Bespangled with dew.”
Very nice aren’t they? Well, a fellow once took the starch out of them by adding a line of reply:
“Twould give me the rheumatiz and so it would you,”
which is about the size of it.
All parties making this journey require an escort. We had one, and it consisted of one man. He was a picturesque looking rooster, with a burnous or cloak, that may have been new once, though I doubt it, and he kept a handkerchief tied around his forehead. H e would have been of great service in a fight; his gun was of an antiquated pattern, and when he tested it in camp, he snapped it half a dozen times before it would go off. He was an inveterate beggar of tobacco for cigarettes, and kept two of us reasonably busy to supply him.
He took a great fancy to my tobacco pouch, and tried to intimate that I should give it to him, but I assumed an air of stupidity, and couldn’t understand him. Twenty times in the course of the day he renewed the topic, but always with the same result, and in spite of all his signs, I would not comprehend. Probably he set me down as the stupidest idiot he had ever met, and my dullness may have served to enliven his subsequent stories to his friends. He got after the “Doubter,” but that worthy refused to talk with him as soon as he discovered that he couldn’t talk, and that the Bedouin wanted to beg something.
The region between Jerusalem and the Jordan and Dead Sea abounds in these rascals. They are shepherds and robbers, according to circumstances. We found them tending their flocks or loafing around their villages, and frequently they conversed with our escort. Had we been unaccompanied, one of the villages that we passed would have signaled to another, and we should have been plundered. We took the precaution to leave all our money, letters of credit, and everything of that sort, except our watches, with the keeper of our hotel in Jerusalem, so that we would not have been a very valuable prize, but at the same time it would have been inconvenient to be robbed.