I was trying to sit upright in that abominable saddle and look dignified, as became the honoured guest with a twenty-man escort, when a courteous-looking cut-throat wearing an amber necklace worth a wheat-field, forced his way through a crowd and greeted Anazeh like a long lost brother.  I examined him narrowly to make sure he was not Grim in disguise, but he had two fingers missing, and holes in his ears, which decided that question.

After he had welcomed me effusively he led us through a rat-run maze of streets to a good-sized house with snub-nosed lions carved on the stone doorposts and a lot of other marks of both Roman and crusader.  No part of the walls was less than three feet thick, although the upper story had been rebuilt rather recently on a more economical and much less dignified scale.  Nevertheless, there was a sort of semi-European air about the place, helped out by two casemented projections overhanging the narrow street.

There was no need to announce ourselves.  The clatter of hoofs and shouts to ordinary folk on foot to get out of the way had done that already.  Sheikh ben Nazir opened the door in person.  His welcome to me was the sort that comes to mind when you read the Bible story of the prodigal son returning from a far-off country.  I might have been his blood-relation.  But perhaps I am wrong about that; bloodfeuds among blood-relations are notoriously savage.  He was the host, and I the guest.  Among genuine Arabs that is the most binding relation there is.

He was no longer in blue serge and patent-leather boots, but magnificent in Arab finery, and he was tricked out in a puzzling snowy-white head-dress that suggested politics without your knowing why.  He had told me, when I met him at the American Colony, that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca more than once; but that white linen thing had nothing to do with his being a haji, any more than the expensive rings on the fingers of both hands had anything to do with his Arab nationality.

After he had flattered and questioned me sufficiently about the journey to comply with etiquette I asked him whether Ahmed might not be untied.  The thong cutting the man’s wrists.  Sheikh hen Nazir gave the necessary order and it was obeyed at once.  The liquid-eyed rascal with the priceless amber necklace then led away the escort, Ahmed included, to some place where they could stall the horses, and—­side-by-side, lest any question of precedence should be involved, Anazeh and I followed ben Nazir into the house.

We were not the only guests there.  He ushered us into a square room, in which outrageous imported furniture, with gilt and tassels on it, stood out like loathsome sores against rugs and cushions fit for the great Haroun-al-Raschid’s throne room.  Any good museum in the world would have competed to possess the rugs, but the furniture was the sort that France sends eastward in the name of “culture”—­stuff for “savages” to sit on and be civilized while the white man bears the burden and collects the money.