Unlike the more civilized Mahometans, they care little about veiling their faces, and, in fact, pass a life nearly as free as that of the men. Even the women’s apartment of the tent is thrown open by day for the sake of air, and any one can see freely into it.
Feminine beauty differs as much among the Arabs as among other people. Mr. Palgrave says wittily that if any one could invent an instrument which could measure beauty—a kalometer, as he calls it—the Bedouin would be “represented by zero, or at most 1°. A degree higher would represent the female sex of Nejed; above them rank the women of Shomer, who are in their turn surmounted by those of Djowf. The fifth or sixth degree symbolizes the fair ones of Hasa; the seventh those of Katar; and lastly, by a sudden rise of ten degrees at least, the seventeenth or eighteenth would denote the pre-eminent beauties of Oman.
“Arab poets occasionally languish after the charmers of Hejaz; I never saw anyone to charm me, but then I only skirted the province. All bear witness to the absence of female loveliness in Yamen; and I should much doubt whether the mulatto races and dusky complexions of Hadramout have much to vaunt of. But in Hasa a decided improvement in this important point is agreeably evident to the traveller arriving from Nejed, and he will be yet further delighted on finding his Calypsos much more conversible, and having much more too in their conversation, than those he left behind him in Sedeys and Aared.”
It is popularly thought that Arab manners are like those of the Turk,—grave, polite, and majestic. The fact is far different. Though, like the American Indian, the Arab has a proud and stately walk, and knows well enough how to assume a regally indifferent demeanor on occasion, he is by nature lively and talkative, not caring very much what he talks about; and fond of singing Arab songs in that curious mixture of high screaming falsetto and guttural intonation which he is pleased to consider vocal music.
Then the general manners are by no means dignified, even when the Bedouins want to do special honor to a guest. Mr. Palgrave spent much time among them, and has drawn a vivid picture of life in a Bedouin encampment. It is no unfavorable one, the inmates being described as “ajaweed,” or gentlemen—though the author remarks rather wickedly that, if they were gentlemen, he very much wondered what the blackguards were like.
“The chief, his family (women excepted), his intimate followers, and some twenty others, young and old, boys and men, came up, and, after a kindly salutation Bedouin-wise, seated themselves in a semicircle before us. Every man held a short crooked stick for camel-driving in his hand, to gesticulate with in speaking, or to play with in the intervals of conversation; while the younger members of society, less prompt in discourse, politely employed their leisure in staring at us, or in pinching up dried pellets of dirt from the sand, and tossing them about.
“But how am I to describe their conversation, their questions and answers, their manners and jests? ‘A sensible person in this city is like a man tied up among a drove of mules in a stable,’ I once heard from a respectable stranger in the Syrian town of Homs, a locality proverbial for the utter stupidity of its denizens. But among Bedouins in the desert, where the advantages of the stable are wanting, the guest rather resembles a man in the middle of a field among untied mules, frisking and kicking their heels in all directions around him.
“Here you may see human nature at its lowest stage, or very nearly. One sprawls stretched out on the sand, another draws unmeaning lines with the end of his stick, a third grins, a fourth asks purposeless or impertinent questions, or cuts jokes meant for wit, but in fact only coarse in the extreme. Meanwhile the boys thrust themselves forward without restraint, and interrupt their elders (their betters I can hardly say) without the smallest respect or deference.
“And yet, in all this, there is no real intention of rudeness, no desire to annoy—quite the reverse. They sincerely wish to make themselves agreeable to the new comers, to put them at their ease, nay, to do them what good service they can, only they do not exactly know how to set about it. If they violate all laws of decorum or courtesy, it is out of sheer ignorance, not malice prepense. And, amid the aimlessness of an utterly uncultivated mind, they occasionally show indications of considerable tact and shrewdness; while, through all the fickleness proper to man accustomed to no moral or physical restraint, there appears the groundwork of a manly and generous character, such as a Persian, for instance, seldom offers.
“Their defects are inherent in their condition, their redeeming qualities are their own—they have them by inheritance from one of the noblest races of earth, from the Arabs of inhabited lands and organized governments. Indeed, after having travelled much and made pretty intimate acquaintance with many races, African, Asiatic, and European, I should hardly be inclined to give the preference to any over the genuine unmixed clans of Central and Eastern Africa. Now these last-mentioned populations are identical in blood and tongue with the myriads of the desert, yet how immeasurably inferior! The difference between a barbarous Highlander and an English gentleman, in ‘Rob Roy’ or ‘Waverley,’ is hardly less striking.”