By nature the Arab is active, vivacious, and keen-witted. He is proud of his lineage, earnest, and hospitable. The mother not only takes care of the home but educates the children; and, strange as it may seem to the outside world, illiteracy is practically unknown to Arabia.

To the Arabic race we are indebted for our knowledge of arithmetic, and many of the principles of algebra and geometry. The pendulum, the mariner's compass, and the manufacture of silk and cotton textiles were introduced into Europe by the Arabs. They claim to have used gunpowder as far back as the eleventh century. In the year 706 paper was made at Mecca and from there its manufacture spread all over the western world. To them we owe many of the useful arts and practical inventions which were later brought to perfection by other nations.

Khaibar Pass, the gateway to India
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Now, no one is quite certain about the Saracens as a people because the name has been very loosely used. It was applied by Roman soldiers to several wandering tribes of Arabs who were much accustomed to mistaking other people's flocks of sheep and herds of cattle for their own. Most likely there never was a Saracenic Empire. But there certainly was a time when Arabians controlled not only the Arabian peninsula, but also Syria and the fertile plains of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as well; and that great region became known as the "Land of the Saracens." From Damascus to Bagdad, and from the Bab-el-Mandeb to the Gulf of Oman, the Moslem was all-powerful.

Let us glance at the country itself. In the first place, Arabia is not a nation but a country made up of petty states—some independent, some controlled by the sultan of Turkey; two or three are included in the British Empire. But the country itself is very far removed from the rest of the world so far as accessibility is concerned; and although its coast is scarcely a gunshot from the greatest trade route of the East, Arabia is to-day one of the least-known countries in the world.

In general, the country is a moderately high table-land bordered by low coast plains. Much of it is an out-and-out desert; all of it is arid. Long ago it was divided into Arabia Petræa, Arabia Deserta, and Arabia Felix—that is, the rocky, the desert, and the happy. It is needless to say that Arabia the happy was the part receiving enough rainfall to produce foodstuffs.

The coast-line of this great peninsula is nearly as great as that of the Atlantic and Gulf coast of the United States; but in its entire extent, not far from four thousand miles, there is scarcely a harbor in which a good-sized fishing schooner could find safe anchorage. Even at Aden a steamship cannot approach within a quarter of a mile of the shore. So one will not be far out of the way in designating Arabia as an impassable country with an impossible coast.

It is estimated that about seven millions of people live in the entire peninsula. To say that these belong to the Semitic race is merely to say that they are dark-skinned and black-haired. The Arab, whether a merchant dwelling in a city along the coast, or a Bedouin wandering with flocks and herds, is a product of the desert and of the teachings of Islam. His black eyes twinkle with shrewdness and he is a past master of craftiness. As a trader he is unsurpassed, and Arab traders control the interior commerce of western Asia and northern Africa just as the Chinese control the trade of southeastern Asia.