our lives. Sitting upon a packet,
therefore, I commended my soul to our blessed Saint Helena, while I
watched with despairing eyes the stealthy and menacing approach of the
Arab robbers.

"It may have been our own good fortune, or it may have been the handsome
offering of beeswax candles--four to the pound--which I had mentally
vowed to the Blessed Helena, but at that instant I heard a great outcry
of joy from among my own followers. Standing up on the packet that I
might have a better view, I was overjoyed to see a long caravan--five
hundred camels at least--with a numerous armed guard, coming along the
route from Macoraba. It is, I need not tell you, the custom of all
caravans to combine their forces against the robbers of the desert, and
with the aid of these new-comers we had become the stronger party. The
marauders recognised it at once, for they vanished as if their native
sands had swallowed them. Running up to the summit of a sandhill, I was
just able to catch a glimpse of a dust-cloud whirling away across the
yellow plain, with the long necks of their camels, the flutter of their
loose garments, and the gleam of their spears breaking out from the
heart of it. So vanished the marauders.

"Presently I found, however, that I had only exchanged one danger for
another. At first I had hoped that this new caravan might belong to some
Roman citizen, or at least to some Syrian Christian, but I found that it
was entirely Arab. The trading Arabs who are settled in the numerous
towns of Arabia are, of course, very much more peaceable than the
Bedouin of the wilderness, those sons of Ishmael of whom we read in Holy
Writ. But the Arab blood is covetous and lawless, so that when I saw
several hundred of them formed in a semi-circle round our camels,
looking with greedy eyes at my boxes of precious metals and my packets
of ostrich feathers, I feared the worst.

"The leader of the new caravan was a man of dignified bearing and
remarkable appearance. His age I would judge to be about forty. He had
aquiline features, a noble black beard, and eyes so luminous, so
searching, and so intense that I cannot remember in all my wanderings to
have seen any which could be compared with them. To my thanks and
salutations he returned a formal bow, and stood stroking his beard and
looking in silence at the wealth which had suddenly fallen into his
power. A murmur from his followers showed the eagerness with which they
awaited the order to