represented the
venture of a Jewish syndicate which had collected it in pinches of
gold-dust from the river beds of southern Soos and hit on this form of
transport. A troop of horse could never have brought it, as gold, a
day's journey through the lawless tribes of the south, but that
tatterdemalion Jew had done it at the price of a few contemptuous
buffets. He had, indeed, offered one truculent gang of highwaymen a few
of the tawdry-looking rings to let him pass, but they had waved such
obvious trash aside in their eager search for actual cash, which they
had taken to the last _rial_.

The only other occasion on which I have known a Moor to be hoisted with
the petard of his own contemptuous fanaticism was an experience of my
own.

I was moving quietly through a belt of timber just before dawn in the
hopes of getting a shot at a boar who was in the habit of feeding till
daybreak among some barley that grew near a caravan route. Before the
light was quite strong enough to shoot by I was more than a little
annoyed and astonished to hear cocks crowing all over the place;
presuming an early caravan with poultry for market, I pushed on to the
track, meaning to pass the time of day and ask if they had glimpsed my
quarry or heard him. I almost ran into a town-bred Moor who was trying
to round up some scattered poultry in the gloom and cursing volubly. He
explained that he was riding his donkey along the track perched between
two light reed cages containing fowls when the donkey baulked as a boar
snorted in the thickets just off the road. He whacked the donkey and
cursed the boar as a pig and a Christian. Thereupon came a rush like
cavalry, the donkey was knocked from under him and he was lying amid
the wreckage of his flimsy crates with his poultry scattered abroad. The
boar, already angry and suspicious, as anyone but a townsman would have
known by the noise he made, had charged like a thunderbolt at the sound
of a human voice so close to him and galloped off with all the honours
of war.

The donkey was badly hurt and the man only escaped because he was
sitting high and just above the point of impact. I helped him secure his
poultry and started back to my village to send him another donkey. He
thanked me in brotherly style as one Moor to another. "I'm a Christian
myself," I remarked at parting, and added in my best beginner's Arabic
as I turned to go, "It is incumbent on me to assist you after the
aggression of my co-rel