Milnes cleverly goes to the French for the exact word which conveys the impression produced by the voice of the Arabs, and calls them "un peuple CRIARD."The Bedouin women are not treasured up like the wives and daughters of other Orientals, and indeed they seemed almost entirely free from the restraints imposed by jealousy. The feint which they made of concealing their faces from me was always slight. They never, I think, wore the YASHMAKproperly fixed. When they first saw me they used to hold up a part of their drapery with one hand across their faces, but they seldom persevered very steadily in subjecting me to this privation. Unhappy beings! they were sadly plain. The awful haggardness that gave something of character to the faces of the men was sheer ugliness in the poor women. It is a great shame, but the truth is that, except when we refer to the beautiful devotion of the mother to her child, all the fine things we say and think about woman apply only to those who are tolerably good-looking or graceful. These Arab women were so plain and clumsy, that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a better world. They may have been good women enough so far as relates to the exercise of the minor virtues, but they had so grossly neglected the prime duty of looking pretty in this transitory life, that Icould not at all forgive them. They seemed to feel the weight of their guilt, and to be truly and humbly penitent.
I had the complete command of their affections, for at any moment I could make their young hearts bound and their old hearts jump by offering a handful of tobacco, and yet, believe me, it was not in the first SOIREE that my store of Latakia was exhausted.
The Bedouin women have no religion. This is partly the cause of their clumsiness. Perhaps if from Christian girls they would learn how to pray, their souls might become more gentle, and their limbs be clothed with grace. You who are going into their country have a direct personal interest in knowing something about "Arab hospitality"; but the deuce of it is, that the poor fellows with whom I have happened to pitch my tent were scarcely ever in a condition to exercise that magnanimous virtue with much ECLAT. Indeed, Mysseri's canteen generally enabled me to outdo my hosts in the matter of entertainment. 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.