At two P.M. we were roused to a dinner as simple as the breakfast had been.  Boiled rice with an abundance of the clarified butter[FN#5] in which Easterns delight, some fragments of Kahk[FN#6] or soft biscuit, and stale bread[FN#7] and a handful of stoned and pressed date-paste, called ’Ajwah, formed the menu.  Our potations began before dinner with a vile-tasted but wholesome drink called Akit,[FN#8]

[p.246] dried sour milk dissolved in water; at the meal we drank the leather-flavoured element, and ended with a large cupful of scalding tea.  Enormous quantities of liquid were consumed, for the sun seemed to have got into our throats, and the perspiration trickled as after a shower of rain.  Whilst we were eating, a Badawi woman passed close by the tent, leading a flock of sheep and goats, seeing which I expressed a desire to drink milk.  My companions sent by one of the camel-men a bit of bread, and asked in exchange for a cupful of “laban.[FN#9]” Thus I learned that the Arabs, even in this corrupt region, still adhere to the meaningless custom of their ancestors, who chose to make the term “Labban[FN#10]” (milk-seller) an opprobrium and a disgrace.  Possibly the origin of the prejudice

[p.247] might be the recognising of a traveller’s guest-right to call for milk gratis.  However this may be, no one will in the present day sell this article of consumption, even at civilised Meccah, except Egyptians, a people supposed to be utterly without honour.  As a general rule in the Hijaz, milk abounds in the spring, but at all other times of the year it is difficult to be procured.  The Badawi woman managed, however, to send me back a cupful.

At three P.M. we were ready to start, and all saw, with unspeakable gratification, a huge black nimbus rise from the shoulder of Mount Radhwah, and range itself, like a good genius, between us and our terrible foe, the sun.  We hoped that it contained rain, but presently a blast of hot wind, like the breath of a volcano, blew over the plain, and the air was filled with particles of sand.  This is the “dry storm” of Arabia; it appears to depend upon some electrical phenomena which it would be desirable to investigate.[FN#11] When we had loaded and mounted, my camel-men, two in number, came up to the Shugduf and demanded “Bakhshish,” which, it appears, they are now in the habit of doing each time the traveller starts.  I was at first surprised to find the word here, but after a few days of Badawi society, my wonder diminished.  The men were Beni-Harb of the great Hijazi tribe, which has kept its blood pure for the last thirteen centuries,-how much more we know not,-but they had been corrupted by intercourse with pilgrims, retaining none of their ancestral qualities but greed of gain, revengefulness, pugnacity, and a frantic kind of bravery, displayed on rare occasions.  Their nobility, however, did not prevent my quoting the Prophet’s saying, “Of a truth, the worst names among the Arabs are the Beni-Kalb