360 - THE EMPTY QUARTER

welcome to you, and whence come ye ? We come as ye see,
replied Zayid, from the desert. We are 'returners/ returned
from our hunting. We have seen nought but good—no
pastures indeed but rains abundant. And saw ye tracks of
foes 1 she asked. None, said Zayid; but tell me, what of
your harvest ? and what the price of flour and dates among
your people ? Praise be to God, that has blessed us this
season, she replied; you will get two measures1 of fine flour
for the dollar, and dates at six weights or seven.2 The other
women stood a little way back from their champion, open-
eyed and open-mouthed doubtless under their concealing
veils, but one of them, evidently the daughter of the charm-
ing-voiced old lady, had come a little forward to her mother's
elbow and had coyly contrived to disarrange her veil suffi-
ciently to reveal a pair of sparkling eyes under a brow that
was perfection. Her charm met with the inevitable, though
silent, tribute of the weathered gallants, whom her mother
kept in conversation, and I noticed that the comparative
splendour of my accoutrements and the manifest superiority
of my steed had served to focus a lovely gaze in the right
direction. It was no time, however, for dalliance, and Zayid
and the old lady had soon exhausted the possibilities of such
polite conversation as was required by the circumstances of
our meeting. So we turned with heavy hearts from our first
glimpse of human beauty after weeks and months of barren
travail, but we counted it for luck that our first human en-
counter had been so charming. A Brimstone butterfly flitted
over the sea-green shrubs of Harm as if to challenge compari-
son, and we passed on through the bottle neck of the Latwa
valley, leaving the women to think of their wood-cutting and
other things. And I was back once more among the familiar
scenes of a distant, but unforgotten, past.

The stone-built ruins of the original settlement of Sulaiyil
still covered the gentle slope of Tuwaiq where it runs down
to the Wadi's edge. Its bastions and battlements still
crowned the ridge with their gaunt skeletons. But the valley
itself bore the scars and blisters of a long unmerciful drought,
which had fallen upon this country of the south a year or two

* Waana*