Page:Mount Seir, Sinai and Western Palestine.djvu/128

 the terms of our contract, and nothing would induce us to alter it by a hair's breadth. After the envoys had been paid they should have departed. We were on Sheikh Ali's ground, and they were intruders. We requested them to leave the camp, but they remained shouting and gesticulating, and demanding more money. We then requested Ali to eject them, but he dallied, and the confusion increased. Bernhard then told Ali that he was no sheikh at all, or "only a quarter of one," as he was unable to protect his territory from intruders, and his convoy from the insults of these Petra robbers! This was more than Ali could bear. In great fume he called his men to arms, and when I emerged from my tent in the morning I found the clansmen "standing to their guns"—in other words, standing in a row with their long flint locks resting on the ground, the men themselves scarcely able to conceal a grin of amusement. The scene was comical enough; the old guns would have been of little use, and I rather think that one of our revolvers would have been more than a match for a dozen of them. The display of force, however, was not against us, but against the Petra Sheikhs, who finding things beginning to look serious and that nothing more was to be got out of our "man of iron," Bernhard Heilpern, mounted their nags and rode out of the camp towards the hills; Sheikh Abdullah declaring that if he should catch Heilpern within ten miles of Petra he "would do for him;" and the latter, that if he should ever catch Abdullah within twenty miles of Jerusalem, he should do the like for him!

With such farewells we watched our Petra guides ride up towards their native haunts; we ourselves were soon on the march in the opposite direction towards the Great Valley, where we camped in the evening, glad to leave behind us such a den of thieves.