A body of twenty Arab warriors mounted on camels was crossing the desert, and as they rode in Indian file, and from ten to twenty paces apart, the string was a long one. Probably they did not belong to a tribe that had taken part in any of the numerous routs, assaults on strong places, and massacres, which had supplied so large a portion of the Mahdi’s troops with modern arms of precision, for those of them who carried guns had those long-barrelled, short-stocked weapons, which are familiar to us in pictures, and which are so admirable from an artistic, and so worthless from the Wimbledonian, point of view. But the majority carried spears instead of guns, and they were all armed with swords and pistols.
Whatever the actual number of days and hours which elapse between the dates of an Arab’s birth and death, his life seems a short one reckoned by sensations and incidents, for he spends so very large a proportion of it in sitting on the hump of a camel as it toils across a country of maddening sameness. The distances he has to travel are so vast, and his means of progression so limited!
Perhaps that is the reason why, when he does come across an occasion of excitement, he is so terribly in earnest. He is months and months without the chance of an emotion, accumulating explosive forces all the while; and when he at last goes off, he does it like dynamite.
And yet, perhaps, the child of the desert, if he visited our shores, might point to a ploughboy plodding up and down, with one foot in the furrow, from dawn till dusk, and ask if his task were lively. Or, still more forcibly, he might take us into an office in a dingy city street where copying clerks sat at their monotonous work, and put it to us how many minutes in the week we supposed they lived.
But still, though it might be difficult to deny that he had reason on his side, there is a certain dreariness about the endless sandy plains which renders it difficult to imagine it possible for a human being to spend his days in traversing them without going mad.
But these present travellers did not seem to mind it. Some of them solaced themselves with the chibouque, as they sat with the comfort which can only be acquired after years of practice on the humps of their camels; the others, though silent and quiescent, did not look bored.
Presently the one in front was attracted by an object a little out of his path, and turned to examine it more closely. Then he spoke to his hygeen, which knelt down, whereupon he dismounted, and went up to the figure of a man lying on the sand. There had been a great deal of fighting and carnage, beyond the ordinary blood-feuds between the different tribes, going on for some months in the country, and the bodies of men were as commonly found as those of camels used to be. So it may seem surprising that the Arab should have taken the trouble to dismount for such a trifle.
But this body was dressed, and had weapons—was worth despoiling, in fact. This particular child of the desert was not more greedy than others; he was a man in some authority, and rich according to his own ideas and those of his people. But still, one does not like to see articles of value unappropriated, and one might as well have them as any one else. Such sentiments might animate you or me, let alone a gentleman who had been brought up to regard all human beings who did not belong to his own particular set much as we look upon beavers, foxes, hares, grouse, pheasants, as creatures that are provided by Providence for our sport or profit.
The body lay on its breast with the arms stretched out; the head a little turned, so that the right cheek lay on the sand. And when the Arab bent over it, it did not look, he thought, quite dead. Well, if he were not, a man with such a good gun as that ought to be when a better man wants it. But still, it has been shrewdly observed that there is a deal that is human about human nature. The Arab might not improbably be in the same position some day, and would he not then require aid himself? And then the Koran enjoined true believers to succour the distressed who fell fainting in the desert; and this was an educated man, who read his Koran; and a religious man, according to his lights, who obeyed its precepts when he happened to remember them, and temptation to the contrary was not too strong. If he had known that the property before him belonged to a pig who did not believe the Prophet, it might have been different; but he could not tell that, and he turned Harry Forsyth over to give him a drink of water.