At sunset we reached a solitary palm-grove, an oasis in the waste, and the camp was pitched beneath the trees. The Germans were not far away, but they, like the Cairene merchant, concluded that we were Ingleez Howadji, but, unlike him, did not expose themselves to our civilities. Strangers are now as little likely to make social overtures to John Bull as he is to receive them.

The palms were shrubby and scant; but the stars were bright among their boughs as we looked from the tent door: and as the Pacha wrapped himself in his capote and lay down to sleep, I asked him what the Prophet said of palms.

In reply the Pacha said disagreeable things of the Prophet. But the learned say that his favourite fruits were fresh dates and water-melons. Honour, said he, your paternal aunt the Date Palm, for she was created of the earth of which Adam was formed. Whoso eateth, said the Prophet, a mouthful of water-melon, God writeth for him a thousand good works and cancelleth a thousand evil works, and raiseth him a thousand degrees, for it came from Paradise.

66

Golden Sleeve," said the Pacha, with slumberous vagueness, "water-melons for breakfast.”

CHAPTER X.

MIRAGE.

HENRY MAUNDRELL having been shut out all night from a Shekh's house in Syria, during a pelting rain, revenged himself next morning by recording that the three great virtues of the Mohammadan religion are a long beard, prayers of the same standard, and a kind of Pharisaical superciliousness.

Our uninvited guest, the Shekh's father, possessed those virtues in perfection. Enjoying our escort, eating our food, warming himself at our fire, the testy old gentleman evidently thought that our infidel presences cumbered the earth, and soiled by contact his own Muslim orthodoxy. He was therefore perpetually flinging himself upon his little donkey and shambling towards the horizon, with a sniff of disgust, to air his virtue from further contagion in the pure desert atmosphere. We

were as continually overhauling him turned up against a wind-sheltered sand-bank, and, in meditative solitude, smoking our choice Latakia.

It was our daily amusement to watch the old Ishmael, whose mind and life were like the desert around us, putting contemptuously away from us upon his tottering donkey, his withered ankles and clumsy shoes dangling along over the sand-away from us, stately travellers upon MacWhirter and El Shiraz, for whom Shakspeare sang, and Plato thought, and Raphael painted, and to whom the old Ishmael's country, its faith and its history, were but incidents in the luxury of Life.

Yet Ishmael maintained the balance well, and never relaxed his sniffing contempt for the Howadji, who, in turn, mused upon the old man, and figured the strange aspect of his mind.

Like a bold bare landscape it must have been, or rather like the skeleton of a landscape. For Ishmael was not true Bedoueen enough to have clothed the naked lines and cliffs of his mind with the verdure of romantic reverie. At evening he did not listen to the droning talk of the other Arabs over the fire, but curled himself up in his blankets and went to sleep. By day he sought solitude, and dozed in his own smoke; and

E

whenever he spoke it was in the querulous tone of

soured old age.

His whole life had been a monotonous tale endlessly repeated. From Cairo to Gaza-from Gaza to Cairo. As a boy, tugging the caravan along, with a halter drawn over his shoulder: as a man, in supreme command, superintending the whole: as a grandsire, cantering away from infidel dogs to smoke their tobacco tranquilly in the sun. Life must have been a mystery to Ishmael, could he have ever meditated it; and the existence of a western world, Christians, and civilisation, only explained by some vague theory of gratuitous tobacco for the Faithful.

As I watched his bright young grandson, Hamed, leading the train, I could not but ruefully reflect that the child is father of the man, and foresee that he would only ripen into an Ishmael, and smoke the ungrown Latakia of Howadji yet

unborn.

But through all speculations, and dreams, and jokes, and intermittent conversation-for you are naturally silent upon the desert-your way is still onward over the sand, and Jerusalem and Damascus approach slowly, slowly, two and a half miles an hour.

In the midst of your going, a sense of intense

Rock,

weariness and tedium seizes your soul. rock-jerk, jerk, upon the camel. You are sick of the thin, withered slip of a tail in front, and the gaunt, stiff movement of the shapeless, tawny legs before you; and you vainly turn in your seat for relief from the eyes of Khadra-vainly, for the curtains of the palanquin are drawn: the warm morning sunlight has been Mandragora to her, and she is sleeping.

The horizon is no longer limitless, and of an ocean grandeur. The sluggish path trails through a defile of glaring sand, whose sides just contemptuously obstruct your view, and exasperate you because they are low and of no fine outline. Switzerland has vanished to-day, and the Arabia that chokes your eye is Arabia Felix no longer. Your brow flushes and your tongue is parched; and, leering over the rim of the monotonous defile, Fever points at you, mockingly, its long lank finger, and scornfully, as to a victim not worth the wooing. Suffocated in the thick hot air, the sun smites you, and its keen arrows dart upwards, keener, from the ground. The drear silence, like a voice in nightmare, whispers, "You dared to tempt me:" and with fresh fury of shining, and a more stifling heat, the horrors of the mid-desert encompass you.