EPILOGUE	363
pence to at least 500 persons during the two days of my
sojourn—mostly starving children and women in the ex-
tremities of wretchedness. Yet the rains of the past weeks
had brought new hope to many who had resigned themselves
in hopeless despair to the will of God.
We sat down to a mid-day meal of mutton and sopped
bread and rice, eating pur fill after empty days. And in the
evening we dined with Earhan—a similar meal, simple, well
cooked and fall of nourishment. But our stomachs revolted
at such exuberance, and for some days we suffered the tor-
ments of the damned for no apparent reason but the taking of
good food in plenty into systems attuned to desert starvation.
It was said that the flocks of Sulaiyil graze largely on the
Sana, a violent purge weE-known to the epicures of Mecca,
and it may be that their meat is seasoned with the physic.
Or, maybe, the chill that came with the cold winds and rain
that beat upon us these days had worked upon our unac-
customed surfeit to make us ill.
For ill indeed we were, all of us ! and the ides of March
dawned bleak and stormy on a company prostrated by the
vicious grip of the colic. In the intervals of pain and miser-
able inaction I ranged the gardens for butterflies and plants,
while a host of small boys brought me small birds caught in
their home-made snares. It was a long and weary way that
yet lay before us, and the time was short if we would reach
Mecca for the celebration of the pilgrimage. We could not
afford to dally and there was nothing to keep us at Sulaiyil
after our camels had rested a while and filled their bellies with
the desert plants by day and the rich lucerne spread before
their couches at night.
Ill the coming days and weeks we would revisit the settle-
ments of Wadi Dawasir to find them as inhospitable and
unfriendly as before—but not openly hostile—under the
guidance of a bigoted prelate ; we would see the oases of the
great Wadi Bisha and cross the sister channels of Tathlith
and Ranya ; we would in due course trail wearily over the
vast lava-field of the Buqum, where they point out to this
day the routes of the advancing and retreating hordes of the
Abyssinian Abraha in the * year of the Elephant * ; and we