All are trained to the use of arms, and are skilled in horsemanship, and Allan could perceive that the care of the flocks and herds was committed mostly to the women, while the youth of the tribe—all fellows spare of form, light of limb, and active as their native gazelles—were in their saddles scouring round the camp, and practising the use of the javelin, the spear, and the Remington rifle, with which many in Lower Egypt were now armed, as they had been flung away in thousands by the fugitive soldiers of Arabi.
The innate love of freedom which is fostered by the facilities for a nomadic life, and the desert-locomotion which his horses and camels afford him, impart to the Bedouin a dignified and haughty bearing, which contrasts powerfully with the servility and pusillanimity of the rustic sons of Egypt.
Unchanged from unknown generations, they are the same as when Volney wrote of them—'Pacific in their camp, they are everywhere else in a habitual state of war. The husbandmen whom they pillage hate them; the travellers whom they despoil speak ill of them; and the Turks, who dread them, endeavour to divide and corrupt them.'
Their wandering life affords more freedom to their women than usually falls to the lot of Moslem females, and the wild desert, where they always dwell, becomes in many cases the actual scene of those keen and passionate love adventures which are depicted in the tales and poems of the Arabians.
If Allan would escape from these Bedouins, he would require to have all his wits about him, and not risk the slightest mistake.
'The child of the desert, reared in continual wandering, possesses in the fullest degree the activity of sense,' says a writer. 'His spirit is all abroad in his perceptive organs; he is voluble and sagacious, quick, passionate, and sympathetic, but by no means intellectual. Quickness of perception and strength of imagination are mental characteristics of the Bedouin, and superstition, the child of ignorance, is nowhere more powerful than among the wanderers of the desert.'
But in what direction was Allan to bend his steps, if he contrived to elude his captors? He might only wander into the barren desert—a sea of sand—there to perish of hunger and thirst, or be overtaken to suffer a cruel death.
Reflection showed him that it would be better to temporise—to await the return of the sheikh, and endeavour to treat about a ransom.
Beyond the encampment of rude tents, which they carry with them from wadi to wadi—the male portion employing their horses and camels in the transport from one oasis to another—Allan could see the desert, traversed by the camel-route to Suez by Regum-el-Khel, spreading far away to the north-east, the horizon enveloped in fog in the morning and evening, for the season was moist now.
Near the camp was the tomb of a santon, or holy man, surmounted by a little white dome, and shaded by date-trees.