Zeitoon itself is a mountain, next neighbor to the Beirut Dagh, not as high, nor as inaccessible; but high enough, and inaccessible enough to give further pause to its would-be conquerors.  Not in anything resembling even rows, but in lawless disorder from the base to the shoulder of the mountain, the stone and wooden houses go piling skyward, overlooking one another’s roofs, and each with an unobstructed view of endless distances.  The picture was made infinitely lovely by wisps of blown mist, like hair-lines penciled in the violet air.

Distances were all foreshortened in that atmosphere, and it was mid-afternoon before we came to a halt at last face to face with blank wall.  The track seemed to have been blocked by half the mountain sitting down across it.  We sat down to rest in the shadow of the shoulder of an overhanging rock, and after half an hour some one looked down on us, and whistled shrilly.  Kagig with a rifle across his knees looked down from a height of a hundred and fifty feet, and laughed like a man who sees the bitter humor of the end of shams.

“Welcome!” he shouted between his hands.  And his voice came echoing down at us from wall to wall of the gorge.  Five minutes later he sent a man to lead us around by a hidden track that led upward, sometimes through other houses, and very often over roofs, across ridiculously tiny yards, and in between walls so closely set together that a mule could only squeeze through by main force.

We stabled the mules in a shed the man showed us, and after that Kagig received us four, and Anna, Gloria’s self-constituted maid, in his own house.  It was bare of nearly everything but sheer necessities, and he made no apology, for he had good taste, and perfect manners if you allowed for the grim necessity of being curt and the strain of long responsibility.

A small bench took the place of a table in the main large room.  There was a fireplace with a wide stone chimney at one end, and some stools, and also folded skins intended to be sat on, and shiny places on the wall where men in goat-skin coats had leaned their backs.

Two or three of the gipsy women were hanging about outside, and one of the gipsies who had been with him in the room in the khan at Tarsus appeared to be filling the position of servitor.  He brought us yoghourt in earthenware bowls—­extremely cool and good it was; and after we had done I saw him carry down a huge mess more of it to the house below us, where many of the stragglers we had brought along were quartered by Kagig’s order.

“Where’s Monty?” Fred demanded as soon as we entered the room.

“Presently!” Kagig answered—­rather irritably I thought.  He seemed to have adopted Monty as his own blood brother, and to resent all other claims on him.

The afternoon was short, for the shadow of the surrounding mountains shut us in.  Somebody lighted a fire in the great open chimney-place, and as we sat around that to revel in the warmth that rests tired limbs better than sleep itself, Kagig strode out to attend to a million things—­as the expression of his face testified.