THE camp was pitched upon the north bank of the Wad Nefis, not far from Tamoshlacht. Above it towered the Atlas, looking like a wall, with scarce a peak to break its grim monotony. A fringe of garden lands enclosed the sanctuary, in which the great Sherif lived in patriarchal style; half saint, half warrior, but wholly a merchant at the bottom, as are so many Arabs; all his surroundings enjoyed peculiar sanctity. In the long avenue of cypresses the birds lived safely, for no one dared to frighten them, much less to fire a shot. His baraka, that is the grace abounding, that distils from out the clothes, the person and each action of men such as the Sherif, who claim descent in apostolic continuity from the Blessed One, Mohammed, Allah’s own messenger, protected everything. Of a mean presence, like the man who stood upon the Areopagus and beckoned with his hand, before he cast the spell of his keen, humoristic speech upon the Greeks, the holy one was of a middle stature. His face was marked with smallpox. His clothes were dirty, and his haik he sometimes mended with a thorn, doubling it, and thrusting one end through a slit to form a safety-pin. His shoes were never new, his turban like an old bath towel; yet in his belt he wore a dagger with a gold hilt, for he was placed so far above the law, by virtue of his blood, that though the Koran especially enjoins the faithful not to wear gold, all that he did was good. Though he drank nothing but pure water, or, for that matter, lapped it like a camel, clearing the scum off with his fingers if on a journey, he might have drank champagne or brandy, or mixed the two of them, for the Arabs are the most logical of men, and to them such a man as the Sherif is holy, not from anything he does, but because Allah has ordained it. An attitude of mind as good as any other, and one that, after all, makes a man tolerant of human frailties. Allah gives courage, virtue, eloquence, or skill in horsemanship. He gives or he withholds them for his good pleasure; what he has written he has written, and therefore he who is without these gifts is not held blamable. If he should chance to be a saint, that is a true descendant, in the male line, from him who answered nobly when his foolish followers asked him if his young wife, Ayesha, should sit at his right hand in paradise, “By Allah, not she; but old Kadijah, she who when all men mocked me, cherished and loved, she shall sit at my right hand,” that is enough for them.