Fellāḥ ul 'Isa expressed no direct approval of the advantages of this system, but he listened with interest while I explained the principles of the Fellaḥīn Bank, as far as I understood them, and at the end he asked whether Lord Cromer could not be induced to extend his rule to Syria, an invitation that I would not undertake to accept in his name. Five years before, in the Ḥaurān mountains, a similar question had been put to me, and the answering of it had taxed my diplomacy. The Druze sheikhs of Ḳanawāt had assembled in my tent under shadow of night, and after much cautious beating about the bush and many assurances from me that no one was listening, they had asked whether if the Turks again broke their treaties with the Mountain, the Druzes might take refuge with Lord Cromer in Egypt, and whether I would not charge myself with a message to him. I replied with the air of one weighing the proposition in all its aspects that the Druzes were people of the hill country, and that Egypt was a plain, and would therefore scarcely suit them. The Sheikh el Balad looked at the Sheikh ed Dīn, and the horrible vision of a land without mountain fastnesses in which to take refuge, or mountain paths easy to defend, must have opened before their eyes, for they replied that the matter required much thought, and I heard no more of it. Nevertheless the moral is obvious: all over Syria and even in the desert; whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes that he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government.[5]
As I sat listening to the talk round me and looking out into the starlit night, my mind went back to the train of thought that had been the groundwork of the whole day, the theme that G̣ablān had started when he stopped and pointed out the traces of his former encampment, and I said:
[Illustration 36: G̣ABLĀN IBN ḤAMŪD AD DA'JA]
"In the ages before the Prophet your fathers spoke as you do and in the same language, but we who do not know your ways have lost the meaning of the words they used. Now tell me what is so-and-so, and so-and-so?"