The real Bedouin is not a large personage. He is rarely taller than five feet and seven or eight inches, and is not inclined to corpulence. He appears taller than he really is by reason of his erectness, and he has a light, elastic step and performs every movement with ease and grace. His features are sharp, his nose aquiline, his eyes dark, deep set and generally lustrous, his beard thin and short and his hair long and worn in greasy plaits down each side of the face. The complexion is a dark olive, but it varies considerably among different tribes. The Bedouins of Jerusalem and most other parts of Palestine are a burlesque upon the sons of the Desert. The “Doubter” called them sons of thieves, or something of the sort, and for once we agreed with him.
The first one that was pointed out to me was enough to make a chicken laugh or a mule sing. He was mounted on a horse that looked as if he had walked out of a bone-boiling factory by mistake and was waiting to go back again and take his turn. His (the horse’s) pet hold appeared to be in waiting, and certainly his general style indicated that he could put the time in that way better than in any other unless it were in dying.
As for speed he couldn’t pass any other horse, short of a dead one, except by going the other way, and I have a strong belief that a dead horse would have given him a reasonably lively trial.
He was all over knobs like an Irish blackthorn and the “Doubter” took him at first for a lot of oyster shells nailed against a garden gate. He drank through his left eye or rather the socket for it, and then his upper lip curled over in a sort of a hook that was very convenient in picking up anything; one ear hung forward and the other aft; his tail had been originally “set up” but it had broken and lopped half way so that it doubled back on itself in a manner remarkable to behold. The rider was as great a burlesque as the horse. He looked like a last year’s scarecrow, coming home from a drunk, and in gazing upon his looped and windowed raggedness you experienced a desire to move him to the nearest cornfield, run a bean pole through him, and set him up on a stump. As a work of art, he was worthy a place among the pictures and statuary in the capitol at Washington, and it was fortunate that none of our aesthetic Congressmen could have a chance at him. He carried a spear and tried to wave it at an imaginary foe, but before he got it in the air the point fell out and disconcerted him. We turned away to hide our tears—and smiles. A regiment of oil derricks would, be about as serviceable as one composed of these fellows, so far as fighting qualities are concerned. If I am ever robbed I hope it will not be by one of these cheap-John Bedouins. I should feel as badly as a man I once knew who was telling me of an accident from which he was limpingly recovering.
“To think,” said he, “that I should have been ten years at sea, and four years in the army in the field, with never a scratch, and then be run over by a swill-wagon and have my leg broken.”
In the forty miles and more from Kuryetein to Palmyra there is not a drop of water, and the journey is generally made in one day with a single brief halt. The valley is the same and varies from four to eight miles in width, and the features of the landscape are the same as before.
By and by the mountains shut in upon the valley and leave only a narrow and crooked pass. We enter this and suddenly the whole mass of ruins upon the site of Palmyra are spread before our wondering eyes.