They Were Always Courteous, However,
And Were Never Backward In Offering Me The Youart, A Kind Of Whey,
Which Is The Principal Delicacy To Be Found Amongst The Wandering
Tribes.
Practically, I think, Childe Harold would have found it a dreadful
bore to make "the Desert his dwelling-place,
" For at all events, if
he adopted the life of the Arabs he would have tasted no solitude.
The tents are partitioned, not so as to divide the Childe and the
"fair spirit" who is his "minister" from the rest of the world, but
so as to separate the twenty or thirty brown men that sit screaming
in the one compartment from the fifty or sixty brown women and
children that scream and squeak in the other. If you adopt the
Arab life for the sake of seclusion you will be horribly
disappointed, for you will find yourself in perpetual contact with
a mass of hot fellow-creatures. It is true that all who are
inmates of the same tent are related to each other, but I am not
quite sure that that circumstance adds much to the charm of such a
life. At all events, before you finally determine to become an
Arab try a gentle experiment. Take one of those small, shabby
houses in May Fair, and shut yourself up in it with forty or fifty
shrill cousins for a couple of weeks in July.
In passing the Desert you will find your Arabs wanting to start and
to rest at all sorts of odd times. They like, for instance, to be
off at one in the morning, and to rest during the whole of the
afternoon. You must not give way to their wishes in this respect.
I tried their plan once, and found it very harassing and
unwholesome. An ordinary tent can give you very little protection
against heat, for the fire strikes fiercely through single canvas,
and you soon find that whilst you lie crouching and striving to
hide yourself from the blazing face of the sun, his power is harder
to bear than it is where you boldly defy him from the airy heights
of your camel.
It had been arranged with my Arabs that they were to bring with
them all the food which they would want for themselves during the
passage of the Desert, but as we rested at the end of the first
day's journey by the side of an Arab encampment, my camel men found
all that they required for that night in the tents of their own
brethren. On the evening of the second day, however, just before
we encamped for the night, my four Arabs came to Dthemetri, and
formally announced that they had not brought with them one atom of
food, and that they looked entirely to my supplies for their daily
bread. This was awkward intelligence. We were now just two days
deep in the Desert, and I had brought with me no more bread than
might be reasonably required for myself and my European attendants.
I believed at the moment (for it seemed likely enough) that the men
had really mistaken the terms of the arrangement, and feeling that
the bore of being put upon half-rations would be a less evil (and
even to myself a less inconvenience) than the starvation of my
Arabs, I at once told Dthemetri to assure them that my bread should
be equally shared with all. Dthemetri, however, did not approve of
this concession; he assured me quite positively that the Arabs
thoroughly understood the agreement, and that if they were now
without food they had wilfully brought themselves into this strait
for the wretched purpose of bettering their bargain by the value of
a few paras' worth of bread. This suggestion made me look at the
affair in a new light. I should have been glad enough to put up
with the slight privation to which my concession would subject me,
and could have borne to witness the semi-starvation of poor
Dthemetri with a fine, philosophical calm, but it seemed to me that
the scheme, if scheme it were, had something of audacity in it, and
was well enough calculated to try the extent of my softness. I
well knew the danger of allowing such a trial to result in a
conclusion that I was one who might be easily managed; and
therefore, after thoroughly satisfying myself from Dthemetri's
clear and repeated assertions that the Arabs had really understood
the arrangement, I determined that they should not now violate it
by taking advantage of my position in the midst of their big
Desert, so I desired Dthemetri to tell them that they should touch
no bread of mine. We stopped, and the tent was pitched. The Arabs
came to me, and prayed loudly for bread. I refused them.
"Then we die!"
"God's will be done!"
I gave the Arabs to understand that I regretted their perishing by
hunger, but that I should bear this calmly, like any other
misfortune not my own, that, in short, I was happily resigned to
THEIR fate. The men would have talked a great deal, but they were
under the disadvantage of addressing me through a hostile
interpreter; they looked hard upon my face, but they found no hope
there; so at last they retired as they pretended, to lay them down
and die.
In about ten minutes from this time I found that the Arabs were
busily cooking their bread! Their pretence of having brought no
food was false, and was only invented for the purpose of saving it.
They had a good bag of meal, which they had contrived to stow away
under the baggage upon one of the camels in such a way as to escape
notice. In Europe the detection of a scheme like this would have
occasioned a disagreeable feeling between the master and the
delinquent, but you would no more recoil from an Oriental on
account of a matter of this sort, than in England you would reject
a horse that had tried, and failed, to throw you.
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