The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

who were at pains to see that he did not crank up and desert. Now he was back beside me, trying to bolster up his own courage by making me afraid.

      “They have determined to take me along with them to prevent me from escaping,” he complained. “That man on the horse is saying that if more men go with Anazeh than you and two others, there will certainly be fighting. And Anazeh answers, he has pledged his word. Can you not say something to persuade Anazeh?”

      I would rather have tried to persuade a tiger. Short of knocking the old raider on the head and standing off his twenty ruffians, I could not imagine a way of turning him from his set purpose. And at that, I had not a weapon of any kind. I was the goods, and the game old sportsman intended to deliver me, right side up, perhaps, but all in one piece and to the proper consignee.

      “I don’t see anything to worry about,” said I.

      “Wait till you hear the bullets!” Ahmed answered. Nevertheless, bullets or no bullets, I did not see what I could do about it. Again I remembered Grim’s advice: “Do what the leader of the escort tells you.” I had begun to feel sorry for Ahmed in spite of his self-pity, but his fear wasn’t contagious and his advice wasn’t worth listening to.

      “Effendi, you are Anazeh’s guest. He must do as you demand, if you ask in the Name of the Most High. Tell him, therefore, that you have an urgent business in El-Kudz. Demand that he send you back, with me, in my boat!”

      “You are not his guest. He would simply shoot you and destroy the boat,” I answered.

      It was not more than half an hour before I saw horses coming in our direction from the village. At sight of them the man on the gray horse lost heart. With a final burst of eloquence, in which he spread his breast to heaven and shook both fists in witness that he was absolved and no blood-guilt could rest on his head, he rode away at top speed straight up the ravine down which he originally came.

      The horses proved to be a very mixed lot—some good, some very bad, and some indifferent. But again they treated me as honoured guest and provided me a mare with four sound legs and nothing much the matter except vice. She came at me with open teeth when I tried to mount, but four men held her and I climbed aboard, somehow or other. As a horseman, I am a pretty good sack of potatoes.

      That was the worst saddle I ever sat in—and Anazeh’s second-best! The stirrups swung amidships, so to speak, and whenever you tried to rest your weight on them for a moment they described an arc toward the rear. Moreover, you could not sit well back on the saddle to balance matters, because of the high cantle. The result, whether you did with stirrups or without them, was torture, for anybody but an Arab, who has notions of comfort all his own.

      They put Ahmed on a wall-eyed scrub that looked unfit to walk, but proved well able to gallop under his light weight. One of Anazeh’s men took my bag, with a nod to reassure me, and without a word we were off full-pelt, Anazeh leading with four stalwarts who looked almost as hard-bitten as himself, six men crowding me closely, and the remainder bringing up the rear.

      That is the Arab way of doing things—rush and riot to begin with. The steepness of the stony ravine we rode up soon reduced the horses to a walk, after which there was a good deal of attention to rifle-bolts, and a settling down to the more serious aspects of the adventure. The escort began to look sullenly ferocious, as only Arabs can.

      There was a time, during the Turkish regime before the War, when Cook’s Agency took tourists in parties to El-Kerak, and all the protection necessary was a handful of Turkish soldiers, whose chief employment on the trip was to gather fuel and pitch tents. Someone paid the Arabs to let tourists alone, and they normally did. But the War changed all that. A post-Armistice stranger in 1920, with leather boots, was fair quarry for whoever had rifle or knife.

      We passed by a village or two, tucked into folds in the hills and polluting the blue sky with a smell of ageing dung, but nothing seemed disposed to happen. A few men stood behind stone walls and stared at us sullenly. The women looked up from their grindstones at the doors, covered their faces for convention’s sake, and uncovered them again at once for curiosity. There was nothing you could call a road between the villages, only a rocky cattle-track that seemed to take the longest possible way between two points; and nobody seemed to own it, or to be there to challenge our right of way.

      But suddenly, after we had passed the third village and were walking the horses up a shoulder of a steep hill-top, three shots cracked out from in front of us to left and right. Nobody fell, but if ever there was instantaneous response it happened then. Anazeh and his four galloped forward up-hill, firing as they rode for the cover of a breast-high ridge. One man on the off-side tipped me out of the saddle, so suddenly that I had no chance to prevent him; another caught me, and two others flung me into a hole behind a stone. I heard the rear-guard scatter and run. Two men pitched Ahmed down on top of me, for he was valuable, seeing he could run an engine; and thirty seconds later I peered out around the rock to get a glimpse of what was happening.

      There was not a man in sight. I could see some of the horses standing under cover. The firing was so rapid that it sounded almost like machine-gun practice. A hairy arm reached out and pushed my head back, and after that, whenever I made the least movement, a man who was sniping from behind the sheltering rock swore furiously, and threatened to brain me with his butt-end. Beyond all doubt they regarded me as perishable freight; so I hardly saw any of the fighting.

      Judging by the sound, I should say they fought their way up-hill in skirmish order, and when they got to the top the enemy—whoever they were—took to flight. But that is guesswork. There were two casualties on our side. One man shot through the arm, which did not matter much; he was well able to lie about what had happened and to boast of how many men he had slain before the bullet hit him. The other was wounded pretty seriously in the jaw. They came to me for first aid, taking it for granted that I knew something about surgery. I don’t. I had a bad time bandaging both of them, using two of my handkerchiefs and strips from the protesting Ahmed’s shirt. However, I enjoyed it more than they did.

      When Anazeh shouted at last and we all rode to the hilltop there was a dead man lying there, stripped naked, with his throat cut across from ear to ear. One of our men was wiping a long knife by stabbing it into the dirt. There was also a led horse added to the escort. Anazeh looked very cool and dignified; he had an extra rifle now, slung by a strap across his shoulders. He was examining a bandolier that had blood on it.

      We rode on at once, and for the next hour Ahmed was kept busy interpreting to me the lies invented by every member of the escort for my especial benefit. If they were true, each man had slain his dozen; but nobody would say who the opposing faction were. When I put that question they all dried up and nobody would speak again for several minutes.

      It turned out afterward that there had been a sort of armistice proclaimed, and all the local chiefs had undertaken to observe it and cease from blood-feuds for three days, provided that each chief should prove peaceful intention by bringing with him only two men. Three men in a party, and not more than three, had right of way. The engagement may have been a simple protest against breach of the terms of the armistice, but I suspect there was more than that in it.

      At any rate, we were not attacked again on the road, although there were men who showed themselves now and then on inaccessible-looking crags, who eyed us suspiciously and made no answer to the shouted challenge of Anazeh’s men. When the track passed over a spur, or swung round the shoulder of a cliff, we could sometimes catch sight of other parties—always, though of three, before and behind us, proceeding in the same direction.

      We sighted the stone walls of El-Kerak at about midafternoon, and rode up to the place through a savage gorge that must have been impregnable in the old days of bows and arrows. It would take a determined army today to force itself through the wadys and winding water-courses that guard that old citadel of Romans and crusaders.

      We approached from the Northwest corner, where a tower stands that they call Burj-ez-Zahir. There were lions carved on it. It looked as if the battlements had been magnificent at one time; but whatever the Turks become possessed of always falls into decay, and the Arabs seem no better.

      Beside the Burj-ez-Zahir is a tunnel, faced