Seventeen of these men, nearly naked, armed as I have described, and wild-looking in the extreme, formed our bodyguard, and if we attempted to give an order which did not please them, they would independently reply, 'We are all sheikhs, we are not slaves.' At the same time they paid the greatest deference to their chief, the old Sheikh Sehel, and expected us to do the same.
Sheikh Sehel was the head of the Beit al Kathan, which is the chief of the many families into which the Gara tribe is divided, and consequently he was recognised as the chief of all the Garas. He was a wizened, very avaricious-looking old man, who must have been close upon seventy, and though he owned 500 head of cattle and 70 camels, he dressed his old bones in nothing save a loin-cloth, and his matted grey locks were adorned and kept together by a simple leather thong twisted several times round his forehead. Despite his appearance he was a great man in his limited sphere, and for the weeks that were to come we were completely in his power.
He had the exclusive charge of me and my camel, which he led straight through everything, regardless of the fact that I was on several occasions nearly knocked off by the branches of trees; and if my seat was uncomfortable, which it often was, as well as precarious--for we all sat on luggage indifferently tied on--we had the greatest work to make Sheikh Sehel stop to rectify the discomfort, for he was the sheikh of all the Garas, as he constantly repeated, and his dignity was not to be trifled with.
The seventeen sheikhs got half a dollar a day each for food, their slaves a quarter.
Our expedition nearly came to an untimely end a very few days after our start, owing, as my husband himself confessed, to a little indiscretion on his part; but as the event serves to illustrate the condition of the men we were with, I must not fail to recount it. During our day's march we met with a large company of the Al Khathan family pasturing their flocks and herds in a pleasant valley. Great greetings took place, and our men carried off two goats for an evening feast. When night approached they lit a fire of wood, and piled stones on the embers so as to form a heated surface. On this they placed the meat, cut in strips with their swords, the entrails, the heads, and every part of the animal, until their kitchen looked like a ghastly sacrifice to appease the anger of some deity. I must confess that the smell thereof was exceeding savoury, and the picture presented by these hungry savages, gathered round the lurid light of their kitchen, was weird in the extreme. Daggers were used for knives, two fingers for forks, and we stood at a respectful distance and watched them gorge; and so excited did they become as they consumed the flesh, that one could almost have supposed them to be under the influence of strong drink. Several friends joined them from the neighbouring hills, and far into the night they carried on their wild orgy, singing, shouting, and periodically letting off the guns which the soldiers sent by Wali Suleiman brought with them.