tents must have been pitched in some oasis, or restful isle of palms like Wady Gharundel, or Wady Taiyibeh, or even the beloved Feiran. Just round the tents or screens there would be vegetation, some spring or well of waters would be near-probably no picturesque or bubbling fountain, like those of northern hills and vales, but one or more sandy holes, deeper or shallower, supplied from springs copious enough to supply flocks and herds for a few weeks' sojourn.

But as Isaac went forth to his evening thoughts and prayers, the scene all round him must have gained infinitely in beauty, though without losing such terrors as it had for one who knew its life so well. We all know the beauty of a low sea-sunset, and can all imagine the great orb going down amidst horizontal clouds parallel with the far distance; still reflected from sand and stone, but now in color rather than in light. All is now ruddy gold and pure crimson, which spreads away into the horizon, the glimmering land that is very far off, and mingles with the barred sky in a series of hues, for which, as Ruskin says, there are no words in language and no ideas in the mind. The best description I remember of the transition from the burden and heat of the day to its long-desired ending is in Mr. Kinglake's "Eothen "; and it may come in here, as it really conveys some of the most graphic and vivid ideas in the power of language, and, when you have read it, you know what a day is like in the hot, short, desert journey from Gaza to Cairo, in going down into Egypt from the Holy Land:

"As long as you are journeying in the interior of the desert, you have no particular point to make for as your resting-place. The endless sands yield nothing but small, stunted shrubs: even these fail after the first two or three days; and from that time you pass over broad plains-over newly reared hills-through valleys dug

to

out by the last week's storm; and the hills and the valleys are sand, sand, sand, and still only sand again. The earth is so samely, that your eyes turn toward heaven-toward heaven, I mean, in the sense of sky. You look to the Sun, for he is your taskmaster, and by him you know the measure of the work you have done, and the measure of the work that remains for you do. He comes when you strike tent in the early morning; and then, for the first hour of the day, as you move forward on your camel, he stands at your near side, and makes you know that the whole day's toil is before you. Then for a while, and for a long while, you see him no more, for you are vailed, and shrouded, and dare not look upon the greatness of his glory, but you know where he strides overhead, by the touch of his flaming sword. He runneth about to the end, he delighteth as a giant to run his course. No words are spoken now, but your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, your skin glows, your shoulders ache, and for sights you see the pattern and the web of the silk that vails your eyes, and the glare of the outer light. Time labors on-your skin glows, your shoulders ache, your Arabs moan, your camels sigh, but conquering Time marches on, and by-and-by the descending sun has compassed the heaven, and now softly touches your right arm, and throws your lank shadow over the sand, right along on the way for Persia. Then again you look upon his face, for his power is all vailed in his beauty, and the redness of flames has become the redness of roses; the fair, wavy cloud that fled in the

morning now comes to his side once more-comes blushing, yet still comes on-comes burning with blushes, yet comes and clings

to his side."

The shepherd life of the patriarch must have made him familiar with many days and thoughts like this. Probably he now thought of what he had heard of Euphrates and the richer plains of the East, and of the mysterious call of his father from Ur of the Chaldees, and his own foretold birth and destiny-to be father, in his turn, of a great nation, as the stars in multitude. And so he would have thought of the kindred he had never seen by the great river, and of the promised bride of his own race; and, no doubt, he felt that she was long in coming. Probably it was not the first time he had gone out to watch the clear evening horizon for some moving speck in distance, which

| might be her precursor. And though movement is generally the first thing one can detect in a monotonous sky-line, and one sees there is something before one knows what it is, it almost invariably proves to be the neck and head of a camel when it is recognized. There is, of course, a peculiar graphic exactness in the expression, "Behold, the camels were coming." The experienced eye of the young sheikh would note the waving necks and high-piled burdens far away; and perhaps it was quick to note the covered litters, or takht-er-rahwans, which would tell him of her whom he longed for. It is a moral certainty that Rebekahı rode her camel within some such screen as is represented in our central woodcuts. Probably she and her maid, or nurse, threw open the covering, in the cool evening and morning march, when their men-folk were not too near. When she lighted down from off her camel, he knelt, and, for aught I know, he was induced to do so by that peculiar gurgling sound in his driver's throat, which I had to learn myself between Suez and Sinai. It is supposed to suggest the outpouring of water to the camel, and to be connected in his mind with rest, and his kneeling down as a preliminary to getting rid of his burden. At all events, it makes a camel kneel down now, and I dare say it did then.

For in the East and its daily life, as every traveler has borne witness, one learns to understand how the Law and the Way of the Mede and Persian altereth not: how the more unchanging conditions of human life form unprogressive habits, which pass from father to son, and from mother to daughter, undisputed and unvaried. One kind of dress is enforced, chiefly because it is very hot, and only occasionally very cold, and never too wet to be pleasant, and almost always too dry; also you can scarcely get any other kind of clothes, and therefore there is no fashion or ungraceful change. And every garment is becoming, because it thoroughly suits the wearer and his needs, and the scene and the "environment." The Bedouin Arab to this day has his skull-cap and thick-woven kerchief or kefiyeh to shield his head and shade his eyes, with the additional protection of the akkal, or camels'-hair fillet; and it is unquestionably the handsomest head-dress in the world. All day long he goes about in a long shirt, and hide sandals, if he possesses the latter. The former is tucked up over the girdle which carries his crooked knife, flint, steel, and tobacco-bag. He has a striped cloak to throw over that in the cool morning and evening, and for Winter he has a heavy hooded mantle of wool, goats'hair, and camel-hair all together, woven in country looms of Lebanon, and thick enough to stand by itself. The fitness of his dress consists chiefly in this, that he can dispense with all the warm part of it at once, and resume it in no time; and he always looks well, whatever his own personal appearance may be. His shirt or tunic has all the grace of the Greek chiton, and his abba falls as well as the himation; and neither garment is less graceful because his essentially equestrian habits have made sleeves a necessary addition. As to lower garments, he rides as fast and as far in dilapidated cotton drawers as the well-equipped traveler in boots and breeches.

In reading the books of Genesis and Exodus as part of the history of the world and of ourselves—and there is not much use in reading them as anything else-we ought not to forget the relation of the Hebrew to the Arab. The typical divergence of Jacob and Esau, or indeed of Isaac and Ishmael, may explain it. Esau is the hunter and warrior, his brother the plain man dwelling in tents. That is to say, the one is the true desert chief, who will not deal with cultivation or commerce; who does not apprehend, or value as he should, the promised land, and the prospect of a great national existence for his children; nor, most of all,

the promised blessing for all nations of the world. The other willingly accepts the shepherd life, and his sons are found engaged in agriculture, binding their sheaves in the field; with him and his began that Syrian life of pastoral happiness, except for sin and sorrow, which centres in its highest beauty in the person and character of David. Considering lapse of time, and the necessary work of death and change, the country life of settled Arabia or Palestine, and those who lead it, are not very unlike Hebrews and the Hebrew life of old. Abraham and Isaac seem to have lived between the desert and the lands inhabited; to have depended on and wandered with their large flocks and herds, but still to have kept in full relation with the kings or chiefs of settled countries. Nevertheless, it is well to remember that the Arab of the present day is akin to the Hebrew, to say the least, and that the Hebrew is still a Mosaic Arab; in plain fact, retaining many of the best qualities of the purest and most ancient races on earth. No one in his senses, who has seen good specimens of either, will deny them power, courage, tenacity and physical endurance in the highest degree, and in an ancestral and inherited form.

But to return to our camels. This digression has a genuine bearing on the subject: first, dependence on the camel, as the chief servant of man among the lower animals, marks the child of the desert, the son of Ishmael and of Esau, who has always had his share accordingly of the carrying trade of the Semitic East; and then, secondly, there is a curious illustration from spoken and written language, which shows how near to each other, and the original stock of human speech, the two languages must be. The first three letters in their alphabet, Aleph, Beth, Gimel, represent Aleph, the ox, the horned giant who leads all the herd; the house (i. e. tent or screen, Beth in Hebrew, Beit in Arabic); and the camel, Gamal, or Gimel. Anybody will see that the Hebrew letters are derived from a horned animal, a booth or covering, and from the long neck of the camel. As was said before, and as every sketcher knows who has crossed the desert, the waving, graceful curve of the neck catches one's eye before all else in distance; and indeed it is the most attractive feature in the animal when you are near him.

ance.

For, excepting high-bred white dromedaries, camels are, I fear, highly unprepossessing animals at first meeting, and do not gain greatly on one's affections by further acquaintI rode one camel all the way to Sinai from Suez, and another all the way back. We got on very well. I had to thump him with a pipe-stick from time to time, and I got him green stuff to eat whenever I could. He never bit or struck at me, he always knelt down and got up as he was wanted, he was equal to a rattling trot at evening or morning, when I had held him back from our caravan for a mile or two for the sake of sketching. But he and his fellow were regular desert dromedaries, fine-limbed and thoroughbred; and in as good condition as is possible for such lean creatures, and more intelligent than others. I think it is his determined indifference or unconsciousness about you and your meaning, or what you want him to do, which makes men quarrel with the camel.

utter any sound except brute amorphous noises, expressive of complaint and disgust, sometimes so like execration that some cynic of our party observed the beasts “ swore like Christians." I don't know why, except that they bear the burden of the desert, and seem to be heirs of all the ages of starvation and thirst, blows and curses, frost and fire, which have been passed in the wilderness, I do not myself habitually suffer from indigestion; bat when I call to mind the manner and extent to which some of my friends are irritated by internal function, I think it must be a very trying thing to be born with four stomachs not to mention a large reservoir for water.* Any trav eler who will imagine himself thus internally constructed, with the first four storehouses full of nothing but choppe straw and rushes, and the water-bag strongly impregnated with Epsom salts from some brackish sand-hole, will prob ably admit that he might be led to growl a good deal—al so camels must go on growling to the end of time.

Mr. Palgrave's knowledge of the animal is unquestion. able, and beyond appeal; and I am sorry to say he is ca the unfavorable side, and gives some instances of malignity and revenge, which seem to show that the animal's rudimentary intellect inclines to evil rather than good. It seems so with many dull human creatures also. At l events, the camel has the excuse of misery and inherited evil-handling. I have sometimes thought that, in contend ing with a horse's temper or timidity, a man may often be, in fact, fighting against the ill-humor and remembered cutting whip of some groom or breaker unknown: and! must say that Sinai camels, bred and broken to ride by the gentle and good-hearted race of the Towara, are not u amiable creatures to my knowledge. I believe that where there is any choice, as with the Anazeh and great came breeding tribes, either high-bred dromedaries alone ar used for riding, and gain intelligence from kindness; those are selected from the herds which are capable of taking a lead. In every large number of animals, in fact, whether of oxen, mules or camels, there are naturl leaders, whose instincts or influence direct the others. These will go by themselves under superior direction, whereas an ordinary baggage-camel or ox has no ide except of following his leader, or rather of being painfall dragged on by the chain through his nose, which the drive? has attached to his leader's tail. The Northern, Bactrian, or two-humped camel, is much more savage than the Egyptian dromedary; and as far as I remember then in Smyrna, the most brutal-looking of all brute creatures, He is no more like a good little Towara beast-still less like one of the beautiful white dromedaries of Oman ar Eastern Arabia, than a navigator of the roughest sort like the late and truly lamented Mr. Moore. Then, of course, huge and heavy-laden beasts such as jostle one i the streets of Cairo, bear the same relation to the ridingcamel as the cart-horse to the thoroughbred. Altogether,

* A representation of the cells of the camel's stomach is givench page 552. The first stomach, or paunch, has a division which may be closed by muscular action, the walls of which are provide with a system of large cells, capable of considerable distensio

which the animal can fill with water to the amount of sever

quarts, and thus carry with itself a supply for its own wants f about a week—a supply which it occasionally yields with its life th save that of its master. The other anatomical peculiarities of the camel, to which it owes so much of its ungainly appearance, ar in reality the very things which, apparently deformities, go far? make it one of the most useful of animals, indispensable, inde, for passing from place to place in the desert. Thus, the hump its back is a storehouse of nutriment which is slowly re-absorte

the race of camels, like the generations of men, varies according to circumstances.

I remember the departure of the Haj, or Mecca pilgrimage, from Damascus in 1862, and the large number of very fine tawny Anezeh camels which were assembled for it, picketed in the fields just without the gates. Many would come back no more, but leave their bones along the painful way, as I have seen them so often. They are really like the doomed Israel of the wanderings; they must all die in the wilderness, happy only if their driver has time or pity to draw his sharp khandjar across their throats; when they sink down exhausted, or split up, and cruelty will get no more from them. Those who will look at the hind-quarters of the camel with the litter will see the great danger of overloading the ungainly beast. He will bear, on an average, about 300 pounds as a regular burden. If he is too heavily weighted, and especially if he gets into slippery ground, there is nothing to prevent those straggling hind-legs or their broad, flat feet, from slipping utterly away from each other and fatally straining the unhappy animal, or actually tearing him asunder. I never saw it happen-I never shall now, I trust; but there can be no doubt of the possibility, or that in long marches for life—and in the Nefoods and Dahnas of Eastern Arabia, or in the terrible Northeastern or Turcoman Deserts, all marches are for life-the loss of many camels by extremity of suffering is a matter of course. So is death always to ourselves and all creatures; but these have to die so hard.

I remember a sight at Suez, as long ago as 1859, long before the Canal, even before the present excellent hotel, when all the flat desert from Cairo was exactly as Kinglake describes it above, with new-heaped hills and freshly hollowed valleys of shifting sand, glimmering with heat late in October. It was the first time I had ever been there, or had looked on the Red Sea. I had been on the top of Mont Blanc on the 6th of the month, and on that of the Great Pyramid on the 26th, and this may have been the 28th. The transition from the great, glittering snow-fields and ice-glazed rocks to the sand-waste, which is as bright and terrible, with the interval of wandering fields of barren foam in the Mediterranean, was rapid and exciting enough, and the great associations of the new scene were somewhat overpowering. One felt that one had passed over, and saw in very truth, some part of the track and the sufferings of the People in the Wilderness, and a new and emphatic sense of the reality of history was upon one. But if any feature of the imaginative picturesque could have added to the interest of that meeting of the mountains, the desert, and the sea, it was the wrecks of shattered old vessels, which were imbedded in the beach just below high-water mark, slowly swallowed up between the sand-drift and the Indian Ocean. These would sail the sea no more; and well within sight of their great wooden skeletons, on whose hollow timbers the sun glared white and dazzling, were the huge ribs and thigh-bones of dead camels. The desert ships had gone down also, close by the wrecks of the wide waters.

The manners and habits of camels at longer or shorter halts are well illustrated in the smaller cuts. At night, for a long rest, they draw rather sociably together, and their smell makes it necessary to insist on their bivouacking to leeward of a traveling party. When their loads are off (these are generally carried in huge saddle-bags, balancing each other on each side, or in rope nets, with a central burden), they stroll away after watering, and pick up what they can, or lie down and chew the cud with all the manifold energy of their fourfold stomachs. If an Arab jumps down, and leaves his camel for any short time, he generally

ties a foreleg together, doubling it up, shank and thigh, at the knee, and the patient creature stands looking unutterables on its three "left" legs till he comes back. Our Sinai camels were lightly laden and easily marched, and when they were turned loose at the end of the day, and found some coarse grass or young broom, used to sit down and ruminate over it with an air almost of grave happiness which seemed to say, "Sweet Home."

The cut at the bottom of page 572 illustrates, in a sketchy, spirited way, the somewhat difficult and unwilling entrance of a party of Desert camels into a large khan or its courtyard, or, perhaps, within some needle's eye, or postern-gate of a city. I think what they call the Dung-Gate at Jerusalem, near the Tyropoon, was such a place, larger or smaller, between 1859 and 1862. Camels of the wilderness, like their masters, have an objection to entering cities or even sleeping under roofs. They have always misgivings as to getting out again. The comparison of the rich man to the laden camel is specially wonderful, like other parables or similes of Our Lord, from its curious coincidences of detail. The man laden with thick clay does not altogether desire to enter through the strait gate into the kingdom of Heaven. He knows it is there; not merely conventionally, not without hope-but he has misgivings about entering in. And then he is laden, and that high pile of merchandise and those well-stuffed saddle-bags, they cannot get in with him. They are a burden, no doubt, but he is used to them; and oh, how hard and fast they are tied on; strapped and bound and knotted, till he is sore-backed, perhaps, and sore-ribbed, but dreads the wrench and smarting with which they will come away. He could get in, and there is welcome within, they are trying to get him in. It is all the burden—and he backs, and moans, and struggles in the entry.

see.

I once saw a mad camel at Bethlehem and anything more like one of Dante's or Orgagna's demons, I never did He kicked or bucked his saddle off with two or three efforts; which considering how a camel-saddle fits the hump was a remarkable performance. Then he seemed to strike right and left with both forelegs at once, and in a manner which cleared the small square before the Basilica in a few moments. Our party, mounted on little Syrian hacks, all squeezed into corners, or made other rapid strategic movements, as in a moment; and he had all the place to himself. He passed continuous periods of minutes on his hind-legs; towering about above everything, with no special point or object of attack, but conducting himself as one that beateth the air, in general protest and outbreak of brute, unmeaning wretchedness. And all the time his utterances were not as the bellowing of anything else, animate or inanimate. They were more frantic than a bull's, though as sullen; they were too stupid for a tiger, though as ferocious; they were harsher than the American Devil, though as loud. His voice was like himself, amorphous and bestial to a degree unattainable by any other beast. They got him out of the square somehow, and he went, like the Battle of the Lake Regillus, "roaring down the pass" of one of the narrow, steep streets. He was not like my Desert "mount," who would take green boughs from one; and at a halt by the well, used to wave his long neck about sometimes with an air of hospitality, and many little moans and growls, implying welcome to the high Wadies. Treatment, in short, makes great differences not only with men but with camels. Where life is hard, burdens heavy, marches long, and men reckless of their own or others' life, their hands and voices will always be too harsh. We are many of us tired wayfarers, driven on and driving others; but, with God's help, we will not be too sorely "discouraged because of the way."