In the darkness, that had a pleasing touch of purple colouring lent it by the stars, Ain el Baidah's headman loomed very large and imposing. "Praise to Allah that you have come and in health," he remarked, as though we were old friends. He assured me of my welcome, and said his village had a guest-house that would serve instead of the tent. Methought he protested too much, but knowing that men and mules were dead beat, and that we had a long way to go, I told Salam that the guest-house would serve, and the headman lead the way to a tapia building that would be called a very small barn, or a large fowl-house, in England. A tiny clay lamp, in which a cotton wick consumed some mutton fat, revealed a corner of the darkness and the dirt, and when our own lamps banished the one, they left the other very clearly to be seen. But we were too tired to utter a complaint. I saw the mules brought within the zariba, helped to set up my camp bed, took the cartridges out of my shot gun, and, telling Salam to say when supper was ready, fell asleep at once. Eighteen busy hours had passed since the mueddin called to "feyer" from the minaret above the Tin House, but my long-sought rest was destined to be brief.
[46] So many lepers come from the Argan Forest provinces of Haha and Shiadma that leprosy is believed by many Moors to result from the free use of Argan oil. There is no proper foundation for this belief.
[47] This is the most important of the five supplications. The Sura of Al Koran called "The Night Journey" says, "To the prayer of daybreak the Angels themselves bear witness."
FALSTAFF--"Four rogues in buckram let drive at me."
By the time Salam had roused me from a dream in which I was being torn limb from limb in a Roman amphitheatre, whose terraced seats held countless Moors all hugely enjoying my dismemberment, I realised that a night in that guest-house would be impossible. The place was already over-populated.
A brief meal was taken in the open, and we sat with our feet thrust to the edge of the nearest charcoal fire, for the night was cold. Our animals, tethered and watered, stood anxiously waiting for the barley the chief muleteer had gone to buy. Supper over, I sat on a chair in the open, and disposed myself for sleep as well as the conditions permitted. Round me, on the bare ground, the men and the boy from the Sus lay wrapped in their haiks--the dead could not have slept more soundly than they. The two fires were glimmering very faintly now, M'Barak was stretching a blanket for himself, while Salam collected the tin plates and dishes, his last task before retiring. Somewhere in the far outer darkness I heard the wail of a hyæna, and a light cold breeze sighed over the plain. Half asleep and half awake I saw the village headman approaching from out the darkness; a big bag of barley was on his shoulder, and he was followed closely by the muleteer. They came into the little circle of the fast falling light; I was nodding drowsily toward unconsciousness, and wondering, with a vague resentment that exhausted all my remaining capacity to think, why the headman should be speaking so loudly. Suddenly, I saw the muleteer go to earth as if he had been pole-axed, and in that instant I was wide awake and on my feet. So was Salam.