"They are not. Our women at home are the sunshine of our lives."
"Please do not talk any more on that subject," he said as he wiped the sweat from his neck with his flowing sleeve.
Many were the peculiar incidents in our caravan of over fifteen hundred souls on our long journey of twenty-nine days up the Euphrates and over the desert, all of which I must pass over, noticing only Jona and his group as they appeared on the desert.
Jona, astride of his beautiful, fleet Arabian, was followed by a mammoth black camel loaded down with about eight hundred pounds of luggage. Following next was a tall, gaunt, mouse-colored camel on which was a platform fastened to the saddle; of which, on either side over the camel's sides, were attached covered seats which looked like dog houses. In each of these dog houses was a wife, his favorite and her assistant, Fatima. Each wore a veil over her head, jewels on her fingers, ankles, wrists, ears and neck, attired in a loose wrapper. Oriental nabobs usually travel with two wives, their favorite and her assistant. The elder, in this case, was his favorite; she bossed him around just like American wives do their husbands, not by force but through influence; as Abraham obeyed Sarah, and sent the guileless Hagar into the wilderness, regardless of his feelings.
A sort of Jacob's ladder, on which the women descended to and from their roost, was among the luggage on the pack camel, and notwithstanding the charge of my Rechabite friend that I was not to disquiet his wives, I continually placed the ladder and assisted Fatima and his favorite to ascend as soon as we struck camp; for if I had not, Jona was liable to leave his wives and other luggage on the camel until we had been on the sand for an hour. Fatima and I were usually side by side evenings, when her aptness in catching the English words and returning them to me in Arabic surprised me.
SLEEPING BEAUTY OF THE DESERT
On the twenty-eighth day, about eleven o'clock P. M., weary from the long day journey, I dined again on tea and toast, and with my boots on dropped on my cot, just for a moment; and seemingly before the moment had passed the morning sun peeped in and awoke me from my sweet dream of home. I awoke Jona, and while the camp still slumbered we ascended a rise of ground to gaze on that silent form of grandeurs which lay before us, full twenty miles away. As far as the eye could penetrate, north and south, the Syrian highlands, long known as the haunt of the most ferocious Bedouins, loomed up, where about in the center, seemingly imbedded in the glistening cliff, lay the ruins of the once proud city of Tadmor, the queen of the desert. For, while Nineveh and Babylon at their best were old gray monks, Tadmor, in the days of David, with her stately granite columns from the Nile, coquetted with the morning sun like a maiden in her teens.