hed knowledge.
Not that he was free from the latterday craving for accuracy
whenever it might serve to bolster up the rest of the fabric.

"Yonder," he said, for instance, pointing toward the sky-line
with a dramatic sweep of his arm, "they say that Adam and Eve are
buried. But they lie!"

And having denounced that lie, he expected me to believe
everything else he told me.

According to him every rock we passed had its history of jinn and
spirits as well as battles, and he knew where the tomb was of
every national saint and hero, every one of whom had apparently
died within a radius of twenty miles. Some of them had died in
two or three different places as far as I could make out from his
account of them.

And what Abraham had not done on those hillsides in the way of
miracles and war would not be worth writing in a book; whatever
cannot be otherwise explained is set down to the Ancestor, the
Arabs ranking Abraham next after Mohammed, because the patriarch
built the Kaaba, or Mosque, at Mecca, that Mohammed centuries
later on adopted for his new religion.

But even Ali Baba grew tired of acting historian at last, and
once more silence settled down, broken only by the bells and the
camels' gurgling, until about midnight we overhauled the three
men who had been sent in chase of the fellow on the Bishareen.
They had lost him, and were angry; for what should a man do
except be angry in such a circumstance, unless he is willing to
accept blame?

"You should have let us shoot, Jimgrim! Once I got close enough
to have cut his beast's legs with my sword! You think this is
like the city, where a policeman holds up a hand and men halt?
Hah! Wallah! It was he who drew sword, and behold my camel's nose
where he slashed at it! One finger's breadth closer and I would
have had a sick beast on my hands--but he proved a blundering pig
with his weapon and only made that scratch after all.

"However, it is your fault, Jimgrim! You have made us to be
laughed at by that father of dunghills! His beast was the faster,
and he got away, and vanished in the shadows."

So there we halted and held a conference, letting the camels
kneel and rest for half an hour, while each man said his say
in turn.

"That man is Rafiki's messenger," said Grim. "He is on his way to
Abbas Mahommed, Sheikh of the Beni Yussuf, who owes Rafiki money.
I think Rafiki is offering to forgo the debt if Abbas Mahommed
will lie in wait for us and carry off this