and because they have to endure so much petty persecution at the hands of their comrades in the army; at least this is the explanation given by themselves.
The behaviour of the zaptiehs when they visit these villages is often harsh and tyrannical in the extreme. They quarter themselves in the houses of the inhabitants, who are obliged to keep them and their horses free of charge as long as they choose to remain, and to submit to their overbearing conduct without remonstrance. On one occasion, when a sergeant and two men were at the village, a man came to me with his breast bleeding with blows which he had received from one of the men. I was listening to his tale, when my servant appeared, white, or rather amber-coloured, from indignation. He had protested against a zaptieh – the same zaptieh who had struck the man – watering his horse at a trough filled with water drawn especially for my horses, and had also been beaten. I at once sought out the offender, and in the heat of the moment paid him back in his own coin. The sergeant then came up, and, afraid of the consequences, sought to propitiate me. After making the man stand in the sun for an hour in the presence of the villagers, I finally agreed not to make a formal complaint to his superior officer at Haifa, on condition of his apologising publicly to the man he had struck, as well as to my servant, which he did with a great show of humility.
Besides events of this public nature, there are others of a more private character, which serve to relieve the monotony of life in a Druse village. The other day, aroused by a violent uproar, I went into the street, and found a handsome young fellow, one of the sheikh's sons, surrounded by a posse of screaming women, whose abuse drove him to such a frenzy of rage that he seized a huge stone and would have hurled it at them, had not his father, whom I was in the act of questioning as to the cause of the tumult, rushed to the rescue. With great difficulty he succeeded in quelling the disturbance. Meantime I observed with surprise the young man's wife, a remarkably pretty young woman, whom he had presented to me the day before, standing in a verandah, apparently quite unconcerned at the excitement which was raging against her husband, leaning against a post, with her baby in her arms. She looked on, and smiled languidly. I said to a man standing near –
"What is all the row about? At any rate, the wife does not seem to take much interest in it."
"What would be the use?" he replied. "He has just divorced her, and all the women are abusing him for it. His father is angry with him too, for she is his niece, and his own first cousin, and it brings discredit on the family."
"Then why does he do if?" I asked. "She is a very pretty young woman, and he seemed to have no such intention yesterday when he introduced me to her as his wife."
"Oh yes, he had. He has been planning for it for some time, only he could not find an excuse. I suppose he has made one now. He is in love with another woman, whom he wishes to marry."
Then I saw the baby put into the cradle, which a man took up, followed by the wife still smiling, and by the mother-in-law raging, and by the sheikh sullen and dignified, and they marched off to the mother-in-law's house, which was henceforth to be the house of the discarded wife, who thus promptly
