He was a peculiar-looking man. The lower part of his cheek--that
side on which I sat--was sunk in, as if he had no teeth there.
The effect was to give his whole face a twisted appearance. The
greater part of his head, of course, was concealed by the flowing
white kaffiyi, but his skin was considerably darker than that of
the Palestine Arab. He had no eyebrows at all, having shaved
them off--for a vow I supposed. Instead of making him look
comical, as you might expect, it gave him a very sinister
appearance, which was increased by his generally surly attitude.

Once again, as when I had entered the room, he turned his head to
give me one swift, minutely searching glance, and then turned his
eyes away as if he had no further interest. They were quite
extraordinary eyes, brimful of alert intelligence; and whereas
from his general appearance I should have set him down at
somewhere between forty and fifty, his eyes suggested youth, or
else that keen, unpeaceful spirit that never ages.

I tried him again in Arabic, but he answered without looking at
me, in a dialect I had never heard before. So I offered him a
gold-tipped cigarette, that being a universal language. He
waived the offer aside with something between astonishment and
disdain. He had lean, long-fingered hands, entirely unlike
those of the desert fraternity, who live too hard and fight
too frequently to have soft, uncalloused skin and unbroken
finger-nails.

He did not exactly fascinate me. His self-containment was
annoying. It seemed intended to convey an intellectual and moral