peace and war record of the Colony was what had brought them all
there. Hardly an Arab in the country was not the Colony's debtor
for disinterested help, direct or indirect, at some time in some
way. The American Colony was the one place in the country where
a man of any creed could go and be sure that whatever he might
say would not be used against him. So they were talking their
heads off. Hot air and Arab politics have quite a lot in common.
But there was a broad desert-breath about it all. It wasn't like
the little gusty yaps you hear in the city coffee-shops. A lot
of the talk was foolish, but it was all magnificent.

There was one sheikh named Mustapha ben Nasir dressed in a blue
serge suit and patent-leather boots, with nothing to show his
nationality except a striped silk head-dress with the camel-hair
band around the forehead. He was a handsome fellow, with a black
beard trimmed to a point, and perfect manners, polished no doubt
in a dozen countries, but still Eastern in slow, deferential
dignity. He could talk good French. I fell in conversation
with him.

The frankness with which treason is mooted, admitted and
discussed in the Near East is one of the first things that amaze
you. They are so open about it that nobody takes them seriously.
Apparently it is only when they don't talk treason openly that
the ruling authorities get curious and make arrests. To me, a
total stranger, with nothing to recommend me but that for an hour
or two that afternoon I was a guest of the American Colony,
Mustapha ben Nasir made no bones whatever about the fact that the
was being paid by the French to stir up feeling over Jordan
against the British.