These Three
Fellows, Fasting Through The Ramazan, And Over As Rough A Road, For
The Greater Part, As Ever Shook Mortal Bones, Performed Their
Fourteen Hours' Walk Of Near Forty Miles With The Most Admirable
Courage, Alacrity, And Good-Humour.
They once or twice drank water
on the march, and so far infringed the rule; but they refused all
bread or edible refreshment offered to them, and tugged on with an
energy that the best camel, and I am sure the best Christian, might
envy.
What a lesson of good-humoured endurance it was to certain
Pall Mall Sardanapaluses, who grumble if club sofa cushions are not
soft enough!
If I could write sonnets at leisure, I would like to chronicle in
fourteen lines my sensations on finding myself on a high Turkish
saddle, with a pair of fire-shovel stirrups and worsted reins, red
padded saddle-cloth, and innumerable tags, fringes, glass-beads,
ends of rope, to decorate the harness of the horse, the gallant
steed on which I was about to gallop into Syrian life. What a
figure we cut in the moonlight, and how they would have stared in
the Strand! Ay, or in Leicestershire, where I warrant such a horse
and rider are not often visible! The shovel stirrups are deucedly
short; the clumsy leathers cut the shins of some equestrians
abominably; you sit over your horse as it were on a tower, from
which the descent would be very easy, but for the big peak of the
saddle.
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