Only one of the treasures of the palace has ever come to light, viz. a pair of bronze oxen, found in the process of cleaning out the well in the court of the mosque. These "idols" were promptly melted down; and they now, in the form of a window grating, keep thieves from a gentleman's house in Mosul. The old order is changing in Mosul as elsewhere; or will change when the Baghdad Railway comes and brings light and sanitation into its picturesque corruption. The domination of the present governing clique will go, and one hopes that something better will take its place. Will whatever happens to come be a real improvement on the open bribery of Sabonji, and the humorous tolerance of Tahir Pasha? Some things will mend. The small merchant, for instance, will no longer be made to buy his stock from the local member of the administrative council; and warned that if he dares to import for himself from Aleppo, that caravan, at any rate, will not pass the Shammar Arabs. The youthful heroes of that tribe will no longer be told by the old men "in the good old days of our fathers, a young fellow had to kill his lion before he thought himself man enough to take a wife. Now you must, at any rate, rob a caravan." All that will be to the good. Still, the experience of towns like Beyrout and Smyrna suggests that, after all, the known evils of the East may be preferable to the unknown crop that will spring from a confusion of East and West. CHAPTER V THE TEMPLE OF THE DEVIL (SHEIKH ADI) We have long been partial to pilgrimage. Partly because we love all old habits. Because "it was so our fathers did in the days of old;" and because, quite apart from that intrinsically "excellent reason," we have yet another reason which may well be thought "good enough." We have found that the original promoters of that pastime were people of singular discrimination, and endowed with a positive genius for exploiting attractive resorts. The shrines to which they sent their penitents are so many realms of delight to the vagrant pleasure-seeker; and who could pick out for himself a more ideal holiday paradise than Lourdes or Monserrat or Covadonga or Rocamadour? We have ranged in quest of palms and scallop shells through the length and breadth of Christendom, from the Holy Sepulchre in the east to Santiago de Compostela in the west; and nowhere have we been disappointed of receiving our temporal reward. Yet we feel it is rather hard measure to be grudged all ulterior benefits--to be told that, having roamed "without intention," our spiritual profits are _nil_.