The description of the evening meal need not be repeated. There was little variety in the halts. There was here, however, no sheep to slaughter and no tent to accommodate poor Miss Petty. She and her Lammikin had to bivouac on the bare ground, under the sky. Harold, who was not far from his charges, was startled in the night by shriek upon shriek. Were the Arabs murdering their unfortunate captives? Harold hurried to the spot in time to set his heel on one of the small dark reddish scorpions found in the desert, which had crawled on Shelah's dress.
"Horrible creature! And there's another! I declare that I can't and won't sleep on the sand!" cried Miss Petty, furiously shaking her clothes lest one of the hideous reptiles should be concealed in some fold. But there was nothing else on which to sleep!
Harold returned to his own place near Tewfik, the Bedouin who had first seized him, and who consequently seemed to regard the captive as his own special property. Weariness might have enabled the missionary to find some relief from sorrow in sleep, had he not been kept awake by the loud talking of the Arabs near him. From the few words which he made out, Harold felt assured that he himself was the subject of conversation. What Harold could not understand in the following dialogue, his imagination tolerably well supplied, though gaps of ignorance remained to perplex the mind of the hapless captive.
"We have won poor spoil this time," said the chief of the Shararat band. "These kafirs had hardly a piastre amongst them, the jewels are tinsel and glass; two of the party are dead already, and two of those left are not worth a handful of date-stones."
"Kismat" (fate), was Tewfik's characteristic reply.
"What shall we do with the tall Feringhee?" inquired the chief, glancing towards the spot where Harold was lying.
"Sell him, if we can get a purchaser. It will be strange if no one in Djauf be in want of a slave."
"But he is white; slaves in Arabia are usually curly-headed blacks from the African coast."
"He'll be a choice rarity then, like a white camel," was the laughing reply. Bedouins are fond of a joke.
"The worth of a camel is certainly not in its colour but in its power of bearing burdens," said the chief.