communists and that he had therefore considered it his duty to conduct us to the guard-house to have us examined. At the guard-house we were met by the officer in charge, a petty hakim, who in a rather insolent manner required us to produce our passport. Though it had been viséd by the French consul, he seemed to have his doubts about it. As we did not know French sufficiently well to enable us to carry on conversation in that language, he put us a few questions on paper. He wrote down that we had been arrested as strangers without proper papers, and inquired if we had anything to say in reply. In answer to this, we wrote down that the passport, which we had produced, had been viséd by the French consul. He treated the passport with contempt and peremptorily demanded proofs of our identity! Any satisfactory evidence on this point, it was of course impossible to produce on the spot. We produced what proofs we could, including some letters addressed to one of us which we happened to have with us. This, of course, was not considered satisfactory, specially as they were in English, and we were sent under an escort to the Police bureau. The Commissaire not happening to be in, we were, without any further ceremony, locked up for the night in a miserable cell, and with no better accommodation than a wide wooden bench for bed! We were kept in that place for twelve hours, and about ten o'clock in the morning we were brought before the Police commissaire. He read the report of the officer who had arrested us, examined our passport, and failed to discover why we had been arrested! We were at once released, and on our express-
