[FN#323] The Badawi use javelins or throw-spears of many kinds, especially the prettily worked Mizrak (Pilgrimage i. 349); spears for footmen (Shalfah, a bamboo or palm-stick with a head about a hand broad), and the knightly lance, a male bamboo some 12 feet long with iron heel and a long tapering point often of open work or damascened steel, under which are tufts of black ostrich feathers, one or two.  I never saw a crescent-shaped head as the text suggests.  It is a “Pundonor” not to sell these weapons:  you say, “Give me that article and I will satisfy thee!” After which the Sons of the Sand will haggle over each copper as if you were cheapening a sheep. (Ibid. iii. 73.)

[FN#324] The shame was that Gharib had seen the girl and had fallen in love with her beauty instead of applying for her hand in recognised form.  These punctilios of the Desert are peculiarly nice and tetchy; nor do strangers readily realise them.

[FN#325] The Arabs derive these Noachidae from Imlik, great-grandson of Shem, who after the confusion of tongues settled at Sana’a, then moved North to Meccah and built the fifth Ka’abah.  The dynastic name was Arkam, M. C. de Perceval’s “Arcam,” which he would identify with Rekem (Numbers xxxi. 8).  The last Arkam fell before an army sent by Moses to purge the Holy Land (Al-Hijaz) of idolatry.  Commentators on the Koran (chaps. vii.) call the Pharaoh of Moses Al-Walid and derive him from the Amalekites:  we have lately ascertained that this Mene-Ptah was of the Shepherd-Kings and thus, according to the older Moslems, the Hyksos were of the seed of Imlik. (Pilgrimage ii. 116, and iii. 190.) In Syria they fought with Joshua son of Nun.  The tribe or rather nationality was famous and powerful:  we know little about it and I may safely predict that when the Amalekite country shall have been well explored, it will produce monuments second in importance only to the Hittites.  “A nomadic tribe which occupied the Peninsula of Sinai” (Smith’s Dict. of the Bible) is peculiarly superficial, even for that most superficial of books.

[FN#326] The Amalekites were giants and lived 500 years.  (Pilgrimage, loc. cit.)

[FN#327] His men being ninety against five hundred.

[FN#328] Arab.  “Kaum” (pron.  Gum) here=a razzia, afterwards=a tribe.  Relations between Badawi tribes are of three kinds; (1) Ashab, allies offensive and defensive, friends who intermarry; (2) Kiman (plur. of Kaum) when the blood-feud exists, and (3) Akhwan= brothers.  The last is a complicated affair, “Akhawat” or brotherhood, denotes the tie between patron and client (a noble and an ignoble tribe) or between the stranger and the tribe which claims an immemorial and unalienable right to its own lands.  Hence a small fee (Al-Rifkah) must be paid and the traveller and his beast become “dakhil,” or entitled to brother-help.  The guardian is known in the West as Rafik; Rabi’a in Eastern Arabia; Ghafir in “Sinai ;” amongst the Somal, Abban and the Gallas Mogasa.  Further details are given in Pilgrimage iii. 85-87.