but proved well able to gallop under his light weight. One of
Anazeh's men took my bag, with a nod to reassure me, and without
a word we were off full-pelt, Anazeh leading with four stalwarts
who looked almost as hard-bitten as himself, six men crowding me
closely, and the remainder bringing up the rear.

That is the Arab way of doing things--rush and riot to begin
with. The steepness of the stony ravine we rode up soon reduced
the horses to a walk, after which there was a good deal of
attention to rifle-bolts, and a settling down to the more serious
aspects of the adventure. The escort began to look sullenly
ferocious, as only Arabs can.

There was a time, during the Turkish regime before the War, when
Cook's Agency took tourists in parties to El-Kerak, and all the
protection necessary was a handful of Turkish soldiers, whose
thief employment on the trip was to gather fuel and pitch tents.
Some one paid the Arabs to let tourists alone, and they normally
did. But the War changed all that. A post-Armistice stranger in
1920, with leather boots, was fair quarry for whoever had rifle
or knife.

We passed by a village or two, tucked into folds in the hills and
polluting the blue sky with a smell of ageing dung, but nothing
seemed disposed to happen. A few men stood behind stone walls
and stared at us sullenly. The women looked up from their
grindstones at the doors, covered their faces for convention's
sake, and uncovered them again at once for curiosity. There was
nothing you could call a road between the villages, only a rocky
cattle-track that seemed to take the longest possible way between