the Armageddon Hunt deserves this horse bore in his hand, not to pass unchronicled. I have given it that name because the pack first hunted as a whole at the mouth of that valley which, as the Book of Revelation and local legend tell us, is to form the last battleground of all.

Π.-HOUNDS GO NORTH.

Master) went, there went his two couple. True hounds, on the small side; great of jowl and chest and bone.

This is, I believe-I hope four years has not played tricks with my memory-their history.

The Master had hunted them in Italy, and knew their music, their legs, and their noses. Hardwick (believed to be from the Pytchley), Hengist, and Skilful were given him by a former commanding officer, who left his yeomanry regiment, at

the war's end, for the delights of the grass countries. Actress was "found" (in the Army sense) in Italy.

Enter this quintette to the placid calm of the Palestine "posh"1 masterpiece of military trains, that, running for a day across the desert on a track pushed eastward in war time almost as fast as a man can walk, joined the luxurious bases and leave - haunts of Alexandria and Cairo with the birthplace of our English St George - Ludd, the military metropolis of Palestine.

Their journey through the Holy Land was not unaccompanied by incident. The railway authorities would not let hounds travel alone in the guard's van, declaring that they would eat the luggage. The Master indignantly pointed out to these benighted heathen that well-trained hounds never ate luggage, but without avail. Nor was the Master allowed, by Byelaw 4001 (a), to travel in the luggage-van with them.

It ended by the Master travelling as an ordinary first-class military passenger. Two couple of hounds, with which he professed no connection, were tied up in the corridor. They broke their leashes. Hardwick and Hengist fought. Skilful appropriated a seat reserved for a most gilded potentate of the Staff. Actress was sick in a similar holy place. There were many expostulations, and somebody stole their food. The

quintette, having changed at Ludd and Haifa and many other places, arrived in dead of night at Damascus, hungry and not a little weary.

There are hotels at Damascus. Handbills describe them as the most sumptuous of their kind, though corroboration from departing guests is lacking. But to face a Damascus hotel with two couple of hounds at midnight was beyond thought. A café-keeper at the station was induced to provide a bucketful of miscellaneous and unwholesome scraps, for which he had the temerity to ask 50 piastres (half a sovereign). He was told that he could have half that sum or nothing, and, after much haggling, departed chuckling at the innocence of the British, who will pay five shillings for a bucket of kitchen waste.

The wearied Master chained his now somnolent hounds to the railings of the station platform, and composed himself to sleep in their midst. His bag lay open beside him. All the thieves of Damascus who were not on duty came to peep at the tempting sight-including, it is said, the Deputy Grand Master of the Larceny Lodge, but decided that a guest and an ally, sleeping in their midst (surrounded by four large dogs), should not be disturbed.

Rules were not so strict forward of Damascus, on the railway or anywhere else. The Master ensconced himself in a

1 Scrumptious, elegant.

cattle-truck with his charges, in the company of five goats, four women, and a legion of children, some Hedjaz officers, a mountain of luggage, and a party of Indian soldiers. At each stopping-place he rushed forth, returning with a bucket

66

of water, and his pockets stuffed with the eggs cokt" with which the Syrian stays himself on his travels. Unbroken of this fare, hounds were disgorged from their truck at Beirut into the arms of a delighted crowd of sportsmen.

Ш.-ТНЕ TREK TO HOMS.

Hounds had hardly arrived before the 4th (Indian) Cavalry Division was ordered north to Homs.

Few "billets" were more reluctantly left behind than Beirut. From trooper to colonel, the Division felt-as they turned in their saddles, high up on Lebanon, for a last look at the jewelled headland set in sea-blue five thousand feet below-that they were leaving behind as jolly a little station as a soldier might wish to serve in.

They had come there an emaciated force indeed. Shot by Allenby's bow from just north of Jaffa, they had pierced, at arrow speed, up into the heart of Syria; but as a long flight takes the speed and "vim" out of an arrow, so forced marches on tightened belts, fierce little battles among the hills, and, above all, malaria, had taken it out of them. Their kit was what man and horse could carry, and then cut down by half, for it was to be swift going.

That does not allow for

mosquito-nets, and they had passed through some of the most malarial spots in the Levant just at the time when that brisk little lady, the anopheles, 1 was at her liveliest. When the Turk had thrown up the sponge, and the Division was recalled to winter at Beirut, it was, as the song says, "a little bit of heaven."

An old Arab writer says that Beirut is like a beautiful sultana (the lady, not the fruit) reclining on a couch of green, looking out across the blue sea for the coming of her lover.

The least ecstatic of men would admit, when he first steamed into St George's Bay, and the Naples of the Levant opened out before him, that the description is less hyperbolic than it sounds.

Houses of that almost supernatural whiteness that comes of a dash of blue in the whitewash, red roofs reflected in a sea which, like the admiral's story, seems almost too blue to be true, crowd a spacious headland. Behind rise, step

1 The female anopheles mosquito is the cause of malaria.

by verdant step, the vine-clad foothills of the Lebanon; while high over all towers the giant saddleback of Jebel Senin, changing with time and season from snow-white to ghostly silver, from smoky blue to flashing gold. Set like jewels on every tiny hilltop, over a hundred villages may be counted. Below, linking Beirut to the hills, lies a forest of pines-the kind you see in the tree-top scene of 'Peter Pan,' -so close and level that you cannot at first believe it is not a lawn.

Camped among these pines the 4th Cavalry Division had spent the first half of the year. Swimming and fishing and football, gymkhanas of a rough sort, kept them fit and cheery; and each week-end there was a race-meeting, either at the Parc, which would be ablaze with the smart frocks of Beirut's many lovely ladies, or among the trees at Bir Hassan, where in less formal surroundings you could spend as merry a "day in the country" as sportsman could wish.

From this most reposeful of rest billets, then, the Division trekked to Homs, winding up through orchards and pleasant hill resorts until they had their last glimpse of Beirut from 5000 feet above the sea.

other face. Within a mile the view had changed from a paradise in shifting shades of green into a set piece that would have served as ante-room to the Inferno: scowling precipices and barren slopes; not a house or a human being; just the sun beating down on rocks hot to the touch.

Down on the central plain of the Bekaa,1 and all became green again for a while; but a day's trek brought the Division once more into the stony land. Northward they marched, chased by that red-hot wind which sweeps up the valley from, curiously enough, the perpetual snows of Mount Hermon, and overwhelms men and food and horses in clouds of red dust. Past the stately columns of Baalbak, it pursued them until, grown into a blinding gale, it blew them into Homs.

2

As a contrast in stations Homs and Beirut would be difficult to beat. One strip flashes green, the northward curve of the Orontes, with its border of fruit gardens; the rest is wilderness. Ride where you will, the plain is strewn with stones, with here and there an outcrop of solid rock. A huge and ancient mound, once the citadel palace of Assyrian potentates, rises above a maze of hovels so intricate

Here Lebanon showed its that even from this eminence

1 Cælesyria, or Hollow Syria.

* From the red dust of the Bekaa, according to Arab legend, Adam was made. The Syrian Heliopolis, one of the most magnificent ruins in the world. Reputed locally to have been the site of the Tower of Babel.

the eye cannot trace its wind-
ings.

Half-circling the town-and,
needless to say, to windward-
the graveyard, inevitable suburb
of a Syrian city, embraces the
community, as it were, in a
stranglehold of decay. Graves
invade the very streets. Their
nearness seems to typify a
Moslem fatalism. "When you
die, you have not far to go.
Ma-leesh." Their shallowness,
made evident by crumbling
walls and fallen stones, shrieks
to at least two senses the reply,
"And when you arise, you
haven't far to come."

Over it all, from two hours after sunrise till two hours before sunset, whistles and whirls a pitiless wind, charged with tibn, sand, dust, the dried sewage of the streets, and the dessicated remains of ancient inhabitants.

A Danteish spot; but even this, vigorously described as "the last place God ever made," had one redeeming feature. There were a few foxes, a good many jackals, and an abundance of hares.

Of dogs there is never, in the British Army, any lack. They swarmed in every mess;

they brought up litters in the ante-rooms; they yapped from every tent in the lines--dogs of all shapes, colours, and sizes; war dogs who had signed on for the Army of Occupation as long as their masters' rations should last; dogs dimly reminiscent of many a homeborn strain of hound and terrier and pointer, but divided from that distinguished ancestry by a perfect grille of bars sinister; among them, slim, mincing, and disdainful, a few Selugis, Persian greyhounds of as ancient and pure a strain as our

own.

With such as these the yeomen and territorial horse gunners and Indian cavalrymen prepared to take the field.

Alas, the trek through the red dust to Homs, and mishaps en route, sent a couple and a half of the Master's genuine hounds to hunt, let us hope, in Elysian grass countries. When the last column of the trekking Division had off-harnessed, one real hound, the immortal Hardwick, survived to be mentor to the bobbery pack which the advanced-guard had already established. Real hunting had begun!

IV.-CALLIN' THE 'OUNDS BY NAME.

While the stony plain around Homs rang with Hardwick's solo, with quaint obligato from the bobbery pack, southward in Haifa, in less eventful man

ner, another pack was being
brought together.

In the pleasant villas on
Mount Carmel, towering over
the town, lived Headquarters,