I found my friends established as usual in the seat of honor--an old sofa in the corner of the café--and as usual they made place for me amongst them. When the ceremony of their welcome subsided, the _Mudir_ took occasion to whisper to me that the leader of the caravan, an excellent fellow who had stopped there before, was telling stories. I then recognized, in the light of the _cafedij's_ lamp, the man I had seen that afternoon on horseback. He sat on a stool in front of the divan of honor, and behind him were crowded all the other stools and mats in the place. Although he had not deigned, before, to turn his head toward me, he now testified by the depth of his salaam to the honor he felt in such an addition to his circle. He was a curiously handsome chap, burnt and bearded, with the high-hung jaw of his people, the arched brow, the almost Roman nose. And, shaky as I still was in the language, he didn't leave me long to wonder why he was the center of the circle. He was a born _raconteur_--one of those story-tellers who in the East still carry on the tradition of the troubadours. Not that he sang to us, or recited poetry--although the _Imam_ told me with pride that the man was a dictionary of the Persian poets. But he went on with a story he had begun before my entrance. It was one of those endless old eastern tales that are such a charming mixture of serpent wisdom and childish _naïveté_. And he told it with a vividness of gesture and inflection that you never get from print. Well, you can imagine! I always had a fancy for that sort of thing, but it's so deuced hard to get at--at least, for people like us. And after that queer turn the first sight of the caravan gave me, down by the water, it made me feel as if I were really beginning to lay my hand on things at last. So I was disappointed enough when at the end of the story the party began to break up. Upon my signifying as much to my neighbor, the _Mudir_, however, he said that nothing would be easier than to summon the man to a private session. If I would do him the honor to come to the _konak_--I was tickled enough to take up with the idea, provided the meeting should take place at my house instead. I knew there would be bakshish, which I didn't like to put the _Mudir_ in for, after all he had done. Moreover, I had a whim to get the camel-driver under my own roof--by way of nailing the East, so to speak!