[27] Don Raphel's _The Bedouins, or Arabs of the Desert_, Part II, p. 59; quoted in Burder's _Oriental Customs_, 2d ed., p. 72 f. Volney says of the Druzes, "When they have contracted with their guests the sacred engagement of bread and salt, no subsequent event can make them violate it."[28] This Volney illustrates by notable incidents. [28] Volney's _Travels_, II., 76. Mrs. Finn, wife of the English consul at Jerusalem, who was long resident in the East, gives the following illustration of the importance of salt as well as bread to a binding covenant. After a feast in the Hebron district of Palestine, one of the persons who shared it was waylaid and murdered by hired assassins. "One of the men (Abdallah) concerned in the deed, not as an actor, but as spectator, had been the night before actually eating with the victim. On hearing what had happened, the poor fellah woman who had cooked their supper, and who was much attached to the murdered man, bewailed herself, beating her breast and crying, 'Wo is me! wo is me! I left out the salt by mistake when making the bread last night for their supper. Oh that I had put it in! then would not Abdallah have dared to let my lord be murdered in his presence; he would have been compelled to defend him after eating his bread and salt. Wo is me! wo is me!'"[29] [29] _Survey of Western Palestine_, Special Papers, p. 355. John Macgregor, while on the upper Jordan in his canoe Rob Roy, was taken prisoner by the Arabs. As he parleyed with the old shaykh in his tent, Macgregor opened a box of fine salt and proffered a pinch of it to his captor. The shaykh had never before seen salt so white and fine, and, therefore, thinking it was sugar, he tasted it. Instantly Macgregor put a portion also into his own mouth, and with a loud, laughing shout he clapped the old shaykh on his back. The shaykh was dumbfounded. His followers wondered what had happened. "'What is it?' all asked from him. 'Is it sukker?' He answered demurely, 'La, meleh!' ("No, it's salt!") Even his home secretary laughed at his chief." "We had now eaten salt together," says Macgregor, "and in his own tent, and so he was bound by the strongest tie, and he knew it." The result was that Macgregor and his canoe were carried back in triumph to the river, and speeded on their way, while the people on the banks shouted "salaams" to their brother in the covenant of salt.[30] [30] Macgregor's _The Rob Roy on the Jordan_, p. 259 f. Salt alone is a basis of an enduring covenant, but bread alone is not so. Yet bread and salt may be such a basis, because there is salt as well as bread there. So commonly does salt go with bread that it is the exception when they are not together. Our English Bible asks, at Job 6: 6, "Can that which hath no savor be eaten without salt?" But the Septuagint reads: "Can bread be eaten without salt?"[31] [31] See Swete's version of _The Septuagint_, in loco.