s are famous or to be found in any but a very large
scale map, nor because there was even anything at these places to
justify their having names at all, but because each little group of
cacophonous Arabic words will call up to those who were with us memories
and mental pictures of incidents and scenes, otherwise forgotten. Beduin
place names too have a charm of their own. Hod um Ugba for
instance--officially translated as "the depression in the sand full of
palm trees of Mother Ugba." When we visited it, it was almost equally
full of dead horses. It was pathetic to think of old Mother Ugba
squatting in a concentration camp on the Canal and dreaming of the
obscure charms of her beloved hod! One hopes she is back in it by now
with Fathers Hamra and Jeheira and the rest, and we at any rate will
never disturb them more. Or was Mother Ugba some mythical heroine of
those great days when the armies of Egypt and of Asia moved through the
desert to fight and plunder--and the Beduin hung on their flanks and cut
up the wounded on either side indiscriminately, just as they do now. Or
did she lead her tribe in the host of Saladin against the Crusaders and
let the Saracens down as treacherously as she ambushed the Christians.
Old de Joinville in his thirteenth century _Chronicle of the Crusades_
has much to say of the Beduin. "Their belief is," he tells us, "that no
man can die save on the day appointed and for this reason they will not
wear armour." Recalling Palestine in the summer one can think of other
very good reasons for not wearing armour! Their place names do not seem
to have had much attraction for the Crusading chronicler, but perhaps he
felt rather doubtful of the spelling and he had no ordnance survey map
to guide him.

Bir el Abd was much the same as any other bit of desert, save that the
higher sand hills were lacking, the country consisting of rolling slopes
of no great elevation well spotted with scrub. It boasted a fine breed
of chameleon, and we also found a number of little tortoises, which were
pressed into the service to give a bit of sport! Tortoise racing was a
slow business, but eminently sporting, because the tortoise is so
splendidly unreliable. On one occasion one of the competitors in a big
sweepstake was discovered to consist of a shell only--the tortoise who
had once dwelt therein having died and turned to dust. In consideration
of this it was given a start of six inches, but long odds were offered
agai