Lady Hester had found the best formula for travelling in the East: that which consists of living the life of the Arabs without sharing their tents infested with vermin, of becoming impregnated with the picturesqueness of their manners without mimicking them, of admiring the patriarchal simplicity of their repasts without partaking from the common pot. People who have never roved the world except from the depths of their arm-chairs, do not understand this reserve; it is so much less poetical! But the greatest travellers are those who watch their luggage with the greatest care. One can very well enjoy the pleasure of a Bedouin camp without being covered with fleas and without having one's stomach turned by meats more or less dirty and decomposed. Only few persons have the courage of their opinions. Lady Hester had courage of all kinds. Thus, she really knew the Bedouins, not the Bedouins of exportation and of comic opera, but the dirty Bedouins, the Bedouins to the life, braggarts, plunderers, cheats, rancorous haters, as witness the one who having had his pipe filled with camel dung, by way of tobacco, by a Christian humorist, gave the village over to fire and sword, and exterminated all the caravans within reach of his vengeance! But so ready in praises, so apt in compliments, singularly discerning--do they not call her "the Queen?" From time to time, there was certainly a shadow. The Bedouins showed their true character in declaring that if the pacha's troops had had the audacity to penetrate into the desert, they would have sent them--stark-naked and without beards--to their affairs. Was it not, after all, the fault of those who treated them as fools and related to them cock and bull stories at a time when they are most susceptible and more difficult to manage than all the nations of old Europe. And then she had the good fortune to encounter a sheik. A marvellous sheik! A sheik in whose presence Lord Petersham would die with envy. The sprightly air of a Frenchman with the manners and the ease of Lord Rivers or the Duke of Grafton. She learned the Bedouin morals, the strange customs and the famous _Dukhyl_, the code of the rights and the prohibitions of hospitality. A Bedouin who had been robbed has no courts to which to appeal. What does he do? He lies in wait for the robber and so soon as he catches sight of him, he throws at him a ball of thread which he has concealed in his hand. If the ball of thread in unwinding itself touches the robber, the victim has won his cause and recovers his property. But if he misses his aim, he must fly as quickly as he can to save his life. The captive to regain his liberty has only to make secretly a knot in his master's keffiye, but, attention, _nefah_! If the murderer succeeds in entering his victim's tent or in eating at the family table, he is sacred, but take care, _nefah_!