As the travellers approached Damascus, it seemed to Mansfield and Mr Hicks that their pace was faster than it had been at first. Cyril had become more impatient of delay, less tolerant of any proposal to digress from the appointed route for the purpose of visiting some object of interest. They could see that his spirits were variable, in spite of the rigid self-control which he exercised, and his physician discovered that for the first time in his life he slept badly night after night. When they reached the city, however, and had taken up their quarters in the house of an Oriental cousin of the Chevalier’s, he was calm and cheerful again. On the first evening of their stay he was the life of the party, which included a cheerful young Roumi aide-de-camp of the Vali or Governor-General, who was the bearer of his superior’s respects and compliments. When the story of their journeys had been told, Mahmud Fadil Bey had a good deal to say about the one task that remained to be completed. “We are all anxious to see how you get on with the Beni Ismail,” he said, in his excellent French. “They have been a thorn in our side for many a day, and we shall not be sorry to turn them over to you.” “What is their peculiar wickedness?” asked Cyril. Mahmud Fadil shrugged his shoulders. “They are simply an Arab tribe who inhabit a tract of desert of which almost nothing is known, and who make themselves rather more disagreeable than the rest. Of course they have never paid any tribute--though our treasury officials devised a pleasing fiction that the arrears had been accumulating for centuries. It was practically a case of our paying tribute to them. When the usual presents were not forthcoming, it was not long before we heard that the Beni Ismail had robbed a caravan or two. It was no use sending soldiers after them, for they knew the desert and we did not, so we lay low and said nothing.” He glanced smilingly at Mr Hicks, as he made the quotation in English. “Two years ago there was a famine, and I suppose caravans became scarce. At any rate, the Beni Ismail were foolish enough to wander close to the city in search of food, and the Vali saw his opportunity. He drew a cordon of troops round their encampment, and arrested them for non-payment of their taxes. We had very nearly the whole tribe in our hands, and it was intended to deport them to some other part of the country, where they would be absolutely at the mercy of the Government. But, somehow or other, they managed to pay up, though I will do the Vali the justice to say that he did not diminish the sum he had named by a single piastre. This tardy virtue was all very well; but he had no intention of leaving the tribe at liberty to begin their old game again, and the preparations for removing them were going forward, when--of all people--the Pannonian Ambassador at Czarigrad took up the affair. It was said that the Empress of Pannonia was interesting herself in the