[Illustration 122: CHURCH AND TOMB, RUWEIḤĀ]
Late at night one of Sheikh Yūnis's sons rode in to ask us whether his father were still with us. On leaving us that enterprising old party had not, it seemed, returned to the bosom of his anxious family, and I have a suspicion that his friendly eagerness to set us on our way was but part of a deep-laid plot by means of which he hoped to be able to take a hand in those local disturbances that had preoccupied him during the morning. At any rate he had made off as soon as we were out of sight, and the presumption was that he had hastened to join in the fray. What happened to him I never heard, but I am prepared to wager that whoever bit the dust at the village of El Mughāra it was not Sheikh Yūnis.
Three rather tedious days lay between us and Aleppo. We might have made the journey in two, but I had determined to strike a little to the east in order to avoid the carriage road, which was well known, and to traverse country which, though it might not be more interesting, was at least less familiar. Five hours' ride from Dāna across open rolling uplands Brought us to Ṭarutīn. We passed several ancient sites, re-occupied by half-settled Arabs of the Muwāli tribes, though the old buildings were completely ruined. All along the western edges of the desert the Bedouin are beginning to cultivate the soil, and are therefore forced to establish themselves in some fixed spot near their crops. "We are become fellaḥīn," said the Sheikh of Ṭarutīn. In some distant age, when all the world is ploughed and harvested, there will be no nomads left in Arabia. In the initial stages these new-made farmers continue to live in tents, but the tents are stationary, the accompanying dirt cumulative, and the settlement unpleasing to any of the senses. The few families at Ṭarutīn had not yet forgotten their desert manners, and we found them agreeable people, notwithstanding the accuracy with which the above remarks applied to their village of hair.