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JOURNEY FROM 
and to enumerate the various excellences of the fat sheep and lambs, 
of the milk, and the butter, and the water we should find there ; 
assuring us that he would consider it his greatest pleasure, as well 
as duty, to take care that we were well supplied with all these 
valuable commodities. He then began to state the great advantage 
of his protection, and how impossible it would have been for us to 
cross the Syrtis without him. As we suspected that the report 
which had been mentioned to us by the Consul was invented by our 
worthy friend the Dhbbah, we took this opportunity of relating it to 
the Shekh of Mesurata, and of asking his opinion with regard to its 
probabihty. Belcazi shook his head, and very confidently assured us 
that he did not believe there was any foundation for it whatever : it 
was true, he confessed, that a few years ago such an interruption 
might easily have occurred ; but since the Arab tribes had been 
reduced by the Bashaw, the communication between Mesurata and 
Bengazi might be considered as tolerably certain. 
Shekh Mahommed, however (whose large and round eyes had been 
during this discourse very attentively fixed upon those of the Shekh 
of Mesurata), still insisted upon the existence of this horde of shan- 
dTit * ; and even asserted that he was himself well acquainted with 
all their favourite haunts and retreats. Some of his party, he added, 
had tracked their horses’ feet from the well which they had recently 
visited, and had informed him that their troop was very numerous. 
But he knew, he continued, all the wells which they frequented, and 
* The term applied by the Arabs in the regency of Tripoly to marauders of every 
description, and which is evidently corrupted from the Italian. 
