thing." And the words put the thought into
his mind that although they had been travelling for many hours they
had not yet seen a human being, nor yet an animal. Whither the Arabs
had gone the dragoman could not tell him; he could only say they came
to this plain for the spring pasture; their summer pastures were
elsewhere, and he pointed to an old olive, brown and bent by the
wind, telling Owen it was deemed a sacred tree, to which sterile
women came to hang votive offerings. Owen reined up his horse in
front of it, and they resumed their journey, meeting with nothing
they had not met with before, unless, perhaps, a singular group of
date-palms gathered together at one spot, forerunners of the desert,
keeping each other company, struggling for life in a climate which
was not theirs.

At eleven o'clock a halt was made in the bed of a great river
enclosed within steep mudbanks, now nearly as dry as the river they
had crossed in the morning; only a few inches of turbid water, at
which a long herd of cattle was drinking when they arrived; the
banks planted with great trees, olives, tamarisks, and masticks. At
three o'clock they were again in the saddle, and they rode on,
leaving to the left an encampment (the dragoman told Owen the name of
the tribe), some wandering horses, and some camels. The camels, who
appeared to have lost themselves, did not gallop away like the
horses, but came forward and peaceably watched the cavalcade
passing, absent-minded, bored ruminants, with something always on
their minds. The sobriety of these animals astonished him. "They're
not greedy, and they are never thirsty. Of what do they remind me?"
And Owen thought for a while, till catching sight of their long
fleecy necks, bending like the necks of birds, and ending in long
flexible lips (it was the lips that gave him the clue he was
seeking), he said, "The Nonconformists of the four-footed world,"
and he told his joke to his dragoman, without, however, being able
to make him understand.

"These Arabs have no sense of humour," he muttered, as he rode away.

The only human beings he saw on that long day's journey were three
shepherds--two youths and an old man; the elder youth, standing on a
low wall, which might be Roman or Carthaginian, Turkish or Arabian
(an antiquarian would doubtless have evolved the history of four
great nations from it), watched a flock of large-tailed sheep and
black goats, and blew into his flageolet, drawing from