One of the horses had been stolen in the night. It was the last on the line, and beyond it Harun was sleeping on the ground. At 11.30 all was right, but by 12.30 it had disappeared. By 1 A.M. the village had been roused, and the head men were coming in to the camp offering us one of their mares in compensation. The mares, which were wretched skeletons of beasts, were refused, and the horse demanded. Nothing could persuade them to bring him back, or to acknowledge any cognisance of him whatever. They said that passing robbers had taken him, and begged us not to report the affair. Our dragoman, however, took another view. He wrote a letter, long and circumstantial, describing us as “Hawajas” (merchants, gentlemen), travelling for information under tescera from the Sultan. The touch of genius in the letter was its insistence upon the seriousness of this affair on the ground that we were travelling under three flags, the Union Jack, the Turkish flag, and the Stars and Stripes. This letter was sent, by one of our men on horseback, to the Kaimakham, governor of the district, at a place some distance from where we were. The Kaimakham passed him on to the Mudir at another village, a person of terrible reputation, of whom everybody in the neighbourhood was afraid. The upshot of it all was that Mohammed, the messenger, returned to camp accompanied by two soldiers, powerful and intelligent young fellows, but savage-looking and rather ragged. The taller of the two, named Nimr (the leopard), was armed with bayonet, rifle, and revolver, while a double belt of cartridges added to the effect. His orders were to take the thirteen leading men of Banias in irons, and march them off “shoulder-tight” to prison at Mejdel. During the day a great meeting was held in the dragoman’s tent, the soldiers on one side, the “leading men” on the other. One of the latter protested that this was unfair--they had expected the dragoman to grow cooler, but although he had been hot at first, he was getting hotter instead of cooler. The reply was--(may it be forgiven!)--that he had meant to get cooler, but the Hawajas were getting hotter steadily, owing to the three flags aforesaid. After a long parley it was arranged that they should send to another village for a horse worth £20, the value of the stolen one. They stoutly maintained that a stranger, and none of themselves, had committed the robbery, and that it was a bitter day when the Hawajas had pitched their tents among them. Nimr the soldier sat frowning and beating the ground savagely with a stick between his wide open legs. He repeated several times, with gusto, the aphorism, “Better to touch fire and scorpions than the property of Hawajas,” to which the rueful answer of the Sheikh was that it