96 JOURNEY FROM and to enumerate the various excellences of the fat sheep and lambs, of the milk, and the butter, and the water we should find there ; assuring us that he would consider it his greatest pleasure, as well as duty, to take care that we were well supplied with all these valuable commodities. He then began to state the great advantage of his protection, and how impossible it would have been for us to cross the Syrtis without him. As we suspected that the report which had been mentioned to us by the Consul was invented by our worthy friend the Dhbbah, we took this opportunity of relating it to the Shekh of Mesurata, and of asking his opinion with regard to its probabihty. Belcazi shook his head, and very confidently assured us that he did not believe there was any foundation for it whatever : it was true, he confessed, that a few years ago such an interruption might easily have occurred ; but since the Arab tribes had been reduced by the Bashaw, the communication between Mesurata and Bengazi might be considered as tolerably certain.

Shekh Mahommed, however (whose large and round eyes had been during this discourse very attentively fixed upon those of the Shekh of Mesurata), still insisted upon the existence of this horde of shandTit * ; and even asserted that he was himself well acquainted with all their favourite haunts and retreats. Some of his party, he added, had tracked their horses’ feet from the well which they had recently visited, and had informed him that their troop was very numerous.

But he knew, he continued, all the wells which they frequented, and * The term applied by the Arabs in the regency of Tripoly to marauders of every description, and which is evidently corrupted from the Italian.