The arrival of the white traveller was the signal for a great commotion. Women hastened from their domestic avocations and forsook their waterpots at the well. The men mounted their horses--every one came running or galloping helter-skelter, amid wild screaming and shouting. In a ferocious mob they surrounded the unhappy cause of their excitement, pouncing upon him like a pack of hyenas, tugging and pulling his clothes, threatening him with all sorts of penalties if he would not acknowledge the One God and His Prophet. In this sad plight, half dead with the pangs of thirst and the fatigues of a desert march, he was hustled and pulled towards the chief’s tent. When at last he found himself in the presence of the great man, a single glance at his face was sufficient to dispel the last hope of better treatment. Ali was an old man, with an Arab cast of countenance, on whose every lineament were marked sullenness and cruelty. While he passively examined the unfortunate man before him, the women of his household were more actively engaged inspecting the dress of the victim and searching his pockets. They affected to doubt that he was a man at all, and counted his fingers and toes to assure themselves that he was indeed like themselves. Not content even with that, they must needs have a peep at his white skin, and pushed aside his garments in order to effect their purpose. When the excitement was at its height, the sacred call to prayers resounded through the camp, but before the people fell upon their knees before the One God All Compassionate and Merciful, with bent body and face pressed in the dust to acknowledge His Omnipotence, they had a new indignity to put upon the helpless stranger. Showing him a wild hog, they bade him kill and eat it. This he wisely refused. The hog was then let loose in the belief that it would at once attack the white man, but instead it rushed at his tormentors. The sport thus missing its mark, the Moors proceeded to their devotions, and Park was conveyed to the door of the tent of Ali’s chief slave, where after much entreaty he was supplied with a little boiled corn with salt and water, and then left to pass the night on a mat, exposed to cold and the dews, and still worse, to the insults and ribald mirth of the mob which swarmed about him. CHAPTER X. _CAPTIVITY IN LUDAMAR._ The treatment which Park now experienced in the camp of Ali was brutal and barbarous beyond description. In the eyes of the degenerate Arabs of Ludamar he was an object detestable both to God and man--a Christian and a spy. Everything, therefore, that savage ingenuity could invent to insult and torture him was heaped upon him with fiendish glee and eagerness. On the morning after his arrival he was confined in a small square flat-roofed hut built of corn stalks, which happily admitted the breeze and excluded the sun. The hog was tied to the hut as a suitable companion to the hated Christian.