F CHAOS--AFTER THE BOMBING RAID (see p. 255).
[_To face p. 272._]

We began shortly to come upon the real beauties of the Land of Canaan. The
road was bordered in many places by fruit trees of all kinds, overhanging
so far that you had only to reach out your hand to pick the fruit as you
rode along. Also, there were numerous orchards and kitchen-gardens with
whose owners we used to bargain for the produce. Curiously enough we had
extraordinary difficulty in persuading the people to take Egyptian money:
they would insist on having Turkish money in spite of our reiterated
assertions that it had suffered a serious slump in value. One old lady to
whom I showed a Turkish one pound note--worth about the cost of
printing--simply jumped at it, and immediately fished out an enormous bag
of small change. She was quite upset at my refusal to part with the note;
and we haggled for a quarter of an hour about whether she would give me,
roughly, sixteen shillingsworth of Turkish silver for a piece of worthless
paper, or whether she would accept five piastres Egyptian in exchange for a
hatful of limes.

The camel-drivers thoroughly enjoyed this part of the trek; indeed, they
were in amazingly high spirits the whole way, despite the long daily march.
They had as much water as they could drink, a great thing for the Egyptian
native, there was fruit for the picking on the trees, and everything was
free! So they imagined, but the exasperated ladies who were continually
coming to complain that a sportsman in a blue galabeah was rifling their
orchards evidently thought otherwise.

All the camel-men had the predatory instinct strongly developed, and they
were adepts at concealing the "evidence," which sometimes was very much
more than fruit or eggs. On one occasion the convoy passed an old man
driving a flock of sheep, of which one mysteriously disappeared. I happened
to be riding immediately behind the flock and saw nothing unusual, yet some
time after the old man caught us up at the midday halt and complained that
one of the camel-men had stolen a sheep. We searched the convoy from end to
end and found no trace; we even went so far as to search the men's
clothing! and ultimately the old man had to go away without his sheep.

Curiously enough, a leg of mutton appeared in the mess that night; and a
very welcome change it was, too, from bully-beef.

I can offer no explanation of the phenomenon; I only know that we searched
the convoy consc