.. The
monotony of the chant hushed his thoughts, and the sleep into which
he fell must have been a deep one.

A long time seemed to have passed between sleeping and waking....

Throwing his blanket aside, he seized his revolvers. The night was
filled with cries as if the camp had been attacked. But the
disturbances was caused by the stampeding of the horses; three had
broken their tethers and had gone away, after first tumbling into
the reeds, over the hills, neighing frantically. As his horse was
not one of the three it did not matter; the Arabs would catch their
horses or would fail to catch them, and indifferent he stood watching
the moon hanging low over the landscape, a badly drawn circle, but
admirably soft to look upon, casting a gentle, mysterious light down
the lake. The silence was filled with the lake's warble, and the
ducks kept awake by the moon chattered as they dozed, a soft cooing
chatter like women gossiping; an Arab came from the wood with dry
branches; the flames leaped up, showing through the grey woof of the
tent; and, listening to the crackling, Owen muttered "Resinous
wood... tamarisk and mastic." He fell asleep soon after, and this
time his sleep was longer, though not so deep... He was watching
hawks flying in pursuit of a heron when a measured tramp of hooves
awoke him, and hard, guttural voices.

"The Arabs have arrived," he said, and drawing aside the curtain of
his tent, he saw at least twenty coming through the blue dusk, white
bournous, scimitars, and long-barrelled guns! "Saharians from the
desert, the true bedouin."

"The bedouin but not the true Saharian," his dragoman informed him.
And Owen retreated into his tent, thinking of the hawks which the
Arabs carried on their wrists, and how hawking had been declining in
Europe since the sixteenth century. But it still flourished in
Africa, where to-day is the same as yesterday.

And while thinking of the hawks he heard the voices of the Arabs
growing angrier. Some four or five spurred their horses and were
about to ride away; but the dragoman called after them, and Owen
cried out, "As if it matters to me which hawk is flown first." The
quarrel waxed louder, and then suddenly ceased, and when Owen came
out of his tent he saw an Arab take the latchet of a bird's hood in
his teeth and pull the other end with his right hand. "A noble and
melancholy bird," he said, and he stood a long while admiring the
narrow, flattened head, the curved