Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/165

Rh hills of loose sand that surrounded us, but after a while we were lucky enough to recover our right line of march. The same day we fell in with a Sheik, the head of a family, that actually dwells at no great distance from this part of the Desert during nine months of the year. The man carried a matchlock, of which he was very proud. We stopped and sat down and rested awhile for the sake of a little talk. There was much that I should have liked to ask this man, but he could not understand Dthemetri’s language, and the process of getting at his knowledge by double interpretation through my Arabs was unsatisfactory. I discovered, however (and my Arabs knew of that fact), that this man and his family lived habitually for nine months of the year without touching or seeing either bread or water. The stunted shrub growing at intervals through the sand in this part of the Desert enables the camel mares to yield a little milk, which furnishes the sole food and drink of their owner and his people. During the other three months (the hottest of the months, I suppose) even this resource fails, and then the Sheik and his people are forced to pass into another district. You would ask me why the man should not remain always in that district which supplies him with water during three months of the year, but I don’t know enough of Arab politics to answer the question. The Sheik was not a good specimen of the effect produced by the diet to which he is subjected. He was very small, very spare, and sadly shrivelled—a poor, over-roasted snipe, a mere cinder of a man. I made him sit down by my side, and gave him a piece of bread and a cup of water from out of my goat-skins. This was not very tempting drink to look at, for it had become turbid, and was deeply reddened by some colouring matter contained in the skins, but it kept its sweetness, and tasted like a strong decoction of russia leather. The Sheik sipped this, drop by drop, with ineffable relish, and rolled his eyes solemnly round between every draught, as though the drink were the drink of the Prophet, and had come from the seventh heaven.

An inquiry about distances led to the discovery that this Sheik had never heard of the division of time into hours; my Arabs themselves, I think, were rather surprised at this.