her younger sister.  They had trudged on foot four long hours, armed with sticks to urge on that lazy white camel, always loitering to snatch a bite of desert-thorn with his giant jaws.  A short time before sunset I saw the two children mount the animal by climbing up its neck, as only Arabs can, but now, at call to prayer they devoutly slipped down.  Hand in hand they ran ahead a short distance, shuffled aside some sand with their bare feet, rubbed some on their hands, (as do all pious Moslems in the absence of water), faced Mecca, and prayed.

As they did then, so at sunrise and at noon and at four o’clock and sunset and when the evening star disappeared—­five times a day—­they prayed.  It is not true, as is generally supposed, that women in Moslem lands do not pray.  Only at Mecca, as far as I know, of all Arabia, are they allowed a place in the public mosques, but at home a larger per cent. observe the times of prayer than do the men.

When Noorah had ended her prayer and resumed the task of belabouring the white camel, she turned to me with a question, "Laish ma tesully anta?" which with Bedouin bluntness means, “You, why don’t you pray?” The question set me musing half the night; not, I confess, about my own prayers, but about hers.  Why did Noorah pray?  What did Noorah pray?  Did she understand that

    Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear,
    The upward glancing of the eye when only God is near,

as well as the dead formalism of the mosque?  How could I answer her question in a way that she might well understand?  And if hers, too, was a sincere prayer, as I believe,—­the prayer of an ignorant child of the desert,—­did she pray words or thoughts?  What do Noorah and her more than two million Bedouin sisters ask of God five times daily?  Leaving out vain repetitions, this is what they say: 

    “In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate;
    Praise be to God who the two worlds made;
    Thee do we entreat and Thee do we supplicate;
    Lead us in the way the straight,
    The way of those whom Thou dost compassionate,
    Not of those on whom is hate
    Nor those that deviate.  Amen.”

It is the first chapter of the Koran and is used by Moslems as we use the Lord’s Prayer.  The words are very beautiful I think, don’t you?

Whether Noorah understood what she asked I know not; but to me who saw and heard in the desert twilight, (as under like conditions to you), the prayer was full of pathos.  The desert! where God is, and where but for His mercy and compassion death and solitude would reign alone; the desert, a world of its own kind, a sea of sand, with no life in it except the Living One, and over it only His canopy of stars—­God of the two worlds!  And to that God, than whom there is no other, and whom they ignorantly worship, these sons and daughters of outcast Ishmael bow their faces in the dust and five times daily entreat and supplicate to be led aright in the way of truth.