All day long in the blazing heat the camels have come shuffling and slouching through the sand past Helouan, for the March full moon is here and five thousand Bedouins are making their annual pilgrimage to the Tomb in the Desert, where the Sheikh Abou Seria (“Father of Speed”) fulfils the function of an Arab Lourdes. From far and near with their , their wives and children, their tents and goats, their plaintive piping reeds and their incessant tapping of drums, the procession has been struggling in since sunrise. Hundreds of donkeys trip beside the stately camels, and the separate lines of dust radiate like the spokes of in invisible wheel towards the great encampment just below Helouan, to merge later in the single stream that journeys forty miles southeast to the Tomb itself. To the music of this soft, gay piping the camels come swaying in beneath their enormous loads. Tents spring up over acres of yellow sand; camps are pitched, all separate yet all touching; the donkeys roll in the hot soil; the children laugh and play; the men, grave as the camels, sit round against the walls of bersim and water-jars and baggage that lie in heaps; and the women whisper to one another behind their veils how their little ones shall all be healed presently, and more⁠—that the childless wives among them shall at last become mothers. At the Tomb of Abou Seria these things come to pass at the March full moon. It is a time of great rejoicing. Shortly after dawn the first stragglers came in⁠—fellaheen on tired donkeys many, too, on foot. They came from villages on the other side of Cairo. For the poor travel slowly, and start first. The wealthy Bedouin sheikhs, swathed in white, with circlets of gold about their turbaned heads, come later on their grand white camels, wives and retainers close behind them. And from dawn, all through the burning heat of noonday and afternoon, the horde of fellaheen troop straggling in till the crimson sunset, dying behind the Lybian Desert, falls on an encampment grown wide and deep. The palm grove along the Delta cast long shadows. The lizards sing among the dunes. The women start their wild and curious ululating shrill as an animal cry and hardly human. And suddenly the moon shows her huge yellow disc above the Mokattam Hill and draws a marvellous sweetness out of the Desert, sheeting the spread encampment with a silvery veil. It is a wonderful sight. The camels seem twice their natural size among the piled-up fodder. Little fires spring up, built over stones. Voices are low; noises die down one by one⁠—braying of donkeys, gurgling grunts of camels, bleating of goats and kids soon to be sacrificed. Groups gather closely round he fires, for the night air nips. Coffee is made in tiny china cups, and the gaunt heads of the camels thrust forward over the very shoulders of their owners They chew and chew and chew. Those dark bundles in the sand lying apart by themselves, are men already asleep, wrapped from head to feet in sheets of black and blue and white and yellow. No one treads on them. The bare feet silently to and fro, picking their way so carefully. And everywhere dark faces gleam in the moonlight, eyes flash like stars and white teeth shine. Little visits are paid from group to group. A bearded fellow with face of night enters a circle where all are seated round the fire and coffeepot. “Are you happy?” “I am happy because of your existence.” “Coffee?” handing him a cup. “Coffee forever,” as he sip it slowly. We outsiders watch and stare and question, yet get no nearer to them. Centuries lie between. The courtesy is perfect. They accept cigarette, lighting it with flint and steel, offering the latter as a present that may not be refused. The young man, playing his reeds so softly to a group of listeners, hands them over to an admirer who has praised them, with “Please accept them from me.” ’ Behind, in the sand, men are praying on their knees toward Mecca. “Sing to us, kindly,” asks an Englishman, who knows Arabic, of another man. The singer is shy, but only requires coaxing, and when the Englishman suggests a certain song the other hesitates. “It is not pleasing that I should sing such a song before gentlemen and ladies.” “They don’t understand a word.” “But I cannot do it. Whether they understand or no, I find it not pleasing.” And, after this lesson in sweet delicacy, between the verses of a song he finally chants, always this question: “Does my voice please you, O gentleman?” Yet these are merely fellaheen, the peasant toilers of the Delta, who accompany the great Bedouin Pilgrimage to the Desert Tomb of Abou Seria, Father of Speed, one of Muhammad’s generals⁠ ⁠… And after midnight one or two of them rise quietly und resume their journey.