We were so fortunate as to be invited to a great feast which the sheikh gave the entire village in honor of his birthday. Feeding the poor in this wholesale way is regarded by the Arabs as a deed of great merit. A slaughtered camel provided the _pièce de résistance_ of the banquet. In the center of the room was placed an enormous tray piled with a mountain of _burghul_, or boiled wheat, into which had been inserted huge pieces of camel’s meat. A large funnel-shaped depression had been scooped out in the top of the pile and filled with melted butter. This percolated through the mass and added the final touch of flavor to what was—if you liked it—a most rich and delicious repast. The anxious villagers were then admitted in groups of eight or ten. They immediately squatted around the tray, thrust their hands into the mass, grasped as much as they could, plunged it into their mouths and, in order not to lose any time, swallowed it with as little mastication as possible. One greedy fellow got an unusually large chunk of camel’s meat into his throat and, as a consequence, nearly choked to death before his comrades relieved him by strenuous blows upon his back. In order to visit Hama, we returned from Palmyra by another route; and, as a large part of this journey was to be across a trackless, waterless and absolutely uninhabited desert, we engaged a Bedouin to act as our guide. Not long after setting out, we passed through a gap in the hills a quarter of a mile wide, whose sides were almost as perpendicular as if they had been walls shaped by the hand of man. The locality is called _Marbat Antar_, that is, “Antar’s Hitching-place.” Antar is the hero of many a fabulous exploit among the Arabs, much as was Hercules among the Greeks; and the prodigies of valor which he performed in defense of his tribe are celebrated in song and story. Among other wonderful feats, he is said to have leaped his horse across this deep ravine from cliff to cliff. The first day’s journey homeward brought us to el-Wesen, a well where we had expected to lay in a supply of water for the long ride across the arid wilderness; but, to our intense disappointment, we found the water foul with dead locusts. Our Arabs, however, swallowed the nauseating fluid with great gusto, apparently rejoicing that they could obtain both food and drink in the same mouthful; and, as it was a case of necessity, we managed to cook some food with the water, and even drank a little of it in the form of very strong tea which disguised somewhat the insect flavor.