“Since when does the word of a Damascene exclude an honourable sheikh from a mejlis in El-Kerak?” asked Anazeh, standing in the doorway.

He was in no hurry to enter.  The dramatic old ruffian understood too well the value of the impression he made standing there.  The room was crowded with about eighty men, seated on mats and cushions, with a piece of carpeted floor left unoccupied all down the centre—­a high-walled room with beautifully vaulted ceiling, and a mullioned window from which most of the glass was gone.  The walls were partly covered with Persian and other mats, but there was almost no furniture other than water-pipes and little inlaid tables on which to rest coffee-cups and matches.  The air was thick with smoke already, and the draft from the broken windows wafted it about in streaky clouds.

Every face in the room was turned toward Anazeh.  I kept as much as possible behind him, for you can’t look dignified in that setting if all you have on is a stained golf suit, that you have slept in.  It seemed all right to me to let the old sheikh have all the limelight.

But he knew better.  Perhaps my erstwhile host ben Nazir had understood a little German after all.  More likely he had divined Abdul Ali’s purpose to make use of me.  Certainly he had poured the proper poison in Anazeh’s ear, and the old man understood my value to a nicety.

He took me by the arm and led me in, Mahommed ben Hamza following like a dog that was too busy wagging its tail to walk straight.  You would have thought Anazeh and I were father and son by the way he leaned toward me and found a way for me among the crowded cushions.

He had no meek notions about choosing a low place.  Expecting to be taken at his own valuation, he chose a high place to begin with.  There were several unoccupied cushions near the door, and there were half-a-dozen servants busy in a corner with coffee-pots and cakes.  He prodded one of the servants and ordered him to take two cushions to a place he pointed out, up near the window close to Abdul Ali.  There was no room there.  That was the seat of the mighty.  You could not have dropped a handkerchief between the men who wanted to be nearest the throne of influence.  But Anazeh solved that riddle.  He strode, stately and magnificent, up the middle of the carpet amid a mutter of imprecations.  And when one more than ordinarily indignant sheikh demanded to know what he meant by it, he paused in front of him and laid his right hand on my shoulder. (There was a loaded rifle in his left.)

“Who offers indignity to a distinguished guest?” he demanded.

The question was addressed to everybody in the room.  He took care they were all aware of it.  His stern eyes traveled from face to face.

“My men, who escorted him here, are outside the door.  They can enter and escort him away, if there are none here who understand how to treat the stranger in our midst!”