ing 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.

I have kept that Bible as a souvenir, with the verses from the
Koran written on the flyleaf in Arabic in Grim's fine hand.
Underneath them, in Greek characters with a pencil line scrawled
through them, is the only sentence tha