[p.281] The distance traversed that night was about twenty-two miles in a direction varying from easterly to north-easterly. We reached Al-Madinah on the 25th July, thus taking nearly eight days to travel over little more than 130 miles. This journey is performed with camels in four days, and a good dromedary will do it without difficulty in half that time.[FN#24] [FN#1] The natives of Al-Hijaz assured me that in their Allah-favoured land, the Samum never kills a man. I "doubt the fact." This Arnaut's body was swollen and decomposing rapidly, the true diagnostic of death by the poison-wind. (See Ibn Batuta's voyage, "Kabul.") However, as troopers drink hard, the Arabs may still be right, the Samum doing half the work, arrack the rest. I travelled during the months of July, August, and September, and yet never found myself inconvenienced by the "poison-wind" sufficiently to make me tie my Kufiyah, Badawi-fashion, across my mouth. At the same time I can believe that to an invalid it would be trying, and that a man almost worn out by hunger and fatigue would receive from it a coup de grace. Niebuhr attributes the extraordinary mortality of his companions, amongst other causes, to a want of stimulants. Though these might doubtless be useful in the cold weather, or in the mountains of Al-Yaman, for men habituated to them from early youth, yet nothing, I believe, would be more fatal than strong drink when travelling through the Desert in summer heat. The common beverage should be water or lemonade; the strongest stimulants coffee or tea. It is what the natives of the country do, and doubtless it is wise to take their example. The Duke of Wellington's dictum about the healthiness of India to an abstemious man does not require to be quoted. Were it more generally followed, we should have less of sun-stroke and sudden death in our Indian armies, when soldiers, fed with beef and brandy, are called out to face the violent heat. At the same time it must be remembered, that foul and stagnant water, abounding in organic matter, is the cause of half the diarrhoea and dysentry which prove so fatal to travellers in these regions. To the water-drinker, therefore, a pocket-filter is indispensable. [FN#2] Al-Shark, "the East," is the popular name in the Hijaz for the Western region as far as Baghdad and Bassorah, especially Nijd. The latter province supplies the Holy Land with its choicest horses and camels. The great heats of the parts near the Red Sea appear prejudicial to animal generation; whereas the lofty table-lands and the broad pastures of Nijd, combined with the attention paid by the people to purity of blood, have rendered it the greatest breeding country in Arabia.