and then to make their urging yet more strong they shrieked out the dreadful syllables, “’brahim Pasha!” The swimmers, one moment before so blown and so weary, found lungs to answer the cry, and shouting back the name of their great destroyer, they dashed on through the torrent, and bore the raft in safety to the western bank.

Afterwards the swimmers returned with the raft, and attached to it the rest of my baggage.  I took my seat upon the top of the cargo, and the raft thus laden passed the river in the same way, and with the same struggle as before.  The skins, however, not being perfectly air-tight, had lost a great part of their buoyancy, so that I, as well as the luggage that passed on this last voyage, got wet in the waters of Jordan.  The raft could not be trusted for another trip, and the rest of my party passed the river in a different and (for them) much safer way.  Inflated skins were fastened to their loins, and thus supported, they were tugged across by Arabs swimming on either side of them.  The horses and mules were thrown into the water and forced to swim over.  The poor beasts had a hard struggle for their lives in that swift stream; and I thought that one of the horses would have been drowned, for he was too weak to gain a footing on the western bank, and the stream bore him down.  At last, however, he swam back to the side from which he had come.  Before dark all had passed the river except this one horse and old Shereef.  He, poor fellow, was shivering on the eastern bank, for his dread of the passage was so great, that he delayed it as long as he could, and at last it became so dark that he was obliged to wait till the morning.

I lay that night on the banks of the river, and at a little distance from me the Arabs kindled a fire, round which they sat in a circle.  They were made most savagely happy by the tobacco with which I supplied them, and they soon determined that the whole night should be one smoking festival.  The poor fellows had only a cracked bowl, without any tube at all, but this morsel of a pipe they handed round from one to the other, allowing to each a fixed number of whiffs.  In that way they passed the whole night.

The next morning old Shereef was brought across.  It was a strange sight to see this solemn old Mussulman, with his shaven head and his sacred beard, sprawling and puffing upon the surface of the water.  When at last he reached the bank the people told him that by his baptism in Jordan he had surely become a mere Christian.  Poor Shereef!—­the holy man! the descendant of the Prophet!—­he was sadly hurt by the taunt, and the more so as he seemed to feel that there was some foundation for it, and that he really might have absorbed some Christian errors.