The journey to Yembu was little better than a nightmare. The fashionable road from Medina to Mecca is overland, or back to Damascus and so direct to Jiddah by the Suez Canal. Only poor people go by the Yembu route, which is supposed to be the most hazardous and the roughest in the Hedjaz. There were no escort or police arrangements, no daily market, and each traveller had to carry his own provisions and water. The Bedawin hired out the camels, which numbered about 5,000, and a Bedawi sheikh was in charge. The countryside was infested by robbers who constantly cut off stragglers. The ground, too, was difficult going, being a rough mountain-land, and, while the noons were scorching, the nights were bitterly cold. Every night an encampment was made, roughly circular in shape, into which the whole caravan was packed in the smallest possible space. "While I was trying to get warm a man stumbled against me and nearly knocked me into the fire. Turning round, I was shocked to see a figure, stained almost from head to foot with blood from a tremendous gash in the head, obviously a sword cut. He asked for water, and I went into the tent to get him some, but returning, found him gone. We heard the next day that no less than six men had been murdered that night and many others wounded; and so it went on till we reached Yembu. These unfortunates were mostly people who could not afford camels, and so had to perform the journey on foot. Straying from the main body in search of firewood they got picked up by the marauders hanging on the flanks, who seized every opportunity to plunder such stragglers of their miserable possessions, and killed unhesitatingly any who resisted." It was in this country that Charles Doughty spent part of his time, and Mr. Wavell thinks that one reason of his success was that he carried nothing worth stealing. The fact that Doughty denied neither his religion nor his nationality seemed to him not the most remarkable fact about the achievement. "The Bedou themselves are not fanatical on these points, and he did not attempt to enter the forbidden cities. Of course, the fact of a stranger being a Christian is always a good excuse for knocking him on the head; but failing it they will soon find another if they want to do so, and will be quite uninfluenced by it if they don't." They had one row with their camel man, Saad, who tried to extort bakhsheesh. Suddenly he quieted down, and became all politeness to the end of the journey. The reason for this was that that resourceful liar Ibrahim had told him that Mr. Wavell was a nephew of the Governor of Yembu. This story served the travellers well. It spread through the caravan, and many of the pilgrims who were being blackmailed by their camel-men came to him and begged his protection, and received it. At last, on the dawn of the sixth day, after trekking without a stop for the last twenty hours, they reached the gates of Yembu.