Forster soon found reason to regret his ill-timed abjuration of the prophet. The camel upon which he was stowed like a bale of merchandise was the worst conditioned of the whole drove; and to comfort him during his ride, a shrill-tongued old woman and a crying child took up their quarters in the opposite pannier, and contrived, the one by shrieking, the other by scolding, effectually to chase away his dreams. An old Afghan lady, with a very handsome daughter and two grandchildren, occupied the panniers of another camel. The rest were loaded with merchandise. This old dame soon began a contest with Dowran, the conductor of the kafilah, respecting the mode in which the movements of the caravan should be regulated; and after some desperate skirmishes, in which the force of her lungs and the piercing shrillness of her voice stood her in good stead, victory declared on her side, and the party fell under petticoat government. Being now a declared infidel, and regarded by every person as an unclean beast, whom it would be pollution to touch, and worse than adultery to oblige by any kind offices, our traveller enjoyed many of the preliminaries of martyrdom, was hourly abused, laughed at, mocked, and derided; and still further to enhance the contempt which every person already entertained for him, Dowran maliciously insinuated that he was not even a Christian, but a Jew. When the party arrived at their halting-place no one could be tempted to assist him, not even for money; imagining, I presume, that the gold which had lurked beneath his “Jewish gaberdine,” like that derived by Vespasian from a tax on urinaries, which his son Titus jocosely smelled in order to discover its scent, must be accompanied by an unsavoury odour, which might cleave to a true believer, and exclude him after death from the arms of the houries. He was therefore daily compelled to go himself in search of water and dried camels’ dung to boil his tea-kettle, and, what was much worse, to endure the smoke which it emitted when first lighted, which entered his eyes, and made him think that some Mohammedan devil had transformed himself into smoke for the purpose of tormenting him. In the midst of this _gehannum_, which gave him the more pain from its being of his own creating, he received some consolation from the protection of the Afghan lady, whose good-will he had won by fondling the children and giving them sugar. Thus fortified, he began by degrees to laugh at Dowran’s beard; and if he did not return him the compliment of being of the race of Abraham, it was more from want of reflection than from apprehension of danger.