Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/156

140 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 pur-