What unforgettable recollections were those evening halts around the dull fires! The encampment and its vicinity were swarming with living things. Camels with velvet steps returning from the springs with their moist leathern bottles; children romping with the foals; women tatooed with fantastical flowers going to milk the she-camels or park the kids. The air resounded with the call of the shepherds and the bleating of the sheep, which were returning in disorder. In the shadow you heard the flocks breathing. The horses, which were shackled near the tents, pawed the sand impatiently, and the desert stretched out its limbs with gladness at the approach of night. The Bedouins, all attention, closely encircled the old poets come from the banks of the Euphrates, who chanted the splendour of dead heroes, and the cry of the roving hyenas made the narrow tents appear better. Mahannah escorted Lady Hester to within a few miles of Hama, and Nasr himself conducted her so far as the house which had been prepared for her. In the middle of December, the rest of the expedition rejoined Lady Hester. The doctor lodged with the Lascaris, and had then all the time and the leisure to observe and know this mysterious personage. Lamartine, in his introduction to the _Récit du séjour de Fatella Sayeghir chez les Arabes du grand désert_, has traced an astonishing portrait of this Lascaris who, from the end of the Directory, foresaw that Asia alone offered a suitable field for the regenerating ambition of the hero. "It appears that the young warrior of Italy, whose imagination was as luminous as the East, vague as the desert, great as the world, had on this subject confidential conversations with M. de Lascaris, and darted a flash of his mind towards that horizon which was opening to him his destiny. It was only a flash, and I am grieved by it; it is evident that Bonaparte was the man of the East, and not the man of Europe.... In Asia, he would have stirred men by millions, and, a man of simple ideas himself, he would have with two or three ideas erected a monumental civilisation which would have endured a thousand years after him. But the error was committed: Napoleon chose Europe; only he wished to throw an explorer behind him to discover what there would be to do there and to mark out the route to the Indies, if his fortune were to open it to him. M. de Lascaris was this man. Man of genius, of talent and of sagacity, he feigned a sort of monomania to form an excuse for his stay in Syria and his persistent relations with all the Arabs of the desert who arrived at Aleppo."