f they
betrayed the trust reposed in them by their superiors, or were seduced
into some act against their loyalty or their religion. But that,
praise be to God, you will not find. It is only in small matters such
as acts of commerce or politeness, which hardly come within the sphere
of a man's conscience, that they are procurable, and no one in this
country thinks the worse of them, whatever people say to you, a
foreigner, by way of flattery. It is very difficult for foreigners to
learn the truth. Your Honour should be thankful that you have Suleyman
for an instructor--and Rashid, too,' he added as an after-thought,
seeing that my bodyservant stood close by, expecting mention.

And after more than twenty years' experience of Eastern matters, I
know now that he was right.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE BATTLEFIELD

Our road, the merest bridle-path, which sometimes altogether
disappeared and had to be retrieved by guesswork, meandered on the
side of a ravine, down in the depths of which, in groves of oleander,
there flowed a stream of which we caught the murmur. The forest was
continuous on our side of the wadi. It consisted of dense olive groves
around the villages and a much thinner growth of ilex in the tracts
between. The shade was pleasant in the daytime, but as night came on
its gloom oppressed our spirits with extreme concern, for we were
still a long way off our destination, and uncertain of the way.

The gloom increased. From open places here and there we saw the stars,
but gloom filled the ravine, and there was little difference between
the darkness underneath the trees and that outside in open spaces of
the grove. We trusted to our horses to make out the path, which
sometimes ran along the verge of precipices.

I cannot say that I was happy in my mind. Rashid made matters worse by
dwelling on the risks we ran not only from abandoned men but ghouls
and jinnis. The lugubrious call of a hyaena in the distance moved him
to remark that ghouls assume that shape at night to murder travellers.
They come up close and rub against them like a loving cat; which
contact robs the victims of their intellect, and causes them to follow
the hyaena to its den, where the ghoul kills them and inters their
bodies till the flesh is ripe.

He next expressed a fear lest we might come upon some ruin lighted up,
and be deceived into supposing it a haunt of men, as had happened to a
worthy cousin of his own when on a journey. This in