against the French could hardly be suspected of being hired by
the French to do it. There was nobody there but he who could say
what Feisul's intentions actually were. You can say what you
like against the British anywhere, at any time, and find some one
to believe what you say. And it needed no wizardry to prove that
the Allies had broken every promise they ever made to the Arabs.

"Are you going to sit idle, and let Emir Feisul and the Syrians
fight the French alone?" he asked, and paused again.

There was a great deal of murmuring--not quite all of it, I
thought, entirely in his favour.

"What is the alternative to sitting still like camels waiting to
be doubly burdened? If you raid Palestine, the local Arabs will
all rise to your assistance. The throat of every Zionist from
the Lebanon to Beersheba will be cut. There will be plunder
beyond reckoning. And you will help Feisul by holding back the
British army from marching to the assistance of the French. The
question is, are you men?--are you Arabs?--are you true Moslems?
--or do you like to look down from these heights of El-Kerak over
the home of your ancestors in the hands of so-called Zionists who
are nothing but Jews, under a new name?"

He sat down before any one could answer him, and whispered to Ali
Shah al Khassib, who called on another man to speak at once. It
was a pretty obvious piece of concerted strategy, but he got by
with it for the moment. The general feeling seemed to be in
favour of a raid if only some one would start it. Nobody seemed
to mind much how the decision was arrived at, so long as the
responsibility was passed to some one else.

The man now called on was a smooth-tongued, tall, lean individual
with shifty eyes, and a flow of talk of the coffeeshop variety.
At the end of his first sentence any fool would have known that
he had been put up to quiz Abdul Ali, in order that Abdul Ali
might have an excuse to justify himself. He attacked him very
mildly, with much careful hedging and apologetic gesture, on the
ground that possibly the Damascene was ignoring their interests
while urging them to take action that would suit his own.

Even with that mild criticism he set loose quite a murmur of
minority agreement. For the first time since the speech-making
began Anazeh barked approval. I thought for a moment the old man
was going to get to his feet. But Abdul Ali was up again first,
and launched on the seas of self-esteem.