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 dis- 

 gusting 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 chance of 

 being rid of our tormentors. Full of gloomy fore- 

 bodings, the least of Avhich was an immediate return 



