Towards evening, when the golden light was fading from over the wide plain, we turned our steps towards the eastern hills, a long, low, limestone range, a day's ride distant, although, in the clear atmosphere, it seemed as if we might almost reach their foot in time to see the sun set. One of the soldiers in charge of our party kept us in sight all the time; for away in those dim recesses are wild tribes, who submit to no government but that of their own chief, Ibn Rashid, the great Arabian potentate, whose stronghold is far away beyond the hills, in the city of Hayil, and whom all other shechs hold in awe. Our host, Dr Schumacher, told us that not even his Circassian soldiers, fierce and fearless as they are, would consent to accompany him beyond that plain into the district of Hadramat, and it was still with the sensation of being in touch with fairy lore that we listened while the Professor told us stories of his sojourn in that distant land, of hospitality received in that far-away stronghold, and of personal and friendly intercourse with the great chief himself. We were interested later to note the anachronism of the two cairns, on widely distant hills, remains of Dr Schumacher's survey for the great German map of East Jordan.

As our shadows lengthened we stood to watch the herds of gazelle descending into the plain; the graceful creatures, secure in their swiftness, coming so near that we could watch their movements even without our field-glasses. We had already learnt that they came down daily, towards sunset, often close to the palace walls, and our Sportsmen had long lain in wait for them there in the hope of game, but the news of the human invasion, the profane breaking of the silence, had gone forth, and the gentle creatures, having little reason to feel confidence in the lords of creation, had turned away elsewhere.

As we retraced our steps we lingered, picking up here a flint arrow-head, gift of a distant past, there a bleached snake-skin, perfect as though worn but yesterday. Other treasures, too, we found: wonderful velvety arums, crimson, purple, and black, not the large arum palæstinum of the spring, but a minute, dainty, fairy-like copy of it, fitly adorning this dream world; crocuses, leafless, almost stalkless, white, mauve, and pink, rich relations of the "naked ladies" of our home meadows, and tiny pink geraniums, the lingering guests of summer.

Scarcely were we again at home, when Nature endowed us with another, and truly royal, spectacle. As the full moon rose, above our palace walls, she was eclipsed, and we stood long, watching alternately the western miracle of sunset and the eastern pageant of the slow and, as it seemed, reluctant moonrise. Some of the Arab servants watched with us, but they were of so superior a class that they showed but the faint, unimaginative interest of average civilised man elsewhere. They told us, however, of the superstitious practices still pursued by those "who knew no better"—the singing and beating of tom-toms and sacrifice of a cock. They were wonderful servants, or seemed so to us, the slaves of the kitchen of the West. The cook produced excellent dinners, of three hot courses, upon a box of charcoal embers he could lift with one hand, and the waiters, summoned with a hand-clap, not only brought but ran to bring whatever you might want. Everything was spotlessly clean, and the waiting at table would have done credit to an English "Jeames." They all spoke at least three languages, and they amused our leisure moments with games and songs. The native, however, must come out somewhere, and we are bound to record that, when an imprisoned cock crowed from a small wooden box, these Arabs, who are never quiet one second themselves, took him out and whipped him!

We went to rest early in our luxurious tents, and woke next morning to find, among other miracles, that the water in our jugs was barely above freezing point.

CHAPTER V
AMMÂN

"Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains."

Shelley

It was with something like the pain of a personal parting that we bade farewell to Mshatta. Our friends, too, were breaking up camp this 7th of October, and as the German flags were saluted before being taken down, we realised to the full, as sometimes happens, that here was one of those moments in life which could never recur; that our joy in the marvellous beauty of the spot, in the indefinable fusion of Art and Nature, was such as we could never repeat. The swallows, who had made their home in the ruined palace, would soon dart and skim in consciousness of sole possession; the lizards, when the sun became hot, would bask upon the wall as they had basked a thousand years; the gazelles would wander fearlessly around at sunset, all would be as before, except where man had left his imprimatur, the scar of death and destruction that follows his tracks across the face of Nature. The very dogs had gone already: the foolish puppy, with its woolly coat, the beautiful tawny deerhound, more light limbed, more fleet than ours, in proportion as the gazelle, his prey, exceeds our moorland deer in swiftness and in grace. The dream was past, "so sleeping, so aroused from sleep," we were on one of those tablelands of life from which no change was possible but descent to the commonplace of every day. We had seen the pale moonlight on the palace walls, the purple hills we might never hope to cross; we had had visions of an enchanted world we might never see; we had had glimpses of a page we might never hope to turn.