but butter and milk to stay its pangs. And in the winter it
is cold. The girl shivered under the folds of her ragged
mantle as she told us what she knew of the dispositions of the
various families and subsections of her group.

The sun gradually filtered through the mist and the morn-
ing warmed up under the influence of a mild southerly breeze
which had taken the place of the chill northern blasts. For
the first time since leaving the Hasa we began to feel alive as
we plodded on over the changeless scene. 'Ali Jahman,
riding a great whitish beast which was held to be the best in
all our party, rode far ahead with Zayid, on his dark brown
Dara'iya1 camel, in attendance, gossiping about his ex-
periences on a recent tax-collecting expedition, to the south-
eastern districts along the frontier of Oman, from which he
had only returned at the beginning of Sha'ban. In those
parts, he declared, he had often seen and shot the wild ass
which frequents the valley country of Ash'ab al Ghaf under
Jabal Hafit. And the women of the Manasir are passing
fair. If God wills, he said, I would go thither again next year
and perhaps Shaikh 'Abdullah will go with us to see that
country, which is better than this desert. Everywhere you
will see palm-groves and villages and rich pastures. It is a
fair land and the folk are hospitable, but there is a girl among
them I would wed. I was interested to hear from him that
Ibn Sa'ud's influence is felt to-day in all the Dhahira country,
as they call the tract westward of the Oman massif, including,
of course, Buraimi, a Wahhabi centre of long standing, and
apparently even 'Ibri. These tax-collecting expeditions
scarcely, perhaps, do more than pay the expenses involved in
equipping and sending them out, but they do tend to spread
the gospel of Wahhabi peace and Arabian unity. Slowly
but surely the ripples of stable government broaden out-
wards from the centre, and the Manasir may be counted
to-day as subjects of Ibn Sa'ud, who asks little of them but
the acceptance of his sovereignty and the maintenance of the
public peace. Zayid had obvious limitations in the capacity
of guide and a full quiver of quaint and slightly irritating
mannerisms, but he was a born story-teller, with a strange,

1 So-called because bred by the Duru' tribe of the Oman border.