Here he proved a real friend, for he offered to show me the bazaar and try to get bread and some dinner before closing time. The bazaar was a small one, but fortunately there was a tiny cookshop, where exactly three kinds of very greasy pilau were on sale. From these I selected the least uninviting, and arranged for the proprietor to send a couple of plates of it to the caravanserai. We went into the village baker’s, and there I found the great advantage of being, first, a Haji, and next, a strange Haji. At first the man, who was closing his shop, was very loth to serve us; but my guide, in tones of pained remonstrance, mentioned that I was a Haji, and the man hesitated, and finally began to throw bread into his scales. As a means to get full weight, Muhammad, the coachman, threw in the remark that I was a stranger from far away, knowing neither tongue, nor country, nor custom. The worthy baker, with a sententious remark upon the virtue of honouring the stranger and the acquisition of merit, threw in an extra piece and looked to me for the pious expression that was his due, and which I was fortunately able to supply in Arabic, much to his gratification. When we asked him the price, he actually told us the right amount without any haggling, and remarked upon the wickedness of harassing the stranger. This excellent attitude I found in many places, that is, wherever there were Kurds or Arabs. Turks are another race in manner and custom. I found my dinner waiting at the caravanserai, and invited my coachman to partake, for I knew that the humble station I occupied in the social scale was only equal to, if not lower than, that of a coachman. [Sidenote: A JUST MAN] With frank gratitude he squatted opposite me, and with our fingers we finished the mess. Previous experience in Persia had taught me how to negotiate semi-liquid dishes with a piece of bread and two fingers, or consume piles of rice without feeding one’s surroundings. Also I knew the style of ablution necessary, and the formulæ of thanksgiving after eating. This latter was not called for on the road, for religious observance falls into considerable desuetude among the slaves of the desert track. Dinner finished--it took about three minutes--we shared each other’s cigarettes, and as he departed to attend to his horses and I retired under a fold of my coat in a corner of the room, I felt that once more I was back in that generous and genial East that I had known before, so many hundreds of miles nearer the rising sun. Next morning before daybreak we were up and on the way, and the sun rising showed us the same yellow undulating plain with now a range of distant hills to the north of us. We were not taking the usual track across the desert, which goes as a rule more northwards towards Birejiq, a town whose chief feature is a castle built during the wars of the Crusade.