look sullenly
ferocious, as only Arabs can.

There was a time, during the Turkish regime before the War, when
Cook's Agency took tourists in parties to El-Kerak, and all the
protection necessary was a handful of Turkish soldiers, whose
thief employment on the trip was to gather fuel and pitch tents.
Some one paid the Arabs to let tourists alone, and they normally
did. But the War changed all that. A post-Armistice stranger in
1920, with leather boots, was fair quarry for whoever had rifle
or knife.

We passed by a village or two, tucked into folds in the hills and
polluting the blue sky with a smell of ageing dung, but nothing
seemed disposed to happen. A few men stood behind stone walls
and stared at us sullenly. The women looked up from their
grindstones at the doors, covered their faces for convention's
sake, and uncovered them again at once for curiosity. There was
nothing you could call a road between the villages, only a rocky
cattle-track that seemed to take the longest possible way between
two points; and nobody seemed to own it, or to be there to
challenge our right of way.

But suddenly, after we had passed the third village and were
walking the horses up a shoulder of a steep hill-top, three shots
cracked out from in front of us to left and right. Nobody fell,
but if ever there was instantaneous response it happened then.
Anazeh and his four galloped forward up-hill, firing as they rode
for the cover of a breast-high ridge. One man on the off-side
tipped me out of the saddle, so suddenly that I had no chance to
prevent him; another caught me, and two others flung me into a
hole behind a stone. I heard the rear-guard scatter and run.
Two men pitched Ahmed down on top of me, for he was valuable,
seeing he could run an engine; and thirty seconds later I peered
out around the rock to get a glimpse of what was happening.

There was not a man in sight. I could see some of the horses
standing under cover. The firing was so rapid that it sounded
almost like machine-gun practice. A hairy arm reached out and
pushed my head back, and after that, whenever I made the least
movement, a man who was sniping from behind the sheltering rock
swore furiously, and threatened to brain me with his butt-end.
Beyond all doubt they regarded me as perishable freight; so I
hardly saw any of the fighting.

Judging by the sound, I should say they fought their way up-hill
in skirmish order, and when they got to the