They Could Not,
I Think, Really Secure Themselves Against Any Serious Danger By
This Contrivance, For Though They Have Arms, They Are So Little
Accustomed To Use Them, And So Utterly Unorganised, That They Never
Could Make Good Their Resistance To Robbers Of The Slightest
Respectability.
It is not of the Bedouins that such travellers are
afraid, for the safe conduct granted by the chief
Of the ruling
tribe is never, I believe, violated, but it is said that there are
deserters and scamps of various sorts who hover about the skirts of
the Desert, particularly on the Cairo side, and are anxious to
succeed to the property of any poor devils whom they may find more
weak and defenceless than themselves.
These people from Cairo professed to be amazed at the ludicrous
disproportion between their numerical forces and mine. They could
not understand, and they wanted to know, by what strange privilege
it is that an Englishman with a brace of pistols and a couple of
servants rides safely across the Desert, whilst they, the natives
of the neighbouring cities, are forced to travel in troops, or
rather in herds. One of them got a few minutes of private
conversation with Dthemetri, and ventured to ask him anxiously
whether the English did not travel under the protection of evil
demons. I had previously known (from Methley, I think, who had
travelled in Persia) that this notion, so conducive to the safety
of our countrymen, is generally prevalent amongst Orientals. It
owes its origin, partly to the strong wilfulness of the English
gentleman (which not being backed by any visible authority, either
civil or military, seems perfectly superhuman to the soft Asiatic),
but partly too to the magic of the banking system, by force of
which the wealthy traveller will make all his journeys without
carrying a handful of coin, and yet when he arrives at a city will
rain down showers of gold. The theory is, that the English
traveller has committed some sin against God and his conscience,
and that for this the evil spirit has hold of him, and drives him
from his home like a victim of the old Grecian furies, and forces
him to travel over countries far and strange, and most chiefly over
deserts and desolate places, and to stand upon the sites of cities
that once were and are now no more, and to grope among the tombs of
dead men. Often enough there is something of truth in this notion;
often enough the wandering Englishman is guilty (if guilt it be) of
some pride or ambition, big or small, imperial or parochial, which
being offended has made the lone place more tolerable than
ballrooms to him, a sinner.
I can understand the sort of amazement of the Orientals at the
scantiness of the retinue with which an Englishman passes the
Desert, for I was somewhat struck myself when I saw one of my
countrymen making his way across the wilderness in this simple
style.
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