Soon the "Black Tents" were left far behind, and the camels struck into their regular caravan gait, rolling and lurching like a ship at sea.
If you were riding a camel for the first time you would understand why the Arabs call the camel "the ship of the desert," for it rolls backwards and forwards and pitches first forward and then backward exactly like a ship in mid-ocean.
At noon they halted for the midday meal. While the men hastily put up a tent, the children gathered dry branches in the thickets of thorn-bushes with which to make the fire. Meanwhile Hamid had spied some tents in the distance; and, near them, a woman tending goats.
"May we go and ask her to give us some milk, mother?" asked Fatimah.
"Yes, and here is some bread to give her in exchange for the milk," said Zubaydah.
The Bedouin woman gladly filled the bowl that the children brought with them with nice warm goat's milk, but when Fatimah offered her the bread, she shook her head angrily.
"Nay, nay, I am not a 'labban,'"—a milk-seller,—she said. The true Bedouins think it is a disgrace to sell milk, and that it is only right that they should give it freely to any stranger who may ask for it.
When the children got back with the milk, Zubaydah was frying dates in butter, and soon they were all sitting in the shade of the tent eating heartily of them and the cold meat and rice and cakes.
"The camels are glad to rest, too," said Rashid, watching them as they slowly knelt down one by one. It is one of the funniest sights in the world to see a camel lay down on the ground. He sighs and groans and slowly unbends his funny long legs that look as if they would come unjointed and drop off. He folds up his fore legs a little, then he folds up his hind legs in part, and then he falls on his knees until his nose nearly touches the ground. Now he finishes the folding up process with all his legs, as if they were the blades of a jack-knife, and tucks them well away beneath him.