As we rose to go an old man approached. He mumbled a salutation and we replied. He stood and stared at me, wrinkling his eyes; he wore a short dirty loin-cloth and carried a stick – he was evidently to poor to own a dagger. Grey hair sprouted on his chest and eldritch locks fell round his emaciated face; a single tooth wobbled as he spoke. He looked at me for some time and then mumbled again, ‘I came to see the Christian’. Sultan said to me, ‘He is a Shahara’. I wondered what he saw as he peered at me with bleary eyes, this old man whose ancestors were tabled in genesis. Perhaps dimly he foresaw the end. As we went down the hillside I asked my companions who he was. ‘He is mad’, one of them answered, and parodied ‘I came to see the Christian’, and they laughed. Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs.