During The War Which
Happened About Eight Years Ago Between The Towara And The Maazy
Bedouins, Who Live In The Mountains Between Cairo And Cosseir, A Party
Of The Former Happened To Be Stationed Here With Their Families.
They
were surprised one morning by a troop of their enemies, while assembled
in the Sheikh’s tent to drink coffee.
Seven or eight of them were cut
down: the Sheikh himself, an old man, seeing escape impossible, sat down
by the fire, when the leader of the Maazy came up, and cried out to him
to throw down his turban and his life should be spared. The generous
Sheikh, rather than do what, according to Bedouin notions, would have
stained his reputation ever after, exclaimed, “I shall not uncover my
head before my enemies;” and was immediately killed with the thrust of a
lance. A low chain of sand-hills begins here to the west, near the sea;
and the eastern mountains approach the road. At nine hours and a half,
HOWARA
[p.472] S.S.E. the eastern mountains form a junction with the western
hills. At ten hours we entered a hilly country; at ten hours and three
quarters we rested for the night in a barren valley among the hills,
called Wady Amara [Arabic]. We met with nobody in this route except a
party of Yembo merchants, who had landed at Tor, and were travelling to
Cairo. The hills consist of chalk and silex in very irregular strata:
the silex is sometimes quite black; at other times it takes a lustre and
transparency much resembling agate.
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