other topics for dispute, enough in all conscience; such as the new dancing girl who had come that week to Madame Delagrange’s Bar, the Villa Iris, and about whom young Ollivier Praslin was raving at the other end of the table.

Paul Ravenel had slipped quietly away now more than a year ago in the black gabardine and skull cap of a Jew pedlar with a few surveying instruments packed in cheap, dirty boxes of white wood hidden amongst his wares on the back of a mule, and a few penny account books in which to jot his notes. He set out to explore the countries of the Beni-M’Tir and the Gerouan tribes, to blacken the white spaces of the map by means of long and perilous journeys. There were no tribes more implacable and fanatical than these; none whose territories at that time were so little known; and since they held the mountain passes and the great forests which border the trade routes from the south and the west to Fez, none whose strongholds and numbers and resources it was more important that the Administration should know.

“A Jew travelling alone, carrying on a mule such valuable things as needles and reels of thread, matches and safety pins, and some bales of cloth will be able to go where even a Moor of another tribe would lose his life,” he had declared, and for a long time in vain.

“And what about your notes? How will you make them?” asked the officer of the Affaires Indigènes, to whom after much persistence he was referred.

“I have a shorthand. They will take little space. I have a small tent, too. I shall make them at night.”

“And if you are caught making them at night?”

“I shall be making up my accounts—that is all.”

The Native Department, however, still shook its head. “A Jew will be robbed, no doubt, and probably kicked and cuffed from tent village to tent village,” pleaded Ravenel. “But he will not be killed. He carries useful things.”

In the end his persistence had won the day. He had been given a list of a few sure friends, a kaid here and there, on whose good will he could rely; and once or twice some news of him from one or other of these friends had come in a roundabout fashion to the headquarters of the Administration at Rabat. But the last of these messages were more than six months old, and Paul Ravenel himself was two months’ overdue.

Gerard de Montignac was gloomily weighing up his friend’s chances when a 

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