We travelled fast and in five hours from ’Ânah came down to the river at Fḥemeh, where we found our tents pitched near a ḳishlâ. The guardhouse is the only building here, the village of Fḥemeh being in the Jezîreh about half-an-hour up stream. About the same distance lower down lies the island of Kuro, which is perhaps Julian’s Akhaya Kala, but I saw it only from afar and do not know whether there are still ruins upon it. We had parted at ’Ânah from Cyrus and from Julian; they marched with their armies down the Jezîreh bank, and our road lost much of its charm in losing the shadowy pageants of their advance. We were tormented during the next three days by an intolerable east wind. It blew from sunrise to sunset, and, for aught we could tell, it might have issued from the mouth of a furnace, so scorching was its dust-laden breath. I heard of ruins at Sûs, a place where the Jerâif own cornfields; but it lay at the head of a peninsula formed by a great bend of the stream, and I had no heart to go so far out of the way.[69] We reached Ḥadîthah in six hours from Fḥemeh and camped there, partly because we were weary of the wind and dust, and partly because Muḥammad had advised me to seek there for a guide into the desert. The nearer we came to that adventure, the more formidable did it appear, and I was beginning to realize that it would be folly to take a caravan across the parched and stony waste, and to revolve plans for sending the muleteers to Kerbelâ and taking only Fattûḥ with me to Kheiḍir. At Ḥadîthah we met an aged corporal, who declared that nothing would be easier than to go straight thence to Ḳaṣr ’Amej, and for water we should find every night a pool of winter rain. He had crossed the desert two years ago and there had been no lack of water. “But this year there has been no rain,” I objected; “and all the Arabs are coming down to the river because of the great drought. Where, then, shall we find the pools?” “God knows,” he answered piously, and I put an end to the discussion and turned my attention to the ruins of Ḥadîthah.