“Our man now set us a bolder example, and we altogether scrambled through a breach in the mud wall, and found ourselves amid empty rooms and a desolate court-yard. ‘Everybody is out in the fields, women only excepted,’ said our guide, and we separated, no better off than before. Despairing of the village commissariat, we climbed a turret on the outer walls, and looked round. Now we saw at some distance a beautiful palm-grove, where we concluded that dates could not be wanting, and off we set for it across the stubble fields. But on arriving we found our paradise surrounded by high walls, and no gate discoverable. While thus we stood without, like Milton’s fiend at Eden, but unable, like him, ‘by one high bound to overleap all bound,’ up came a handsome Solibah lad, all in rags, half-walking, half-dancing, in the devil-may-care way of his tribe. ‘Can you tell us which is the way in?’ was our first question, pointing to the garden before us; and, ‘Shall I sing you a song?’ was his first answer. ‘We don’t want your songs, but dates; how are we to get at them?’ we replied. ‘Or shall I perform you a dance?’ answered the grinning young scoundrel, and forthwith began an Arabian polka-step, laughing all the while at our undisguised impatience. At last he condescended to show us the way, but no other than what befitted an orchard-robbing boy, like himself, for it lay a little farther off, right over the wall, which he scaled with practised ingenuity, and helped us to follow. So we did, though perhaps with honester intentions, and, once within, stood amid trees, shade, and water. The ‘tender juvenile’ then set up a shout, and soon a man appeared, ‘old Adam’s likeness set to dress this garden,’ save that he was not old but young, as Adam might himself have been while yet in Eden. We were somewhat afraid of a surly reception, too well merited by our very equivocal introduction; but the gardener was better-tempered than many of his caste, and after saluting us very politely, offered his services at our disposal. We then proposed to purchase a stock of dates for our onward way, whereon the gardener conducted us to an outhouse where heaps of three or four kinds of this fruit, red and yellow, round or long, lay piled up, and bade us choose. At his recommendation we filled a large cloth, which we had brought with us for the purpose, with excellent ruddy dates, and gave in return a small piece of money, welcome here as elsewhere. We then took leave and returned, but this time through the garden gate, to the stubble fields, and passing under the broken walls of the village, reached our companions, who had become anxious at our absence.”