Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates Vol 2 - The Search For Mecca

cii. XVII.] Arrested I 29
The news sounded very ominously, and Wilfrid
said to me in English, " I suppose we may consider
ourselves under arrest." But to Mohammed and
the others it was necessary to affect a cheerful
willingness to do anything that Huseyn might
think best for our safety ; so Wilfrid went to the
zaptiehs and bade them make themselves at home,
which indeed they had every intention of doing
already, for they had orders to keep guard over us
all night. He learned, in talking to them, that Ali
the Mehed had passed through Bir that morning,
and had stopped, as Arabs always do, for a talk,
and that he had told them of the two mej idles we
had given him, and I daresay a great deal more, —
all which proves that he m-ust be a chatterbox, even
if he has not betrayed us to the Pasha. We w^ere far
too miserable to sleep, but spent the night in vain
regrets at our folly in sending back the two soldiers
so soon to Deyr. They of course had gone back
post-haste to get home and had put Huseyn on the
alert, and he, acting with more promptitude than we
could have expected of him, had sent off this disgusting
messenger to stop us. The annoying part
of it is that if we had only waited till we got to Bir
and then sent them away, all would have gone right.
But at the time we did not know the existence of
this guard-house, and we expected Ali the ]\lehed to
meet us, and we had caught at the first
being rid of our tormentors.
chance of
Full of gloomy forebodings,
the least of Avhich was an immediate return