over which rajahs drove their chariots;
of arenas full of tigers into which living prisoners were thrown
once a week; and of a sheer cliff more than a mile high, over
which women were tossed to alligators.

She took it all in, but doubted demurely at the end of it whether
all those princely Indian terrorists added together could, as she
put it, "reach to the middle of the thigh of Ali Higg"!

I asked her how she had come to marry the gentleman, and she
answered with becoming pride that he had plundered her from the
Bagdad caravan; but I think she meant by that a caravan of
Bedouin on their way from Bagdad to wherever the grazing and
thieving were good. She had a way of her own of enlarging things.
Finally she asked me whether I carried good poison in my chest of
medicines, and I told her I had some that could reach down to
hell and kill the ifrits.

"Wallah!" she answered. "If you two eunuchs hadn't lost that
prisoner we could have tested some of it on him!"

After that she dismissed me, I suppose that she might meditate on
poison in the moonlight. I rode forward to take counsel with
Grim, and some time during the night she got word with one of Ali
Baba's younger sons. We had hardly camped an hour after dawn in
the red-hot foothills east of the Dead Sea when Narayan Singh
caught him rifling my chest, and he had the impudence to ask
which were poisons and which not. Narayan Singh threatened an
appeal to Grim, and the man apologized; but I saw Ayisha giving
him sweetmeats in her tent not long afterward.

She had none of the ordinary Moslem woman's notions of privacy. A
whole Bedouin family will live in a black tent ten by twelve, and
though she had picked up wondrous ideas of high estate since her
infancy, the desert upbringing remained. Her tent was pitched
each day in the midst of ours, and she ordered every one about,
Grim included, as if we were her husband's purchased slaves. And
because it was Grim's idea to make use of her to gain access to
her husband we all put up with it, fetching and carrying without
a murmur--that is to say, all except one of us.

Whenever Narayan Singh had to do her bidding his great black
beard rumbled with discontent; and as that only amused her she
ordered him about more than any one, the others aiding and
abetting by inventing things for him to be told to do. But it
hardly paid her in the long run.

On the third day, when we camped by an old well that Ali Baba
swore was the id