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The Emir was a noble-looking old man, with a long white beard; the ladies were all dressed in white, and had their faces veiled. I once had the opportunity of seeing the Emir in his mountains at Ebtedeen. His proper name was Emir Sa'ad ed-deen Esh-shehâbi.
The chief offenders were some Maghrabis, "fine looking animals from the deserts about Tripoli," the leader of whom, one Maula Ali, "a burly savage," struck Burton as ridiculously like his old Richmond schoolmaster, the Rev. Charles Delafosse. These gentry tried to force their way on to the poop, but Sa'ad distributed among his party a number of ash staves six feet long, and thick as a man's wrist.
Strange enough figures they made, black as coal, muscled like Hercules, and towering well toward seven feet, with arms and hands in which the sinews stood out like living welts. Their faces expressed neither intelligence nor much ferocity. Submission to Bara Miyan's will marked their whole attitude. "Sa'ad," commanded Bara Miyan, "seest thou this dog?"
On reaching Yambu, Burton enquired whether Sa'ad the robber chief, who had attacked the caravan in the journey to Mecca days, still lived; and was told that the dog long since made his last foray, and was now safe in Jehannum.
They had employed the intervening year and a half in the foundation of Busrah and Kufam and in the general consolidation of their sway on the right bank of the Euphrates. They were now prepared for a further movement. The conduct of the war was once more entrusted to Sa'ad.
He sent for Sa'ad ibn Muadh, the chief of the Beni Aus, and into his hands he gave the fate of all those souls who belonged to the tribe of Koreitza. Sa'ad was elderly, fat, irritable, and vindictive. He had a long-standing grudge against this people, and knew nothing of the mercy which greater men bestow upon the fallen.
Among the Persian losses in the battle that of the national standard, the durufsh-kawani was reckoned the most serious. The retreat of the defeated army was conducted by Jalenus. Sa'ad, anxious to complete his victory, sent three bodies of troops across the Atik, to press upon the flying foe.
At Suez he made the acquaintance of some Medina and Mecca folk, who were to be his fellow-travellers; including "Sa'ad the Demon," a negro who had two boxes of handsome apparel for his three Medina wives and was resolved to "travel free;" and Shaykh Hamid, a "lank Arab foul with sweat," who never said his prayers because of the trouble of taking clean clothes out of his box.
It accorded with his mood of angry resentment against the earlier treachery of the Koreitza, but why he deputed its pronouncement to Sa'ad instead of taking it upon himself is not easy to discover.
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