Page:The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare.djvu/10

 to the conquest of Tunis^ where it finally established itself, and where its descendants may still be found. The main fact of this march of the Beni Helal is at any rate a living event in Arab tradition. When crossing the Great Nefud of Northern Arabia in 1879, the translators of the present work had pointed out to them a track locally known as the Road of the Helalat; and further west, in 1881, they found a similar tradition in regard to the group of hills lying between Gaza and Suez, and which has for its name the Jebel Helal. Moreover, the Howeytat Bedouins of Eastern Egypt, whose district adjoins Belbeis, have constantly affirmed to them their kinship with the historic tribe, though their claim is not admitted by other Bedouins, who give them a much less noble pedigree.

As a romance, "Abu Zeyd" is of more undoubted interest. It is not only an excellent example of the Mediaeval Epic in its Eastern dress, but is old enough to have been itself, perhaps, a model from which Europe took its romantic inspiration. It is not generally remembered how immense an influence the Arab invasion of Spain in the eighth century had on European thought, political, rehgious, and literary. From Arabia through Spain the idea of Christian "chivalry" sprang, the romance of the horseman of noble blood armed with the lance as contrasted with the base-born citizen on foot. The knight-errantry of our middle-ages was purely Arabian; the championing of the distressed, especially of women, by wandering adventurers; the