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Traditions Noted. "When a Bedouin woman loses her husband, she is kept 40 days without washing and nobody sees her. . . . It is supposed to bring very bad luck to anybody who sees her on the day of the first bath."
Camels permit themselves but one vice, an innocent diversion of which these pseudo-docile beasts are ashamed. At night, having first ascertained that the occupants are asleep, they scratch their necks against the ropes of the tents.
When a Tebu rides a camel, he takes off his drawers to save wear and tear, and hangs them upon the camel's neck.
Desert men prefer having their dead bodies devoured by vultures to all forms of interment. "Better the entrails of a bird than the darkness of the tomb."
A Bedouin is ready at any moment to give his life for his camel.
Milestones. Skeletons of camels— the cheering advertisement of a well nearby. (Camels usually die near the end of a journey when, if water is scarce, they have been pushed too hard by their masters.)
The fabulous mountains of Arkenu, blazing, like golden thunderheads above the desert.
Drawings upon a rock wall, possibly made by heliolithic men. "The work of djinns," say the Tebus.
The lost oases of Arkenu and Ouenat—little pits of damp sand in the southwest corner of Egypt.
The Significance. Only a man who was at once a Muhammadan, a scientist and a leader of great tact, courage and obstinacy could have consummated this expedition. Ahmed Hassanein was awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. In this book, which is purged of science, he writes of long fatigues and desperate adventure like a University Fellow .discussing such fantasies over the afternoon crumpet, yet this reticence gives the tale an objective ambiguity, as if the type of all desert wanderers, the very ghost of the Golden Horde, rode with Hassanein's thin company along the last frontiers of nomadism. The volume is adorned with many excellent photographs, frontispieced with one of the author himself—no don, but a bold sheik, his falcon features glittering above an expanse of magnificent laundry.
The Author. Ahmed Hassanein Bey, a very great gentleman in Egypt, was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, won fame as a fencer in the University. He served in the Ministry of the Interior at Cairo, is now in the diplomatic service. King Fuad I is his friend.
Smart