As the Bedouins never reside in towns or occupy houses, they live in encampments, pitching their tents wherever they can find pasturage for their horses and camels, changing the site of their abode as often as the support of their cattle or the vicinity of a more powerful and hostile tribe may compel them. Sometimes they sow a little Indian corn, and return to reap it when grown. The milk of their cattle and a few esculents found in the desert are their chief food.
All are trained to the use of arms, and are skilled in horsemanship, and Allan could perceive that the care of the flocks and herds was committed mostly to the women, while the youth of the tribe--all fellows spare of form, light of limb, and active as their native gazelles--were in their saddles scouring round the camp, and practising the use of the javelin, the spear, and the Remington rifle, with which many in Lower Egypt were now armed, as they had been flung away in thousands by the fugitive soldiers of Arabi.
The innate love of freedom which is fostered by the facilities for a nomadic life, and the desert-locomotion which his horses and camels afford him, impart to the Bedouin a dignified and haughty bearing, which contrasts powerfully with the servility and pusillanimity of the rustic sons of Egypt.
Unchanged from unknown generations, they are the same as when Volney wrote of them--'Pacific in their camp, they are everywhere else in a habitual state of war. The husbandmen whom they pillage hate them; the travellers whom they despoil speak ill of them; and the Turks, who dread them, endeavour to divide and corrupt them.'
Their wandering life affords more freedom to their women than usually falls to the lot of Moslem females, and the wild desert, where they always dwell, becomes in many cases the actual scene of those keen and passionate love adventures which are depicted in the tales and poems of the Arabians.
If Allan would escape from these Bedouins, he would require to have all his wits about him, and not risk the slightest mistake.
'The child of the desert, reared in continual wandering, possesses in the fullest degree the activity of _sense_,' says a writer. 'His spirit is all abroad in his perceptive organs; he is voluble and sagacious, quick, passionate, and sympathetic, but by no means intellectual. Quickness of perception and strength of imagination are mental characteristics of the Bedouin, and superstition, the child of ignorance, is nowhere more powerful than among the wanderers of the desert.'