On April 4, at dawn, the Bedouins, excited by the arrival of the Faydans, broke up the camp in all haste. Lady Hester was broken-hearted at leaving without saying good-bye. As for the doctor, he was chiefly anxious to procure the recipe for a sweet sauce to eat with hare, in which figured dried raisins and onions. That interested him much more than all the ruins of creation. Nasr, through calculation or through fear of losing the deposit entrusted to Muly Ismael, hastened the march, allowing respite neither to beasts nor men. He was not reassured until after having crossed the Belaz mountains and fallen in with the tribe of the Sebah and many other Bedouin tribes which were posted on the path of the Syt. Lady Hester was thirty-seven years of age at this period, but her dazzling beauty was able to face the double proof of broad daylight and popular infatuation. Lovingly thousands of women--whom she had, besides, overwhelmed with handkerchiefs and necklaces--surrounded her. All the men, fascinated by her manner of mounting half-wild horses, proclaimed her _Queen_, and made her enter their tribe, giving her, as to a child of the desert, the right of recommending travellers. It is then that a Bedouin, carried away by the cavalcades, the cheering and the general enthusiasm, threw down his keffiye, crying: "Let them give me a hat, and I will go to England!" Lady Hester learned afterwards that 300 Faydan horsemen had pursued the caravan, but having fallen foul of the rearguard of the Sebahs, they had abandoned a game lost in advance. There had been some wounded, and the doctor was requested to give them his attention. But what was he to do with the light-hearted fellows who washed their wounds with the urine of camels and who, after some days of this treatment, were in perfect health! It is useless to be fastidious; it is too disconcerting. In the midst of an extraordinary concourse of admirers and spectators, Lady Hester returned to her pleasant villa at Hama. Nasr drew his 2000 piastres and returned to his desert, quite contented. How far is this modest sum from the 30,000 piastres which a number of travellers benevolently lent him, Didot at their head! As for the two Bedouins whom Lady Hester had brought with the intention of exhibiting them later in England, they pined away so rapidly, they assumed so quickly a pitiable and sickly appearance, that she was obliged to send them back without delay to their vermin and their sun. CHAPTER IX FROM THE TEMPLE OF BAALBECK TO THE RUINS OF ASCALON