serter had a long start; but they rode
with a will when they did go.

If anything on earth looks more absurd than a ridden camel
galloping away in the moonlight, with his neck stretched out in
front of him and his four ungainly legs in the air all together,
it is three more camels doing the same thing. They looked like a
giant's washing blown off the line flapping before a high wind,
and made hardly more noise. The whack-whack-whack of sticks on
the beasts' rumps was as distinct as pistol-shots, but you hardly
heard the galloping footfall.

Grim went on about his business, for changing loads in the dark
is a job that needs attention, unless you choose to have a good
beast lose heart before morning and lie down in the middle of the
road. A camel in pain from a badly cinched girth will endure it
without argument for just so long; after which he quits, and
not all the whacking or persuading in the world will get him
up again.

At the end of twenty minutes we were under way once more. Peace
closed down on us, and we swayed along under the stars in
majestic silence. There have been better nights since, I
think; but until then that was the most glorious experience
of a lifetime.

It is my peculiar delight to read and relive ancient history, and
of all history books the Old Testament is vastly the most
absorbing--far and away the most accurate. There is a school of
fools who set themselves up to scoff at its facts, but every new
discovery only confirms the old record; and here were we
sauntering through the night on camels over hills where the
fathers of history fought for the first beginnings of each man's
right to do his own thinking in his own way.

After a while Ali Baba gave his camel bell to his oldest son
Mujrim, and forced his beast up beside mine, seeming to think
silence might ruin the nerve of such a raw hand as myself. Or
perhaps it was pride of race and country that impelled him. Even
the meanest Arab thrills with emotion when he contemplates his
ancient heritage, just as he rages at the prospect of seeing the
Jews return to it, and Ali Baba, though a prince of thieves, was
surely not a man without a heart.

But the trouble with Arab as distinguished from Jewish history is
that too little of it was written down, and too much of it
invented to prove a theory--much like the stuff they put between
the covers of school history books--so Ali Baba's lecture,
although gorgeous fiction in its way, hardly enric