Despite, However, This Threatening
Demeanour, The Youth, Knowing That He Now Could Safely Go To Any
Lengths, Continued His Ill Words, And Mansur's Face Was So Comically
Furious, That I Felt Too Much Amused To Interfere.
At last the
camel-men disappeared, thereby punishing us most effectually for our
sport.
The road lay up rocky hill and down stony vale; a tripping and
stumbling dromedary had been substituted for the usual monture: the
consequence was that we had either a totter or a tumble once per mile
during the whole of that long night. In vain the now fiery Mohammed
called for the assistance of the camel-men with the full force of his
lungs: "Where be those owls, those oxen of the oxen, those beggars,
those cut-off ones, those foreigners, those Sons of Flight[FN#13]?
withered be their hands! palsied be their fingers! the foul mustachioed
fellows, basest of the Arabs that ever hammered tent-peg, sneaking
cats, goats of Al-Akhfash![FN#14] Truly I will torture them the torture
of the oil,[FN#15] the mines of infamy! the cold of
countenance![FN#16]" The Badawi brotherhood of the camel-men looked at
him wickedly, muttering the while,-"By Allah! and by Allah!
[p.278] and by Allah! O boy, we will flog thee like a hound when we
catch thee in the Desert!" All our party called upon him to desist, but
his temper had got completely the upper hand over his discretion, and
he expressed himself in such classic and idiomatic Hijazi, that I had
not the heart to stop him.
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