The meal being over, a certain weed, used as tobacco, is brought out and smoking is indulged in. Now the shepherds across the branch, with their reed pipes strike up a plaintive tune which floats over the valley and echoes from the distant hills. It strikes also a responsive chord in the hearts of the merchants and camel-drivers. They now bring out their rude instruments of music, and play and sing, chant and dance, for hours, much after the order of wild Indians. In their ideas of dress and propriety, in their customs and habits of life generally, these children of the desert are as primitive, as rude and uncultivated, as were their fathers 4000 years ago.
When they wake in the morning there is great stir, bustle and confusion. As the merchants curse the camel-drivers, they in turn curse and fight each other, and beat the camels. From the noise made one would think that two great armies had met in deadly combat. They slap and beat and kick each other around like madmen—I had almost said “like fiends!” They sometimes put as much on one camel as two or three ought to carry. The poor, faithful brutes can not speak audibly, but as these double burdens are placed upon them, they lie on the ground and bellow in a most pathetic manner. The pitiable cries of the dumb brutes are almost enough to move the surrounding stones to tears, and yet the heartless Arab is untouched. The more the camels bellow, the more their masters beat them with sticks, and prick them with sharp spears. Finally the ships are loaded, and soon you see them strung out across the hills, some going south to Egypt, others going north to Damascus and Beyrout, or east to Palmyra and Bagdad.
DANCING GIRL.
As often as one sees a night like this, and especially when one sees it near Dothan (the city of two wells), he thinks of the time when Jacob’s sons stripped Joseph of his coat of many colors, and cast him into the dry pit. And while yet on the plain of Dothan “they lifted up their eyes and beheld a company of Ishmaelites, with camels, going down to Egypt.”
THE SNAKE CHARMER.