He Was Smuggling Wheat — and a Hyena Ate Him!

The following appeared in our Syrian colleague "Al-Ayyam": In the village of al-Adiliyya, near the Awaj River, there lived a man named Ali Shamma, aged 40 to 45, who was in the habit of leaving his village every evening with a sack of wheat loaded on his donkey, smuggling it to Damascus or to one of its villages, then returning to his village of al-Adiliyya before daybreak.

One night the poor man's donkey was seen knocking at the door of his house with his loads on her back. The people of the house awoke, and when they opened the door they saw the donkey with the master's belongings on her back, and they realized there was some mystery in the matter. After the villagers had gathered, they walked some 100 meters outside the village and found the poor man's shoes stained with blood — but of the body they found no trace...

In the evening they made for the Awaj River, and there, on a stretch of ground on the riverbank, they saw the prints of the man's hands, as though he had been lying on his back; and they saw clearly the prints of the hands and feet of the hyena that had devoured him — it had eaten its fill of him, then flung the rest of the body into the river...

Some shepherds declared that they had heard a distant cry in the black of night: perhaps it was the call for help of this poor man who fell prey to this beast, which ate him and flung his body into the river to cover up its crime!...