“Start again,” the command went round, and in fifteen minutes the two thousand camels swung grumbling and groaning out on the endless trail of the desert.  The captured Arabs were marched in the centre.  All through the night the caravan went on from moonrise to moonset, and through the morning from dawn till ten o’clock—­for they dared not rest while the tribe from whom they had captured the prisoners could get near them.  Then they released the captives and sent them back, for on the horizon they saw the green palms of Kaf, the city that they sought.

The camels had only rested for thirty minutes in forty hours.[68] With grunts of pleasure they dropped on their knees and were freed from their loads, and began hungrily to eat their food.

Forder leapt down and was so glad to be in Kaf that he ran into some palm gardens close by and sang “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” jumped for joy, and then washed all the sweat and sand from himself in a hot spring of sulphur water.

Lying down on the floor of a little house to which he was shown, he slept, with his head on his saddlebags, all day till nearly sunset.

At sunset a gun was fired.  The caravan was starting on its return journey.  Forder’s companions on the caravan came to him.

“Come back with us,” they said.  “Why will you stay with these cursed people of Kaf?  They will surely kill you because you are a Christian.”

It was hard to stay.  But no Christian white man had ever been in that land before carrying the Good News of Jesus, and Forder had come out to risk his life for that very purpose.  So he stayed.

What made Forder put his life in peril and stand the heat, vermin, and hate?  Why try to make friends with these wild bandits?  Why care about them at all?  He was a baker in his own country in England and might have gone on with this work.  It was the love of Christ that gave him the love of all men, and, in obeying His command to “Go into all the world,” he found adventure, made friends, and left with them the Good News in the New Testament.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 65:  Thursday morning, December 13, 1900.]

[Footnote 66:  Recall Henry Martyn and Sabat at work on this.]

[Footnote 67:  Passing Es-Salt (Ramoth Gilead), Gerash and Edrei in Bashan.]

[Footnote 68:  It took the caravan six days to go back.]

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE FRIEND OF THE ARAB

Archibald Forder

(Date of Incident, 1901)

The Lone Trail of Friendship

So the two thousand camels swung out on the homeward trail.  Forder now was alone in Kaf.

“Never,” he says, “shall I forget the feeling of loneliness that came over me as I made my way back to my room.  The thought that I was the only Christian in the whole district was one that I cannot well describe.”