"Lord!" he replied, "I never set eyes on them before this night. They arrived after the gates of the khan were shut, and, saying that they had ridden from the Euphrates, they begged a night's lodging before going on to Baghdad. What manner of men they were I knew not. I swear it."
I believed him, for he was a Jew, and therefore not likely to give board and lodging to two strangers unless he thought that they were respectable and likely to pay their bill. Still, I was not quite certain that the old gentleman was not a confederate of the Bedouins, so I called the corporal and told him that I thought he had better take the owner of the place into Baghdad as a prisoner, and report what had happened. The consternation of the Jew when he heard the order is indescribable. He grovelled on the ground at my feet; flung the dust over his head, and swore to me that he was innocent of participating in any plot. To be sent in to the Turkish governor of Baghdad would mean his ruin. He would not be heard. He was a Jew, and there was no justice for Jews. He begged and implored me to have mercy and to believe his word. As a matter of fact, I had not the slightest intention of losing the services of our escort by sending them back to Baghdad, and I was quite confident that the Jew knew nothing of the robbery. The loss of the money, however, was rather a serious thing, though, fortunately, Edwards was carrying enough to supply our probable wants for some time; and before making a start I sent a letter to the Consul-General, telling him what had occurred, and asking him to send me some more money to Babylon. As can be imagined, we were not too well pleased with the result of our first night in Mesopotamia, and for the next night or two we took the precaution to keep a sentry on duty while we slept.
Getting away as early as possible in the morning, we rode hard all day, and, after passing Khan Haswa and Khan Mahawill, at sunset we crossed the remains of the ancient Parthian earthworks, and entered the ruins of the Great City, taking up our quarters at dusk on a roof-top of the little modern village of Babil, lying close by the Euphrates. Every house in the village was built of bricks dug out of the ruins of famous Babylon; on every brick was the superscription of Nebuchadnezzar; and it was with almost sacrilegious feelings that we lay down to rest among such romantic and old-world surroundings.
CHAPTER III.
INTO THE DESERT.
Riding over the ruins on the following day, I realised for the first time the immense task that I had undertaken. In all directions there stretched miles and miles of barren land, with here and there low mounds, ditches, and heaps of rubbish, overgrown with scrub and coarse grass. Actual ruins, such as walls and the remains of buildings above ground, there were none, though an occasional long deep trench, dug by modern excavators, disclosed the presence of a wall at a considerable depth below the surface. For centuries the place had been ransacked for bricks to build the towns and villages in the neighbourhood, and even now I found natives with donkeys loading up the panniers with masses of broken brickwork.
With the scanty information that I possessed, to attempt to commence digging for the Golden Girdle was, of course, hopeless—far more hopeless than looking for a needle in fifty bundles of hay. I, however, made a thorough exploration of the ruins, and corrected and added to my maps, deciding that the next step to be taken was to get away among the Bedouin tribes, and to try to discover some sort of clue as to the burial-place of the Girdle. Why I thought of the Bedouins as likely to be of assistance was this; I had among my papers a full-sized drawing of an Arab horse-shoe, and my uncle had shown me the actual shoe, the peculiar shape of which at the time interested me a good deal, though I now found that similar ones were worn by all the Arab horses. It was a thin disc of metal with a hole in the centre, but it differed from most shoes in that it had eight nail-holes instead of the usual six. With the drawing was the translation of a document, and a note to the effect that the horse-shoe and its description were obtained from the Munshi Abdul Aziz of Kerbela, and brought to England in 1899 by a certain Captain Johnson, who was subsequently killed in South Africa. The document itself ran as follows:-
"In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate, and, Said Mohammed, Agent of the High God, and of the Companions of Mohammed. Praised be the Lord, the Omnipotent Creator.
"This is the Na'l Talisman of the Muntafik, which at one time adorned the hoof of the beautiful mare Shahzadi, by a Kuhailan Haifi sire, out of the dam Labadah. The famous mare, known to all the tribes, was captured by Feyzul, sheik of the Jelas Aeniza, from the Sheik Jedaan-ibn-Mirshid, who was killed in battle, when a portion of the Salama tribe of the Shammar was utterly defeated on the 17th of the month Saphar, A.H. 1281. Of the ill-omened Salama there escaped but one man, who was riding a brown horse, with four white feet and a white mark on the forehead, said by some to have been of the true breed of Saklawi, by others of Ubaiyan. The man bore away the serpent belt of pure gold, coveted by the desert tribes."
On the back of the original paper was scribbled in pencil:-