"My father holds me so precious," he explained, "that he will not let me leave his side."
"Oh Selmān," I began——
"Oh God!" he returned, using the ejaculation customary to one addressed by name.
"The minds of the Druzes are like fine steel, but what is steel until it is beaten into a sword blade?"
Selmān answered: "My uncle Shibly could neither read nor write."
I said: "The times are changed. The house of the Turshān will need trained wits if it would lead the Mountain as it did before."
But that headship is a thing of the past. Shibly is dead and Yahya childless, Muḥammad is old and Selmān undeveloped, Fāiz has left four sons but they are of no repute, Nasīb is cunning but very ignorant, there is Muṣṭafa at Imtain, who passes for a worthy man of little intelligence, and Ḥamūd at Sweida, who is distinguished mainly for his wealth. The ablest man among the Druzes is without doubt Abu Tellāl of Shaḥba, and the most enlightened Sheikh Muḥammad en Naṣṣār.
The night was bitterly cold. My thermometer had been broken, so that the exact temperature could not be registered, but every morning until we reached Damascus the water in the cup by my bedside was a solid piece of ice, and one night a little tumbling stream outside the camp was frozen hard and silent. The animals and the muleteers were usually housed in a khān while the frost lasted. Muḥammad the Druze, who had returned to his original name and faith, disappeared the moment camp was pitched, and spent the night enjoying the hospitality of his relations. "For," said Mikhāil sarcastically, "every man who can give him a meal he reckons to be the son of his uncle."
I was obliged to delay my start next morning in order to profit by the sheikh's invitation to breakfast at a very elastic nine o'clock—two hours after sunrise was what was said, and who knows exactly when it may suit that luminary to appear? It was a pleasant party. We discussed the war in Yemen in all its bearings—theoretically, for I was the only person who had any news, and mine was derived from a Weekly Times a month old—and then Muḥammad questioned me as to why Europeans looked for inscriptions.
"But I think I know," he added. "It is that they may restore the land to the lords of it."