Salt, the English consul, plundered his clothes and his manuscripts. Lascaris would, then, have performed the greater part of his circuits among the nomads before the arrival of the doctor. Well, during the journey which they accomplished together, the first asserted that he had never seen Palmyra, at a time when, according to Fatalla, he had been there twice in the course of the year 1810. Affair of tactics perhaps to baffle a rival. But what is of more importance, is that neither Mahannah-el-Fadel nor the principal chiefs encountered recognised the famous Sheik Ibrahim. Ought we, then, to imagine a prodigious watchword given by Lascaris to the entire desert? It is impossible. Elsewhere improbabilities embellish agreeably the histories of Fatalla. Nasr, he recounts, was killed in 1811 in the wars between the Drayhy and Mahannah. Zaher, son of the Drayhy, brought him down with a lance-thrust, then "cut his body in pieces, placed it in a basket and sent it to Mahannah's camp by a prisoner whose nose he had cut off." Well, a year later, this unfortunate young man, in wonderfully good health, paid a visit to Lady Hester, then at Damascus, to dissuade her from going to Palmyra. Lascaris had a short memory; he had already forgotten the encampment near Karyatein in January, 1813, from which he accompanied Nasr to search for provisions in the village. Both returned, besides, with an empty bag. It is Nasr again who, in the spring of 1813, escorted Lady Hester to Palmyra and behaved himself in a horrible and brutal manner. Two years later, Mahannah wrote to "the Queen," who was settled at Mar-Elias, to beg her to intervene with the Pacha of Damascus in favour of Nasr, who had wrought great havoc in the full granaries of the Governor of Hama. This dead man clung to life tenaciously! As for the relations of Lascaris with Lady Hester, they are very whimsical and demand some rectifications. Fatalla pretends that it is in the spring of 1812 that he learned of the arrival of a princess, daughter of the King of England, in Syria, where she was displaying a royal luxury. She had overwhelmed with magnificent presents Mahannah-el-Fadel and had made him escort her to Palmyra, where she had distributed her bounty with profusion and had acquired a formidable party amongst the Bedouins, who had proclaimed her queen. Lascaris felt very much alarmed at this news, believing that he saw in it an intrigue to ruin his plans. At this period, Lady Hester had scarcely disembarked from Egypt and was on the way to Jerusalem. The Palmyra project, if it existed already, was still informal and secret.