i88i] A JOURNEY IN THE HEjAZ 503 



selfish and overbearing to get on well with the men under 

 him, though they were afraid to complain of an old and 

 favourite servant of the princely family. With Ismail 

 he had an open rupture at Taif, which threw a certain 

 shade over the rest of our journey. After his love for 

 smoking, eating, and giving himself the airs of a great 

 man, Al Mas s chief characteristic was an extraordinary 

 talkativeness. As he has really seen a great deal of 

 service among the unruly Bedouins of the Hejaz, I found 

 his interminable stories very tolerable by night over our 

 camp fire. He was quite willing to be interrogated, but 

 his answers were always confused and useless unless they 

 took the shape of a narrative, when he sailed on with 

 great fluency and copiousness of irrelevant detail, care 

 fully punctuating his sentences with good Moslem oaths 

 at the larger stops, and the words, &quot; O, my uncle,&quot; in 

 the place of commas. At the close of a paragraph his 

 formula, whether he spoke to me or to the Arabs, was, 

 &quot; Hast thou understood or not ? &quot; His stories of personal 

 adventure were strongly dashed with a superstition more 

 African than Arabic. He was urgent that I should get 

 him a book of charms; and the very first story he told 

 me was the wonderful history of a holy man from the far 

 north who had spent his whole life in travelling, and 

 finally came to the Hajj with no possessions but a single 

 garment, a wallet, a sword, and a precious Khdtme or 

 copy of the Koran. The last two properties were stolen 

 from him at Mozdalifa, and recovered in a marvellous 

 way by the directions of a dream and the help of the 

 Shereef and Al Mas. In return he gave Al Mas a wonder 

 ful talisman, or rather Hejab the whole Koran written 

 in a minute character, and enclosed in a leather case. 

 &quot; Wear this,&quot; he said, &quot; either on the arm or round your 

 neck, but at night hang it on a staff, and on no account 

 let it touch the ground.&quot; Al Mas wore it for two years, 

 during which he was free from all accidents, quarrels, and 

 inconveniences of every sort. At length the string broke 



