the same quarter, albeit with a smaller _entourage._ The
desert journey would be trying, and probably entail much loss,
especially of the cattle and beasts; but at length, on the seventh or
eighth day, as the water was getting low in the skins and the camels
were beginning to faint and groan with the scant fare and the long
travel, a dark low line would appear upon the edge of the horizon in
front, and soon the line would deepen into a delicate fringe, sparkling
here and there as though it were sown with diamonds.[13] Then it would
be recognized that there lay before the travellers the fields and
gardens and palaces and obelisks of Egypt, the broad flood and rich
plain of the Nile, and their hearts would leap with joy, and lift
themselves up in thanksgiving to the Most High, who had brought them
through the great and terrible wilderness to a land of plenty.

But now a fresh anxiety fell upon the spirit of the chief. Tradition
tells us that already in Babylonia he had had experience of the violence
and tyranny of earthly potentates, and had with difficulty escaped from
an attempt which the king of Babylon made upon his life. Either memory
recalled this and similar dangers, or reason suggested what the
unbridled licence of irresponsible power might conceive and execute
under the circumstances. The Pharaohs had, it is plain, already departed
from the simple manners of the earlier times, when each prince was
contented with a single wife, and had substituted for the primitive law
of monogamy that corrupt system of hareem life which has kept its ground
in the East from an ancient date to the present day. Abraham was aware
of this, and "as he was come near to enter into Egypt," but was not yet
entered, he was seized with a great fear. "Behold," he said to Sarai his
wife, "Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon;
therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that
they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will
save thee alive," Under these circumstances Abraham, with a craft not
unnatural in an Oriental, but certainly far from commendable, resolved
to dissemble his relationship towards Sarah, and to represent her as not
his wife, but his sister. She was, in point of fact, his half-sister, as
he afterwards pleaded to Abimelech (Gen. xx. 12), being the daughter of
Terah by a secondary wife, and married to her half-brother "Say, I pray
thee," he said, "thou art my sist