However, they were not long at Aintab, for they were summoned before the Governor and accused of selling four Turkish Testaments. Then, being unable to deny having done so, the Governor said, "You must leave Aintab immediately." He provided camels, and they had perforce to go, as they had been so dictatorially bidden. But this was not all. A mob of fanatics beset them, followed them out into the country, and then pelted them with stones--first with small ones, but later with bigger ones, which could easily have stunned anyone who was hit by them. Presently a man galloped up and tried to seize Newman's horse's bridle, but he beat him off with an umbrella. Some of the crowd called out that the Governor had ordered them to be killed. By the time Newman returned to his party Mr. Cronin was lying on the ground, and his mother declared that her son was dying. He had been set upon by men who had come to attack them, and beaten with fists, clubs, and stones. They tried their best to kill him. However, to Newman's intense surprise he was not hurt inwardly, only weak from exhaustion and pain. This was an almost unhoped-for comfort, and it was even found that he could continue his journey before evening. By this time the crowd had entirely dispersed, for an official had been sent by the Governor, and eventually he was able to quiet the people and send them off. Many of the travellers' possessions were lost, many stolen, but, at any rate, though discomforts and dangers undreamt of had been theirs, at least they were none of them seriously hurt; and that in itself was a thing for which they felt infinitely thankful. At last the Euphrates was reached. "We saw it first in splendid contrast to a chalk desert, the most odious place through which I have travelled. We had soft chalk crumbling under foot, into which the beasts sank over their fetlocks or deeper.... When we surmounted the last chalk hills the green valley of the Euphrates burst upon us. "It runs in a lowland excavation, bounded by opposite lines of high hills.... This valley was rich in the extreme, with trees scattered in it like England; but the sides of the hills were well wooded.... The river is very turbid, as if with white clay; it is unnaturally sweet, does not taste gritty, and is painfully cold. We presume this is from the melting of snow water.... The river is deep, rapid, smooth, and (I judge) as broad as the Thames at Blackfriars...." He thus describes the raft they were having made to take them down the river to Bagdad:--"Rough branches of trees of most irregular shape and quite small are strung together crosswise by ties of rope, and under them are fastened a sort of flooring of goat-skins blown up like bladders.... On these is fixed a deck of planks. These rafts carry enormous weights and draw very little water."