Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/114

 But it is not only the feeling of home, but the feeling of liberty, that attaches the Arab to his mountains and deserts. He loves the freedom of the wilderness, which is more to him than soft raiment and kings' houses. From long wandering there is a restlessness in his very blood which cannot be tamed. "Every kind of beasts is tamed, and hath been tamed, of mankind": man himself alone remains untamable. One might as well think of taming the wildest Camanches as the Bedaween. They are an untamable race. True children of Ishmael, they have roamed these deserts three thousand years untouched by civilization. I have sometimes amused myself by thinking what would be the result of an experiment to civilize a Bedawee. If he were to be taken to Paris, to be dressed in European costume, and made in his exterior like a man of the gay world, and taught all the luxuries and the vices of civilization, yet in his moments of pleasure there would creep over his face the expression of melancholy which seems to belong to the Oriental races, and at the first moment he would escape from his golden chains, from a life which was a bondage and slavery, and fly to his desert, to his tent and his camel.

With such memories and musings, we began our next morning's march. When we turned our backs on the Oasis of Wady Feiran, it was like leaving home. How soon the traveller on the desert gets a feeling of home for a spot where he has camped by the brookside and under the trees, where peace has come to him as he sat before his tent door in the cool of the day, when the evening wind gently stirred the leaves of the palms over his head. Three days before, this oasis was as utterly unknown to us as if it were a valley among the mountains of Central Asia. Now it had become dear by that Sabbath in the wilderness, by the ascent of Serbal, and even by our faintness