The starry heaven by night and the moon he recognises as his friends and protectors; and he gladly welcomes the moment when these guardians overcome the enemy, and drive off the beaming sun, when noon is followed by afternoon, and the evening comes on with its cool breeze, on the track of the departed solar heat. Then he is delivered from the tiresome ḳail, ‘midday sleep,’ which the noon-day heat had brought on. He therefore likes best to begin his journey in the afternoon, and continues it till night or during the night.[137] ‘In their journeys and expeditions with caravans or for plunder,’ says Sprenger of the Arabs, ‘they generally travel during the night. When one rides on a camel at a slow pace through the monotonous desert, the nights seem very long. But the heart is filled with quiet delight by the stillness of the night and the enjoyment of the fresh air, and the eye involuntarily looks upwards. Hence we find even in the Ḳorân and in the poetry of the Bedawî frequent allusion to the starry heaven and its motion.’[138] The caravan-songs (ḥidâh) accordingly refer mainly to night-travelling, as e.g. one quoted by Wetzstein: O how journey we, while dew is scattered out And desert-dust bedecks the lips of sumpter beasts. O how journey we, while townsmen sleep With limbs involved in coverlets;[139] and when he travels by day he follows the course of the clouds, seeking coolness and shade. The Arabic poet Abû-l-ʿAlâ al-Maʿarrî, who, like all the later writers of ḳaṣîdâs,[140] makes the horizon of Beduin life the background of his poetry, says somewhere of his beloved, As though the cloud were her lover, she always turns her saddle To the quarter where the cloud is moving;