Every house had its quota of visitors, who lounged in the
doorways and eyed us with mixed insolence and curiosity. There
were coffee-booths all over the place that seemed to have been
erected for the occasion, where, under awnings made of stick and
straw, men sat with rifles on their knees. Those who had
provender to sell for horses were doing a roaring trade--short
measure and high price; and the noise of grinding was incessant.
The women in the back streets were toiling to produce enough to
eat for all that host of notables.

To have had to hunt for quarters in that town just then would
have been no joke. There was the mosque, of course, where any
Moslem who finds himself stranded may theoretically go and sleep
on a mat on the floor. But we rode past the mosque. It was
full. I would not have liked a contract to crowd one more in
there. Perhaps a New York Subway guard could have managed it.
The babel coming through the open door was like the buzzing of
flies on a garbage heap.

I was trying to sit upright in that abominable saddle and look
dignified, as became the honoured guest with a twenty-man escort,
when a courteous-looking cut-throat wearing an amber necklace
worth a wheat-field, forced his way through a crowd and greeted
Anazeh like a long lost brother. I examined him narrowly to make
sure he was not Grim in disguise, but he had two fingers missing,
and holes in his ears, which decided that question.

After he had welcomed me effusively he led us through a rat-run
maze of streets to a good-sized house with snub-nosed lions
carved on the stone doorposts and a lot of other marks of both
Roman and crusader. No part of the walls was less than three
feet thick, although the upper story had been rebuilt rather
recently on a more economical and much less dignified scale.
Nevertheless, there was a sort of semi-European air about the
place, helped out by two casemented projections overhanging the
narrow street.

There was no need to announce ourselves. The clatter of hoofs
and shouts to ordinary folk on foot to get out of the way had
done that already. Sheikh ben Nazir opened the door in person.
His welcome to me was the sort that comes to mind when you read
the Bible story of the prodigal son returning from a far-off
country. I might have been his blood-relation. But perhaps I am
wrong about that; bloodfeuds among blood-relations are
notoriously savage. He was the host, and I the guest. Among