Their livelihood was won principally by the robbing of caravans. The plundering of them, in fact, was justly held by the Bedouins to be merely a righteous method of exacting the customs that were levied everywhere; for the land, they maintained, was exclusively theirs by right of domain, and trespassers thereon must pay an appropriate penalty. Mounted upon their swift and spirited horses, sprung from the purest pedigree through many generations of careful selection and trained to respond instantly to the slightest touch of the rein, the Bedouins rarely failed to overtake their fleeing prey. Since the loot of caravans supplied them with all the necessities of life, they naturally worshiped their horses and camels--in particular the ones they had stolen--with a superstitious reverence. Their dromedaries, indeed, offered an escape from every contingency: they furnished transportation, food (both tender flesh and milk), long hair for tent-building, and, in case of a pinch, the water in their capacious reservoirs could be used for drink and their dung for fuel. The supreme height of generosity for a Bedouin was attained on those very rare occasions when he slaughtered his own cherished camel to feed and warm the stranger of a night. In some respects the most striking and potent social institution among the Arabs, urbanites and nomads alike, was the annual fair. Every year, during certain months that were supposed to be inviolably sacred--so sacred, in fact, that even personal and tribal broils were taboo--a series of pageants was held throughout the whole country; but the most populous and successful of them all was celebrated at Ukaz, near Mecca. To that place came Arabia’s best and fairest: opulent merchants, actors garbed in masks or veils, poets of the desert, sheiks notorious for their proficiency in war and love, dancing girls, and maidens whose alluring sensuousness was subtly dissembled in languorous modesty, met on a common footing. Specimens of trade and primitive art abounded in many booths; the violent contortions of the corybantes, as they whirled dizzily from tent to tent, excited the reckless Bedouins to such a pitch that drunken orgies occasionally followed, during which the sacred season was momentarily forgotten and resolutions of peace and chastity conveniently overlooked. The pious devotions of pilgrims, the piteous moans of beggars for alms, and the quiet exchange of talk between traders, sightseers and friends, was often disturbed by hilarious shrieks of applause for the bacchantes, by the clang of the cymbal, and the clash of the scimitar. If shrines for prayer were open all day, gambling houses did a flourishing business at night; and if poetic and histrionic contests delighted the onlookers, unfortunate results frequently followed. For the poets, chanting a rudely rhythmical verse, incontinently boasted their individual excellence in the manufacture of stanzas; and not seldom did they