“Mâshallah!” said Fattûḥ, “you must be deaf with the gir-gir-gir of them.”
“Eh billah!” assented Ḥussein, “I shut my ears. Three wives, two sons and six daughters, of whom but two married. Twenty children I have had, and seven wives; three of these died and one left me and returned to her own people. But I shall take another bride this year, please God.”
“We Christians,” observed Fattûḥ, “find one enough.”
“You may be right,” answered Ḥussein politely; “yet I would take a new wife every year if I had the means.”
“We will find you a bride in Kebeisah,” said I.
Hussein weighed this suggestion.
“The maidens of Kebeisah are fair but wilful. There is one among them, her name is Shemsah—wallah, a picture! a picture she is!—she has had seven husbands.”
“And the maidens of Hît?” I asked. “How are they?”
“Not so fair, but they are the better wives. That is why I choose to remain in Hît,” explained Ḥussein. “The bimbâshî would have sent me to Baghdâd, but I said, ‘No, let me stay here; the maidens of Hît do not expect much.’ Your Excellency may laugh, but a poor man must think of these things.”
We rode on through the aromatic scrub until the black masses of the Kebeisah palm-groves resolved into tall trunks and feathery fronds.[73] The sun stood high as we passed under the village gate and down the dusty street that led to the Mudîr’s compound. We tied our mares to some mangers in his courtyard and were ourselves ushered into his reception-room, there to drink coffee and set forth our purpose. The leading citizens of Kebeisah dropped in one by one, and the talk was of the desert and of the dwellers therein. The men of Kebeisah are not ’Arab, Bedouin; they hold their mud-walled village and their 50,000 palm-trees against the tribes, but they know the laws of the desert as well as the nomads themselves, and carry on an uneasy commerce with them in dates and other commodities, with which even the wilderness cannot dispense, the accredited methods of the merchant alternating with those of the raider and the avenger of raids. There was no lack of guides to take me to Khubbâz, for the ruin is the first stage upon the post-road to Damascus, and half the male population was acquainted with that perilous way.