to every act of friendship, as many a Persian pilgrim had good reason to remember if, as it usually happened, he took up his abode at the friendly hearth of a Nakhowali. Hospitable and chivalrous, the Nakhowalis adhere strictly to this unwritten law of the desert-born, that a guest must be protected even if he be an infidel; none the less they count both Jew and Christian as unclean, being as scrupulous in this particular as the Persians, whose rules they follow in the discharge of their religious purifications. My informants, who were armed to the teeth, were handsome, swarthy, and fearless-looking. They bitterly resented the fact that, on certain points of religious observance, they were constrained to obey the instructions of the Kazi of Medina, rather than those of their own clergy. They declared that this obedience had been wrung from them as a condition of their freedom to have priests of their own; but since I had not an opportunity of going to Medina to see for myself, it would be unwise to give further publicity to reports which reached me either through the Orthodox Madani, who were naturally antagonistic, or through the Shiah Nakhowalis, who were not less certainly biassed in their own favour. Their womenfolk (to make an end of this short discourse) are reputed to be the most beautiful of all at Medina; they were so closely veiled, however, that they might just as well have been the ugliest--none save their husbands could tell. The scene now changes. CHAPTER XI ARAFAT DAY: FORENOON AND AFTERNOON