Finally, we told George to place the following terms before the Druse--one hundred pounds in gold on arrival, and fifty pounds paper when we were on horse-back and away from Damascus. For the present, nothing. As for George himself, he should receive fifty English pounds when we reached safety and his job in Australia.
Next day George returned from the bazaar with the reply that the Druse would be satisfied with one hundred and twenty-five pounds in gold at "X," and agreed to leave the question of ready money for the horses until we were out of Damascus. He demanded another twenty pounds, paper, however, for the man who was to bring back the horses after we had ridden to the mountains at Deraa. To these terms we agreed, as the withdrawal of the demand for money in advance evidenced the genuine intentions of the Druse.
"The Druse desires to spot you," said George, breaking into English. "To-morrow an officer will lead you to public baths. When I say to make attention, observe a man who carry yellow _burnous_ and robe."
And so it happened. We had our bath, and, escorted by a Greek doctor in the Turkish army, with several guards and George the inevitable, we walked through the hot streets toward the bazaar.
"Honest to God!" said George suddenly--for it had been agreed that this phrase should signal the presence of the Druse.
I searched the crowd of Arabs gathered in the road at the corner of a narrow turning, and had no difficulty in picking out, right in the foreground, a tall, fierce-moustached man, with yellow robe and yellow head-dress. One hand rested on the bone butt of a long pistol stuck through his sash, and with the other he fingered the two rings round his _burnous_. He looked at us long and intently, especially at H., with his six feet four inches of magnificent physique; then backed into the growing crowd and disappeared.
"Don't look to behind you, my dear," said George, whose inability to control himself had again blanched his face, "or my officer observe."
That walk to and from the big _hammam_ in the centre of Damascus is perhaps the most vivid of my memories of the city. Wherever we passed, a mass of Arabs and nondescripts surged around us, until the road was blocked and our guards had to clear the way forcibly. Bargaining at the stalls was suspended as we moved through the long, covered-in bazaar, with its carpets and prayer rugs, its blood-sausages, its necklaces in amber, turquoise, and jade, its beautiful silks and tawdry cottons, its copper work, its old swords and pistols, its dirty, second-hand clothes--all laid out haphazard for inspection. Once, when we entered a shop, the crowd that collected before it was so large that the guards took us outside by a back door.