increasing throng of farmers--imploring, threatening, trying by hook or
by crook to win back the stolen goods. Little satisfaction did they get,
although some of them went with us as far as Saffêd.

Our garrison town is not an inviting place, nor has it an inviting
reputation. Lord Kitchener himself had good reason to remember it. As a
young lieutenant of twenty-three, in the Royal Engineering Corps, he was
nearly killed there by a band of fanatical Arabs while surveying for the
Palestine Exploration Fund. Kitchener had a narrow escape of it (one of
his fellow officers was shot dead close by him), but he went calmly
ahead and completed his maps, splendid large-scale affairs which have
never since been equaled--and which are now in use by the Turkish and
German armies! However, though Saffêd combines most of the unpleasant
characteristics of Palestine native towns, we welcomed the sight of it,
for we were used up by the march. An old deserted mosque was given us
for barracks; there, on the bare stone floor, in close-packed
promiscuity, too tired to react to filth and vermin, we spent our first
night as soldiers of the Sultan, while the milky moonlight streamed in
through every chink and aperture, and bats flitted round the vaulting
above the snoring carcasses of the recruits.

Next morning we were routed out at five. The black depths of the well in
the center of the mosque courtyard provided doubtful water for washing,
bathing, and drinking; then came breakfast,--our first government
meal,--consisting, simply enough, of boiled rice, which was ladled out
into tin wash-basins holding rations for ten men. In true Eastern
fashion we squatted down round the basin and dug into the rice with our
fingers. At first I was rather upset by this sort of table manners, and
for some time I ate with my eyes fixed on my own portion, to avoid
seeing the Arabs, who fill the palms of their hands with rice, pat it