When, However, After Many A Day Of Toil The
Distant Minarets At Length Appear, The Poor Bedouin Relaxes The
Vigour
Of his pace, his steps become faltering and undecided, every
moment his uneasiness increases, and at length he fairly sobs
Aloud, and embracing your knees, implores with the most piteous
cries and gestures that you will dispense with him and his camels,
and find some other means of entering the city. This, of course,
one can't agree to, and the consequence is that one is obliged to
witness and resist the most moving expressions of grief and fond
entreaty. I had to go through a most painful scene of this kind
when I entered Cairo, and now the horror which these wilder Arabs
felt at the notion of entering Gaza led to consequences still more
distressing. The dread of cities results partly from a kind of
wild instinct which has always characterised the descendants of
Ishmael, but partly too from a well-founded apprehension of ill-
treatment. So often it happens that the poor Bedouin, when once
jammed in between walls, is seized by the Government authorities
for the sake of his camels, that his innate horror of cities
becomes really justified by results.
The Bedouins with whom I performed this journey were wild fellows
of the Desert, quite unaccustomed to let out themselves or their
beasts for hire, and when they found that by the natural ascendency
of Europeans they were gradually brought down to a state of
subserviency to me, or rather to my attendants, they bitterly
repented, I believe, of having placed themselves under our control.
They were rather difficult fellows to manage, and gave Dthemetri a
good deal of trouble, but I liked them all the better for that.
Selim, the chief of the party, and the man to whom all our camels
belonged, was a fine, savage, stately fellow. There were, I think,
five other Arabs of the party, but when we approached the end of
the journey they one by one began to make off towards the
neighbouring encampments, and by the time that the minarets of Gaza
were in sight, Selim, the owner of the camels, was the only one who
remained. He, poor fellow, as we neared the town began to discover
the same terrors that my Arabs had shown when I entered Cairo. I
could not possibly accede to his entreaties and consent to let my
baggage be laid down on the bare sands, without any means of having
it brought on into the city. So at length, when poor Selim had
exhausted all his rhetoric of voice and action and tears, he fixed
his despairing eyes for a minute upon the cherished beasts that
were his only wealth, and then suddenly and madly dashed away into
the farther Desert. I continued my course and reached the city at
last, but it was not without immense difficulty that we could
constrain the poor camels to pass under the hated shadow of its
walls.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 138 of 170
Words from 72520 to 73021
of 89094
