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. They were the genuine beasts of the Desert, and it was sad
and painful to witness the agony they suffered when thus they were
forced to encounter the fixed habitations of men. They shrank from
the beginning of every high narrow street as though from the
entrance of some horrible cave or bottomless pit; they sighed and
wept like women.
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