stumbling beasts!  But as wishing would bring nothing, we dismounted and walked by the side of our animals, the kaid alone remaining in the saddle.  Six o’clock became seven, and seven became eight, and then I found it sweet to hear the watch-dog’s honest bark.  Of course it was not a “deep-mouthed welcome:”  it was no more than a cry of warning and defiance raised by the colony of pariah dogs that guarded Ain el Baidah, our destination.

In the darkness, that had a pleasing touch of purple colouring lent it by the stars, Ain el Baidah’s headman loomed very large and imposing.  “Praise to Allah that you have come and in health,” he remarked, as though we were old friends.  He assured me of my welcome, and said his village had a guest-house that would serve instead of the tent.  Methought he protested too much, but knowing that men and mules were dead beat, and that we had a long way to go, I told Salam that the guest-house would serve, and the headman lead the way to a tapia building that would be called a very small barn, or a large fowl-house, in England.  A tiny clay lamp, in which a cotton wick consumed some mutton fat, revealed a corner of the darkness and the dirt, and when our own lamps banished the one, they left the other very clearly to be seen.  But we were too tired to utter a complaint.  I saw the mules brought within the zariba, helped to set up my camp bed, took the cartridges out of my shot gun, and, telling Salam to say when supper was ready, fell asleep at once.  Eighteen busy hours had passed since the mueddin called to “feyer” from the minaret above the Tin House, but my long-sought rest was destined to be brief.

FOOTNOTES: 

[43] Literally, “Slave of the Merciful.”

[44] Priest attached to the Mosque.

[45] The Angels of Judgment.

[46] So many lepers come from the Argan Forest provinces of Haha and Shiadma that leprosy is believed by many Moors to result from the free use of Argan oil.  There is no proper foundation for this belief.

[47] This is the most important of the five supplications.  The Sura of Al Koran called “The Night Journey” says, “To the prayer of daybreak the Angels themselves bear witness.”

“SONS OF LIONS” AND OTHER TRUE BELIEVERS

[Illustration:  EVENING IN CAMP]

CHAPTER X

“SONS OF LIONS” AND OTHER TRUE BELIEVERS

    FALSTAFF—­“Four rogues in buckram let drive at me.”

    King Henry IV., Act II.  Scene 4.

By the time Salam had roused me from a dream in which I was being torn limb from limb in a Roman amphitheatre, whose terraced seats held countless Moors all hugely enjoying my dismemberment, I realised that a night in that guest-house would be impossible.  The place was already over-populated.