“Princes!” he shouted.  “That Damascene is a father of lies!  It was I, Anazeh, who brought this man hither!  That corrupter of honesty, who doles out other people’s gold for bidden purposes, seeks to appear as your benefactor!” (It was fairly obvious that Anazeh had not received any of the gold.) “He will say next that it was he who set the stars in the sky over El-Kerak, and makes the moon rise!  He is a foreigner, a father of snakes, and a born liar!”

Anazeh refused to sit down again, but stood with rifle on his arm, daring any one to challenge his statements.  Abdul Ali flushed angrily, but laughed aloud.  The next man on his feet was ben Nazir, my erstwhile host, who had repudiated me.  And he repudiated me all over again, accusing me of abusing his hospitality by going over to Abdul Ali, who had never even heard of me before I came to El-Kerak.

There was no making head or tail of the storm of abuse and counter-abuse that followed, except that it did not look healthy for me.  There seemed to be four or five different factions, all of whom regarded me as the bone of contention.  Rather than betray anxiety I opened the Bible and began to make dots under letters, spelling out a message to Grim to the effect that I had no notion where to find lodgings for the night, and that if Anazeh elected to carry me off I should have to go with him.

I did not know how to get the message to him without arousing suspicion and making matters worse than they were, and it seemed best not to call attention to the fact that I was writing.  So I made a few dots at a time, and looked about me.  I saw Abdul Ali, laughing cynically, make a gesture with his arm as if he consigned me to the dogs.  Then I caught Grim’s eye—­Suliman ben Saoud’s.  He, too, was making capital of my predicament.

He had got the attention of the men around him, and was pointing at the Bible while he reeled off a string of an angry rhetoric that sounded like a cat-fight.  He shouted at me, and made angry gestures; but I knew that if he wanted me to understand his signals he would never make them openly, so I ignored them.

“The sheikh from Arabia demands to see the book,” said Mahommed ben Hamza in my ear.

I passed it over the carpet with the pencil folded in it at the page I had begun to mark; and the men opposite handed it along, with remarks they considered appropriate.  Jim Suliman ben Saoud Grim seized the book angrily, glared at it, denounced it, and wrote something on the fly-leaf.  He showed it to the men beside him, and they laughed, nodding approval.  He wrote again.  They approved again.  He turned and talked to them.  Then, as if he had an afterthought, he wrote a third time.  When they wanted to look at that he ran the pencil through it and wrote something else on the other side of the fly-leaf, at which they all laughed uproariously.  Presently he tossed the book back to me with all the outward signs of contempt that a fanatic can show for another religion.