forming the prescribed
ablutions first with water from one of the goatskin bags.

Well, there wasn't any further use in trying to keep our
movements secret. Grim beckoned me to where he stood beside
Narayan Singh, with Ayisha looking mischievous in the gloom
behind them, and issued final instructions.

"Present my compliments and these gifts to Ali Higg--I'm busy at
prayer, remember--and say how greatly honored we feel to have
escorted his wife across the desert. If he asks where her four
men are, tell him I'll bring them later. Be sure and make me out
a great sheikh, and say I heard he is sick, so sent my _hakim_ in
advance to give him relief; then do your best for him, if he'll
let you--after Ayisha has done her worst," he added in a whisper.
"Don't forget you're a _darwaish._ The more you jaw religion the
better the old rascal will like you. See you soon. So long!"

So Narayan Singh and I, followed by Ayisha and two of Ali Baba's
sons, left that ancient temple bearing the medicine-chest as well
as presents, and I hope the others did not feel as scared as I did.

CHAPTER XII

"Yet I Forgot to Speak of the Twenty Aeroplanes!"

You can expect anything, of course, of Arabs. People who will
pitch black cotton tents in the scorching sun, and live in them
in preference to gorgeous cool stone temples because of the
devils and ghosts that they believe to haunt those habitable
splendors, will believe anything at all except the truth, and act
in any way except reasonably. So I tried to believe it was all
right to be unreasonable too.

You would think, wouldn't you, that a man who had set himself up
to be the holy terror of a country-side and put his heel on the
necks of all the tribes for miles around, would have made use at
least of the caves and tombs to strengthen his position. There
were thousands of them all among those opal-colored cliffs, to
say nothing of ruined buildings; yet not one was occupied. Ayisha
had told most of the truth when she said in El-Kalil that her
people lived in tents.

We walked down the paved street of a city between oleander bushes
that had forced themselves up between the cracks, toward an
enormous open amphitheater hewn by the Romans out of a hillside,
with countless tiers of ruined stone seats rising one above the
other like giant steps.

In the center of that the tents were pitched, and the only
building in use was a great half-open cave on another hillside,
in wh