Come, comrades, let us one and all
Join in to get Him back His ball.”
XVIII
THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD
If all Arabia is to hear the story of the Gospel, there are many zigzag journeys yet to be made. The country is much larger than most people imagine, and a great part of it is still unexplored. Fortunately the unexplored sections of the great peninsula are nearly all uninhabited as far as we know, but no one has been there to see or investigate. If you were to travel from New York to Chicago and back on a camel, the distance would be about as great as to cross Arabia once in its broadest direction. Topsy Turvy Land is three times as large as the state of Texas, the largest state in the Union. It is nearly as large as all British India, excluding Burma, and if you spread Arabia out on the map of Europe, without tucking in the corners, you could cover the whole of France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Servia, Roumania, and Bulgaria.
The population of this great stretch of country with its table-lands and deserts, its villages and encampments, is perhaps eight million; and just as Arabia, with its four thousand miles of coast, has only three lighthouses for ships that pass in the night, so the light of the Gospel is shining in only a very few places along the coast, and hardly at all in the interior. At Aden, and Muscat, and Bahrein, and Kuweit and Busrah, as well as along the rivers as far as Bagdad, there are lighthouses of the Gospel. Although only like little candles burning in the night, they can be seen from a long distance. Patients come for hundreds of miles to the hospitals, and when they go away, carry the gospel message for hundreds of miles back to their villages. And yet what are these few stations for so large a territory, and what can less than forty missionaries do among so many people?
When the great Missionary Conference met at Edinburgh in 1910 and the report was made on How to Carry the Gospel to all the non-Christian World, it stated that “Of the eight million inhabitants of Arabia, it is entirely safe to say that fully six million are without any missionary agency.” One can travel from Bahrein across the mainland for 1,150 miles without meeting a missionary or a mission station, all the way to Aden. On the entire Red Sea Coast, as well as the south coast between Aden and Muscat, there is no mission work. Of the six provinces of Arabia, only three are occupied by mission stations. No one has ever preached the Gospel at Mecca, where Mohammed was born, or at Medina, where he lies buried, and although some ninety thousand pilgrims from every part of the Moslem world pass through Jiddah every year on their way to Mecca, this important city is still waiting for an ambassador of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the most neglected class in this great neglected country are the Bedouins, or nomads. Like Ishmael of old, “their hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against them.” Hated alike by the town dwellers and the Turks, they are the roving gypsies of the Orient, and yet they are so numerous and so closely bound together by tribal ties that sometimes one can see their black tents spread out in vast encampments like a city of tabernacles in the wilderness.
It is a strange life these children of Ishmael lead, a life full of its joys and sorrows and desert hardships. Under the shadow of a black tent, or the shade of an acacia bush, or perhaps behind a camel, the Arab baby first sees the daylight. As soon as it is born, its mother gives it a sand-bath, and the father gives it a name. For the rest, it is allowed to grow up much as it pleases. Trained from birth in the hard school of fatigue and hunger and danger, the Bedouin children grow up saucy and impudent, but with cunning and a knowledge of all the ways of the desert and the life of the caravans.