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Updated: June 11, 2025
The Sheikh's voice trembled a little as he spoke, but he interpreted the words clearly, and the Emir said softly "The Hakim is wise and great."
"I am really thankful to have you with me. Besides, we enjoy an advantage in being under the protection of a powerful sheikh, though I am afraid that our chance of escape is as remote as ever; while I suspect, notwithstanding the sheikh's promises, he will be very unwilling, when the time comes, to give me my liberty."
Day after day we continued to travel southward further and further from home, as it seemed to us. Whenever we could meet, Halliday, Ben, and I not trusting to the sheikh's promises, of whose fickleness we had many proofs eagerly discussed the possibility of escaping.
The sheikh, however, was unwilling that Major Denham should be exposed to the dangers he would meet with, but, as he had determined to go, at last gave his consent, appointing Maraymy to attend him, and to be answerable for his safety. Boo-Khaloum and his Arabs, with the sheikh's forces under his general, Barca Gana, had already got some distance ahead.
The professor's knowledge of Arabic was extensive and he had picked up a few words of the dialect used by the Baggara; but he got on with the guard with the greatest difficulty, and the Sheikh's young men were completely wanting in the lingual powers of their chief. "You must let me question him," said Harry. "He seems to have no suspicion of our having been friends."
We had reached the entrance, when a slave overtook us, and informed us that his master would allow us to sleep in a guest-room, opening into an outer court-yard, on one side of the main entrance. Mr Vernon told me afterwards, that not having any definite plan, he thought it would be wise to accept the Sheikh's offer with a good grace, as more likely not to excite suspicion.
So, there were a score of villages where every sheikh, eager for gold, listened for the whisper of the doorways, and every slave and villager listened at the sheikh's door. But neither to sheikh nor to villager was it given to find the man.
Eastwards the country falls away and there are several ragged narrow valleys between some tree-topped ridges till the eye meets a sheikh's tomb on the Zeitun ridge, standing midway between Foka and Beitunia, which rears a proud and picturesque head to bar the way to Bireh.
When we saw it during the first battle of Gaza it was a bold feature surmounted by a few trees and the whitened walls and grey dome of a sheikh's tomb. In the earlier battles of 1917 much was done to ruffle Muntar's crest. We saw trees uprooted, others lose their limbs, and naval gunfire threatened the foundations of the old chief's burying place.
They had been told that the sheikh's soldiers were a few ragged negroes, armed with spears, who lived upon the plunder of the black Kaffir countries. Greatly to their astonishment, as they approached the town they beheld a body of several thousand cavalry, drawn up in line and extending right and left as far as they could see.
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