Occasionally after dinner one of the natives who were employed as secret service agents would arrive very mysteriously at the house on some excuse and report that there were fire-arms in the house of So-and-So. Sometimes the information was no more than an exaggerated rumour, but if it sounded true I would make a night raid on the person who was supposed to have rifles. These night raids were very dramatic, but did not always yield the harvest that was expected. The informer would lead the way, disguised by a turban pulled low over his head and a scarf muffling his eyes. I followed with a dozen armed Sudanese. The difficulty was to prevent the owner of the house getting wind of us before we surrounded the building, and to surround a Siwan house which has dozens of doors and passages and exits over roofs is no easy matter. It was not a matter of entering a hostile town, but of surprising a household. We would pad silently into the town, and anybody who we met roaming the streets would be attached to the party to prevent his giving warning. On reaching the house the guide slipped away in the darkness, and I surrounded the house with men; then at a whistle each man lit a torch and I beat on the door and demanded admittance. Immediately the wildest hullabaloo began inside—men shouting, women yelling, donkeys braying and hens cackling. Sometimes this was done in order to distract our attention from somebody who tried to slip out and remove the rifles to a safe hiding-place. When the door was opened all the male occupants were marched outside and the harem sent into one room, where they sat on the floor with shawls over their heads and reviled us—but in Siwan, so nobody was any the wiser. The house was searched from top to bottom, the ceilings probed, the mats raised, and every room examined. Sometimes the rifles were buried in the floor, or hidden in bales of hay. Occasionally a modern rifle and some ammunition was found, but usually some old Arab guns and a bag or two of shot and gunpowder. If we had a successful haul the master of the house would be marched off in custody to the jail in the Markaz, and next day he would be tried, and probably heavily fined or imprisoned. CHAPTER III THE HISTORY OF SIWA “Cities have been, and vanished; fanes have sunk, Heaped into shapeless ruin; sands o’erspread. Fields that were Edens; millions too have shrunk To a few starving hundreds, or have fled From off the page of being.”