e more openly she
advocated drastic remedies for everything, and the less she was
inclined to take no for an answer.

However, her monologue was wasted on the moon, for no one argued
with her. Grim led the way-off the highroad now, and down dark
defiles that set the camels moaning, while their riders yelled
alternately to Allah and apostrophized their beasts in the
monosyllabic camel language. Camels hate downhill work, especially
when loaded, and fall unless told not to in a speech they
understand, in that respect strangely like children.

You had to look out in the dark, too, for the teeth of the camel
behind, because they don't love the folk who drive them headlong
into gorges full of ghosts, and one man's thigh or elbow makes as
easy biting as the next.

Camels are no man's pets, and there is no explaining them. The
fools will graze contentedly with shrapnel and high explosives
bursting all about them, but go into a panic at the sight of a
piece of paper in broad daylight. And when they think they see
ghosts in the dark they act like the Gadarene swine, only making
more noise about it.

I wouldn't have been the lady Ayisha going down some of those
dark places for all the wealth of ancient Bagdad. Her _shibrayah_
pitched and rolled like a small boat in a big sea, and whenever a
rock leaned out over the narrow trail, or a scraggy old thorn
branch swung, it was by a combination of luck and good carpentry
that she was saved from being pitched down under the following
camel's feet. Whoever made that _shibrayah_ could have built
the Ark.

But we came down through one last terrific gorge on to a level
plain, where the camel-thorn grew in clumps and the heat
radiating from the hills was like the breath from an oven door
behind us. There the animals went best foot forward, as if they
smelled the dawn and hoped to meet it sooner by hurrying. We had
quite a job to keep back for the loaded beasts, and three or four
men, instead of one, brought up the rear to prevent straggling.

Then, about an hour before dawn, in a hollow between sparsely
vegetated sand-dunes, Grim ordered camp pitched, and in very few
minutes there was a row of little cotton tents erected, with a
small fire in front of each.

Most of the camels were turned out at once to graze off the
unappetizing-looking thorns, sparse and dusty, that peppered the
field of view like scabs on a yellow skin. There was no fear of
their wandering too far, for if the