[p.148]Mohammed Ali’s vigorous policy, and such the effects of even semi-civilisation, when its influence is brought to bear direct upon barbarism.

To conclude this subject, the Tawarah still retain many characteristics of the Badawi race.  The most good-humoured and sociable of men, they delight in a jest, and may readily be managed by kindness and courtesy.  Yet they are passionate, nice upon points of honour, revengeful, and easily offended, where their peculiar prejudices are misunderstood.  I have always found them pleasant companions, and deserving of respect, for their hearts are good, and their courage is beyond a doubt.  Those travellers who complain of their insolence and extortion may have been either ignorant of their language or offensive to them by assumption of superority,-in the Desert man meets man,-or physically unfitted to acquire their esteem.

We journeyed on till near sunset through the wilderness without ennui.  It is strange how the mind can be amused by scenery that presents so few objects to occupy it.  But in such a country every slight modification of form or colour rivets observation:  the senses are sharpened, and the perceptive faculties, prone to sleep over a confused mass of natural objects, act vigorously when excited by the capability of embracing each detail.  Moreover, Desert views are eminently suggestive; they

[p.149]appeal to the Future, not to the Past:  they arouse because they are by no means memorial.  To the solitary wayfarer there is an interest in the Wilderness unknown to Cape seas and Alpine glaciers, and even to the rolling Prairie,-the effect of continued excitement on the mind, stimulating its powers to their pitch.  Above, through a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, and the splendours of a pitiless blinding glare, the Samun[FN#14] caresses you like a lion with flaming breath.  Around lie drifted sand-heaps, upon which each puff of wind leaves its trace in solid waves, flayed rocks, the very skeletons of mountains, and hard unbroken plains, over which he who rides is spurred by the idea that the bursting of a water-skin, or the pricking of a camel’s hoof, would be a certain death of torture,-a haggard land infested with wild beasts, and wilder men,-a region whose very fountains murmur the warning words “Drink and away!” What can be more exciting? what more sublime?  Man’s heart bounds in his breast at the thought of measuring his puny force with Nature’s might, and of emerging triumphant from the trial.  This explains the Arab’s proverb, “Voyaging is victory.”  In the Desert, even more than upon the ocean, there is present death:  hardship is there, and piracies, and shipwreck, solitary, not in crowds, where, as the Persians say, “Death is a Festival";-and this sense of danger, never absent, invests the scene of travel with an interest not its own.

Let the traveller who suspects exaggeration leave the Suez road for an hour or two, and gallop northwards over the sands:  in the drear silence, the solitude, and the fantastic desolation of the place, he will feel what the Desert may be.