We started next morning under a Scotch mist, and were soon wet to the skin. After four or five hours’ toiling, yet advancing little, we turned restiff from cold and hunger, and desired to be housed, dried, or, at all events, fed. I insisted, as the direction we travelled in mattered little, on going in search of a Douar. For two hours more we continued to stray. Having missed the one we had sought, and avoiding others which were in sight, our course became to me at last utterly incomprehensible. I thought that wherever there was a tent there was a welcome, and wherever a roof, a shelter. I now discovered my mistake. I insisted on approaching a very small Douar of about fifteen tents, to which some old men and boys of most forbidding appearance, were driving in the cattle. The soldiers went to them, and standing long conversing, I advanced towards the Douar; they rushed at me with violent gestures. M. Seruya offered them money, but they derided him, and signed to us to be off. It was strange: we had offended in nothing; we demanded nothing; we only begged for shelter, and we were willing to pay for it. They were Arabs: we were strangers. Our party was calculated to command respect or enforce obedience, being composed of officers from the city, the sheik of a neighbouring tribe, emissaries of the Sultan: we outnumbered them, and were armed and mounted. Yet the sense of hospitality, money, authority, strength availed us nothing; I asked for an explanation but gained none. Then came the question--the Homeric question, “Who are you?--of what race, of what land?” Εἴπὲ δέ μοι γαῖαν τε τεὴν δῆμον τε πόλιν τέ. Now light broke in. I had to ask the name, not of a village but a tribe.[253] A tribe might be trodden down, not the individuals; these were not a dozen shepherds:--they were _Saba_, who muster two thousand five hundred firelocks. This tribe had travelled from Arabia: they could go back to-morrow if they liked. They might have come yesterday, or a thousand, or two, or three thousand years ago. To such as they are, time brings no change, distance presents no obstacle. But this name was not heard now for the first time. Was it they, perchance, who stole Job’s cattle? Did any of them accompany their queen to Jerusalem? How do these bear the patronymic of that mysterious stock? Sheba was the firstborn of Cush and elder to Phut and Canaan and Mizram. Yet I could not call them with Isaiah “men of stature.” These Saba have seen arise and pass away the great empires of the earth. They will live when that one to which the wanderer belongs, whom they would not receive, is gone to be addressed by the shades of Nineveh and Babylon, “Art thou too become as one of us?” Well, they did not choose that we should enter, and we had neither right to question nor complain. My escort were Moors, not Frenchmen.