oonlight,
with our three bells clanging, you could have told its approximate
whereabouts by the change that came over the gang. Even Grim's
back, away ahead on the leading camel, assumed a jauntier
swing. Old Ali Baba, next ahead of me, began to look ten
years younger, and his sons and grandsons started singing--about
Lot's wife acceptably enough, for we were near the fabled site of
Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Prophet of Islam, who had nothing if
not an eye for local color, incorporated that old story in
the Koran.

The pillar of salt that used to be called Lot's wife, and that
"stood there until this day," when the Old Testament writer
penned his narrative, has fallen into the Dead Sea in recent
memory. But all that did was to set loose imagination that had
hitherto been tied to one landmark, and Ali Baba pointed out to
me a dozen upright piles of argillaceous strata glistening in
moonlight, every one of which he swore was either Lot's wife or
one of her handmaidens.

"Such should be the fate of many other women," he asserted
piously. "It would save a great deal of trouble."

The lady Ayisha heard that remark, and the things she said for
the next ten minutes about men in general and old Ali Baba in
particular were as poisonous as the brimstone that once rained
down on Sodom and Gomorrah. She seemed to have no sense of being
under obligation for the escort, but rather to think we were all
in her debt for the privilege--a circumstance which appeared
to me to bode ill for the manners of the gentry we proposed
to visit.

Thereafter--I suppose since she considered she had utterly routed
and reduced me to submission after the messenger's escape she
summoned me to her side, thrusting the _shibrayah_ curtains apart
and beckoning with the fingers turned downward, Bedouin fashion.
We conversed quite amicably for more than an hour, she mocking my
Arabic pronunciation, but asking innumerable questions about
India--who my mother was, for instance, and whether my father
used to beat her much; what physic was used in India for
date-boils; why I had not stayed at home; wasn't I afraid of
meeting Ali Higg; and were there such great ones as he in India?

So, as there wasn't one chance in ten million of her knowing
anything at all about India, I saw fit to explain that as a
cockroach is to Allah so was Ali Higg to dozens of Indian bandits
I had known. I told her tales of men's head piled mountains high,
and of roads of corpses