e places where water was fairly abundant
both for horse and man. As an off-set to this we had ten miles a day to
travel for rations and forage, so the balance was about even as things were
in Palestine. At dawn on the first morning of our arrival the familiar
crash of bombs was our reveille, and for a month the Turks repeated the
performance every morning as soon as it was light and every evening just
before sunset. With enormous difficulty, for the ground here was mainly
sandstone, we dug burrows for ourselves on the bank of the wadi. Some of
them were just large enough to contain the body stretched at full length;
others, more ambitiously conceived, bore an uncanny resemblance to a grave;
and a few strenuous people made shelves for their belongings in the sides
of their burrows.

Here we extended our acquaintance amongst the inhabitants of these regions.
Scorpions we knew well, tarantulas we had nodded to, but the visitor who
now invaded our narrow dwellings was the homely beetle; a monstrous fellow
this, as big as a crown piece. His correct name is, I think, the
scavenger-beetle, though we used a much more uncomplimentary term. He was
quite harmless, but he would treat blankets as a rubbish-bin. He would
seize a lump of earth or refuse much bigger than himself and push it in
front of him till he came to a convenient blanket, where he dropped his
load and went away for more. But his star turn was an attempt to crawl up
the perpendicular side of a burrow, pushing his load in front of him. The
side generally selected for this attempt was the one nearest your head as
you lay; and often the first intimation you had that the performance had
begun was the abrupt descent on to your face of beetle and load. Neither
the fall nor the subsequent profanity discouraged him in the least; on the
contrary, it spurred him to greater efforts. The next attempt would land
him an inch or two higher up, when down he would come again. I used to have
the most profound admiration for the legendary spider of the late King
Bruce of Scotland, but after a scavenger-beetle had fallen on my face for
the fifth time just when I was trying hard to go to sleep, I thought that
even perseverance had its limits. So I picked up the beetle and threw him
into the next burrow, and, in order that he could give his performance
there, sent the piece of earth after him. Judged by his remarks, however,
the occupant was no naturalist.

The outstanding feature of th