“I went bearing a gift in my hand, O Highly Favoured,” replied the headman, “and he answered me, ’Foolish farmer, shall I bring the Sultan to visit me by interfering with these rebels against Allah who have taken the protection from Nazarenes?’ And then he cursed me and drove me forth from his presence.  But if you will give protection to us also we will face these misbegotten ones, and there shall be none to come between us.”

[Illustration:  A VILLAGE AT DUKALA]

I could do no more than deliver messages of consolation to the poor tribesmen, who sat in a semicircle, patient in the quivering heat.  The old story of goodwill and inability had to be told again, and I never saw men more dejected.  At the moment of leave-taking, however, I remembered that we had some empty mineral-water bottles and a large collection of gunmaker’s circulars, that had been used as padding for a case of cartridges.  So I distributed the circulars and empty bottles among the protection hunters, and they received them with wonder and delight.  When I turned to take a last look round, the pages that had pictures of guns were being passed reverently from hand to hand; to outward seeming the farmers had forgotten their trouble.  Thus easily may kindnesses be wrought among the truly simple of this world.

The market of Sidi B’noor is famous for its sales of slaves and horses,[15] but I remember it best by its swarm of blue rock-pigeons and sparrow-hawks, that seemed to live side by side in the walls surrounding the saint’s white tomb.  For reasons best known to themselves they lived without quarrelling, perhaps because the saint was a man of peace.  Surely a sparrow-hawk in our island would not build his nest and live in perfect amity with pigeons.  But, as is well known, the influence of the saintly endures after the flesh of the saint has returned to the dust whence it came.

The difference between Dukala and R’hamna, two adjacent provinces, is very marked.  All that the first enjoys the second lacks.  We left the fertile lands for great stony plains, wind-swept, bare and dry.  Skeletons of camels, mules, and donkeys told their story of past sufferings, and the water supply was as scanty as the herbage upon which the R’hamna flocks fare so poorly.  In place of prosperous douars, set in orchards amid rich arable land, there were Government n’zalas at long intervals in the waste, with wattled huts, and lean, hungry tribesmen, whose poverty was as plain to see as their ribs.  Neither Basha nor Kaid could well grow fat now in such a place, and yet there was a time when R’hamna was a thriving province after its kind.  But it had a warlike people and fierce, to whom the temptation of plundering the caravans that made their way to the Southern capital was irresistible.  So the Court Elevated by Allah, taking advantage of a brief interval of peace, turned its forces loose against R’hamna early in the last decade of the nineteenth century.  From end to end of its