A party of Arab horsemen were reclining on a little hill with their spears stuck in the ground watching their people pass. We rode up to them, and their chief received us with great courtesy, and urged us to await the arrival of the cavalry with the Sheikh, to whom I had once done a favour which they remembered. We remained about an hour, and still the stream flowed past. The Arabs told us they had begun to move at an early hour, and would continue on the march for days, and as far as we could see, looking north and south, the procession was without break or pause. They told us they could bring into the field 100,000 fighting men, and their people, they said, was "like the sand of the sea." Never before or since have I seen such a swarm of human beings--"a multitude that no man could number." Any trans-Jordanic colony would have to calculate on the proximity of this horde, whose power has never been broken, not even by Joshua nor Ibrahîm Pasha, and whose rule in their own land is supreme in virtue of their resistless might. Even the Turkish Government bribe the Arabs in this region to let the Mohammedan pilgrims pass to Mecca! How much black-mail would the prosperous colony of infidels have to pay for permission to exist in the land of the faithful? And supposing arrangements could be made to secure the tolerance of the Bedawîn, there would still remain the Druzes and Circassians, and local sub-tribes and aggrieved _fellahîn_, who would form combinations to which an agricultural colony could offer no effective resistance. Mr. Oliphant speaks of driving the Arabs "back across the _Hadj_ road, where a small cordon of soldiers, posted in the forts which now exist upon it, would be sufficient to keep them in check." Turkish soldiers would not be the slightest protection to a prosperous colony of infidels, nor would a small cordon of any soldiers suffice, should the colony ever become a tempting prize.