Page:Mount Seir, Sinai and Western Palestine.djvu/244

200 when Professor Palmer, Captain Gill, and Lieutenant Charrington were murdered here.

I obtained from an Arab of the Haiwat tribe a story of the murder which I have never seen published in any account of it. I give it merely for what it is worth: Arabs, as everybody knows who has had to do with them, have a remarkable facility for making up a story to meet a supposed occasion.

This was the story in the Arab's own words:—

"Arabi Pashi, directed by the Evil One—may he never rest in peace!—sent to his lordship the Governor of Nakhl to tell him that he had utterly destroyed all the Christian ships of war at Alexandria and Suez; also that he had destroyed their houses in the same places, and that the Governor of Nakhl was to take care if he saw any Christians running about in his country, like rats with no holes, that the Arabs were to finish them at once. On hearing this news, a party of Arabs started to loot Ayun Mûsa and Suez. Coming down Wâdy Sudur they met the great Sheikh Abdullah and his party; they thought they were the Christians spoken of by Arabi Pasha, running away, so they surrounded them in the wâdy. But the Arabs ran away from the English, who defended themselves in the wâdy; all night they stopped round them, but did not dare to take them till just at dawn, when they made a rush on them from every side and seized them all.

"The Arab Sheikh, who had come with the party, ran away with the money. The Arabs did not know Sheikh Abdullah, and did not believe his statement, and when he offered money, his own Sheikh would not give it, so they believed that the party were running away from Suez, and they finished them there. Afterwards the great Colonel came and caught them, and they were finished at Zag ez Zig. May their graves be defiled!"

Such is the story I heard, and there seems to me to be some amount of truth in it.

Colonel Sir Charles Warren's energetic action in the capture and bringing to justice of the perpetrators of the crime, has created a deep impression, and I consider that the whole peninsula is for foreign travellers now as safe as, if not safer than, it was previously. While on this subject I may mention that I found Professor Palmer's death everywhere regretted deeply by the people, and his memory still warm in the hearts of his Arab friends in the country, Many of them came unsolicited to ask me if I had known him, and to express their sorrow at his loss.