Hassan beamed triumphantly.
"You have fine clothes," he said; "I must not disgrace you."
"Is he always going about in his shirt-sleeves, I wonder?" I inquired. X asked him.
"It is quite usual in my country not to wear a coat in hot weather," he said; "my coat is old and dirty, and my shirt is new and clean: why should I wear my coat?"
And he rarely put it on again.
He loved to see us in nice clothes, and took great delight in wandering about the bazaars with us buying presents for the "twenty-nine friends" in England. But we used to sigh over the good old camping days.
"Hebsi bitdi" (all is over), he would say dolefully, when anything particularly brought them back to our thoughts.
We rode down Palestine and took him over to Egypt with us. Evading with difficulty the importunities of Cook, and the rush of tourists on the beaten track, we tried to steal days which brought back a sense of our old free-and-easy times.
But there came a day when there was an end to it all, an end to the long silent rides, an end to the quiet smokes in desert places, an end to the little daily jokes, an end to the serious talks and the foolish quarrels, an end to the Kallabalaks and the Keyfs.
We stood on the steamer which was to take Hassan back to his old life in the forests of the Turkmendagh.