“Are there many locusts here?” said I, for locusts are not accustomed to lay their eggs in sand. “No,” they answered, “there are none here; but, as God is exalted! there are thousands lower down.” “Then why do you plough here?” I asked, with the tiresome persistence of the European. “The government ordered it,” said they, and resumed their task. In another hour we reached Tell ech Cha’bî (el Ka’bî?) where there is an Arab cemetery, the graves covered with unglazed potsherds. Ḥmeidî told me that when the Arabs bury their dead in such places they dig into the mound and extract broken pottery to strew upon the graves; the Bedouin use no pottery, their water-vessels being of copper or of skin. While we sat upon the top of the tell lunching and waiting for the caravan, which was delayed for nearly an hour in the loose sand, Ḥmeidî gave me his views on politics. “Effendim,” said he, “we do not care what sultan we have so long as he is a just ruler. But as for ’Abdu’l Ḥamîd, he keeps three hundred women in his palace, and, look you, they have eaten our money.” Wherein he wronged the poor ladies; it was not they who scattered the revenues of the State. In thirty minutes we came to Tell Simbal, a small sandy mound; in one hour and fifteen minutes more to Tell el Hajîn, with a village by the river, and after another hour and twenty minutes to Tell Abu’l Ḥassan, where we camped, seven and a quarter hours from Bustân. Abu’l Ḥassan is marked in Chesney’s map as “mound.” It is a very striking tell rising fifty feet above the river; upon the summit are Arab graves strewn with coarse pottery and with undressed stones dug out of the hill, and for a distance of a quarter of an hour’s walk to the north and east there are fragments of brick upon the ground. The graves are those of the Jebbûr, who, said Ḥmeidî, left this district thirty years ago and migrated to the Tigris, where I subsequently saw them. Nearly all the Silmân have also gone away, and though their camping grounds are marked by Kiepert on the Euphrates, their present quarters are on the Khâbûr. The Deleim and the Ageidât, a base-born tribe, together with the Bu Kemâl, now occupy the Euphrates’ banks, and the ’Anazeh come down to the river in the summer. There was no living thing near our camp except an enormous pelican, who was floating contentedly on the broad bosom of the stream. Our advent roused in him the profoundest interest, and as he floated he cast backward glances at us, to see what we were doing in his wilderness.