338 
A CRUSADE IN THE EAST. 
and the saddle occupied the space directly over his tail. It 
was in this condition that he was compelled to make chase 
after the gazelles. The legs of the tall Southerner were 
somewhat long for so small a horse, and having no natural 
support from the saddle, on account of its position, he was 
forced to tie them in a hasty knot underneath, by which 
means a constant spurring and goading was kept up, and an 
irregularity of motion on the part of both horse and rider ex¬ 
tremely curious and picturesque at the distance of half a mile. 
Yusef’s famous steed of the desert, Syed Sulemin, was perhaps 
the only animal in the party that could he said to keep the 
run of the gazelles, hut he kept it at so great a distance that 
they must have been entirely out of sight when the firing com¬ 
menced. The last I saw of Syed Sulemin and his master they 
were rapidly disappearing in a cloud of smoke; and it was 
not until the chase was entirely over that I began to entertain 
the most remote idea of ever beholding them again. While 
all this was going on, it is not to be inferred, from the mi¬ 
nuteness of the details into which I have entered, that my 
horse Saladin stood still in order to afford me an opportunity 
of noting down all these facts; for such was not the case ; so 
far from it, indeed, that he had been tied by the hind-legs 
with a thick rope to a stake, and his fore-legs bound together 
with a strong chain, and his tail fastened in some way to a 
heavy wagon, I am certain he would have carried them all 
with him sooner than be left behind. What I saw was at a 
single glance, but the whole thing was of an unusual and im¬ 
pressive nature, which enables me to recall the details with¬ 
out difficulty. That Saladin was bound to be in chase of 
something was a self-evident proposition. He was not an 
animal mentally or physically calculated to stand still when 
there was any prevailing excitement. In the present case, 
however, he made a mistake at the very beginning which was 
the chief cause of all the misfortunes that befell the mules. 
These animals, as ill luck would have it, were some two or 
three hundred yards ahead of us, a little to the left of the 
path, when the stampede commenced. Saladin, entirely in¬ 
different as to what he was running after, provided he over- 
