The Country At The Time I Passed It (In The Month
Of April) Was Pretty Thickly Sprinkled With Bedouins Expecting
Their Harvest.
Several times my tent was pitched alongside of
their encampments.
I have told you already what the impressions
were which these people produced upon my mind.
I saw several creatures of the antelope kind in this part of the
Desert, and one day my Arabs surprised in her sleep a young gazelle
(for so I called her), and took the darling prisoner. I carried
her before me on my camel for the rest of the day, and kept her in
my tent all night. I did all I could to coax her, but the
trembling beauty refused to touch food, and would not be comforted.
Whenever she had a seeming opportunity of escaping she struggled
with a violence so painfully disproportioned to her fine, delicate
limbs, that I could not continue the cruel attempt to make her my
own. In the morning, therefore, I set her free, anticipating some
pleasure from seeing the joyous bound with which, as I thought, she
would return to her native freedom. She had been so stupefied,
however, by the exciting events of the preceding day and night, and
was so puzzled as to the road she should take, that she went off
very deliberately, and with an uncertain step. She went away quite
sound in limb, but her intellect may have been upset. Never in all
likelihood had she seen the form of a human being until the
dreadful moment when she woke from her sleep and found herself in
the grip of an Arab.
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