The young dragoman's recital ought to be pardoned some degree of inaccuracy. It is necessary to subtract the Oriental zero. Five hundred thousand Bedouins are, after all, only five or six thousand. The Tigris and the Euphrates are two rivers very near to each other, and the name of the first looks so well in a history, even when it is a question of the second. A skirmish of some hundreds of men produces much less effect than a pitched battle of 200,000 warriors. There are, besides, passages which are of a striking interest: pictures painted with a large brush of the turmoil of camps, of songs of love and battle, of tribes on the march, of puffs of burning air which bring all the nostalgia, all the violence, of the free life of the desert, and in which the imprint of Lamartine is recognisable. The whole art of the narrator is to interest, and it must be confessed that Fatalla practised this art wonderfully well. Lascaris's sojourn amongst the wandering Arabs is perhaps, after all, only the journey made with Dr. Aferson to the Emir Mahannah-el-Fadel, and transposed by a secretary with a rich and fertile imagination. It is necessary to remark the similarity of the name of the Bedouin Hassan who, according to the two versions, served them as guide. A Levantine historiographer translated by a poet! The enterprise was truly hazardous. Have successive interpretations altered the original text, or has Lamartine been mystified by a clever story-teller who had already modified the rigid framework of time and facts, which, like a good Oriental, he rendered elastic according to the inclination of his subject. We shall never know, for Lascaris's papers, which alone would have been able to throw light on his real mission and his real travels, have disappeared, snapped up by the English Government. CHAPTER VIII THE QUEEN OF PALMYRA LADY HESTER was cooped up in Hama. Amongst the old men, the most grey-headed did not recollect so severe a winter as that of 1813. Nearly all the fruit-trees of the beautiful gardens which caress the Orontes perished frozen. A tribe of Arabs which was encamped in the plain was engulfed by a snowstorm, with the women, the children and the flocks. Alone the rustic norias continued to hum, and in the wind, the squall and the rain their songs rose infinitely monotonous and melancholy, embodying the revolt of the earth made for sun and joy. But the travellers did not wait longer than in the first days of spring the swarms of bees to take flight from the great dead orchards. M. de Nerciat, passing by Hama, offered Lady Hester a salutary diversion. Then Beaudin fell from his horse and spoiled his face. Mrs. Fry had an acute attack of pleurisy. The health of Lady Stanhope herself was not brilliant; but she was one of those women who endure better the fatigues of journeys than the monotony of prolonged sojourns in the same place, and the doctor, who knew the fierce energy of his patient, did not venture to oppose the expedition.