sojourn at Damascus he was one or our worst enemies.

Another, and the most interesting of all the personages who attended my
receptions, was Lady Ellenborough, known at Damascus as the Honourable
Jane Digby El Mezrab.[1] She was the most romantic and picturesque
personality: one might say she was Lady Hester Stanhope's successor.
She was of the family of Lord Digby, and had married Lord Ellenborough,
Governor-General of India, a man much older than herself, when she was
quite a girl. The marriage was against her wish. She was very unhappy
with him, and she ran away with Prince Schwartzenburg when she was only
nineteen, and Lord Ellenborough divorced her. She lived with Prince
Schwartzenburg for some years, and had two or three children by him, and
then he basely deserted her. I am afraid after that she led a life for
a year or two over which it is kinder to draw a veil. She then tired of
Europe, and conceived the idea of visiting the East, and of imitating
Lady Hester Stanhope and other European ladies, who became more Eastern
than the Easterns. She arrived at Beyrout, and went to Damascus, where
she arranged to go to Baghdad, across the desert. For this journey a
Bedawin escort was necessary; and as the Mezrab tribe occupied the
ground, the duty of commanding the escort devolved upon Shaykh Mijwal,
a younger brother of the chief of this tribe. On the journey the young
Shaykh fell in love with this beautiful woman, and she fell in love with
him. The romantic picture of becoming a queen of the desert suited her
wild and roving fancy. She married him, in spite of all opposition,
according to the Mohammedan law. At the time I came to Damascus she was
living half the year in a house just within the city gates; the other
half of the year she passed in the desert in the tents of the Bedawin
tribe, living absolutely as a Bedawin woman. When I first saw her she
was a most beautiful woman, though sixty-one years of age. She wore one
blue garment, and her beautiful hair was in two long plaits down to the