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. Indeed, I felt
quite good-humouredly towards my Arabs, because they had so
woefully failed in their wretched attempt, and because, as it
turned out, I had done what was right. They too, poor fellows,
evidently began to like me immensely, on account of the hard-
heartedness which had enabled me to baffle their scheme.
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