Of their wonderful acuteness in hearing, some well-attested anecdotes are told of those who act as pilots in the Red Sea. They know very nearly the time when ships from India may be expected, and going down to the water’s edge every night and morning, they lay their ear close to the surface for three or four minutes, and if the ship is not more than 120 miles distant, they can hear the report of the signal gun, or feel the ground shake, upon which they immediately set off in their pilot boat. The manners of the Bedouins are free and simple; vulgarity and affectation, awkwardness and embarrassment, are weeds of civilised growth, unknown to the people of the desert. Yet their manners are sometimes dashed with a strange ceremoniousness. When two friends meet, they either embrace or both extend the right hands, clapping palm to palm; their foreheads are either pressed together, or their heads are moved from side to side, whilst for minutes together mutual inquiries are made and answered. It is a breach of decorum, even when eating, to turn the back upon a person; and when a Bedouin does it, he intends an insult. When a friend approaches an encampment, those who catch sight of him shout out his name, and gallop up, saluting with their lances or firing matchlocks in the air. The patriotism of the nomadic Arab is intense. As the Scottish Highlander wherever he roams turns with fond regret to his heath-clad hills, or the exiled Swiss pines for his snow-peaked Alps, thus his sterile sands are dearer to the wandering son of the desert than the fairest regions of the earth. It is in the lonely wilderness that all his attachments centre, for there alone he can enjoy the independence which in all ages has been his cherished possession. The very wildness of this inhospitable scenery constitutes in his eyes its principal charm, and were these features destroyed, the spell would be broken that associates them in his mind with the romantic freedom of his condition. Disdaining the peaceful and mechanical arts, he looks down with contempt upon all those who are fixed in local habitations, or engaged in the pursuits of industry, and proud of being a ‘dweller in tents,’ which he can pitch and transplant at pleasure, stigmatises them as ‘dwellers in houses made of clay.’ His tent he regards as the nursery of every noble quality, and the desert as the only residence worthy of a man who aspires to be the unfettered master of his actions. Vain of his birth and freedom, he divides the world into two great bodies; first, the Arabs, and secondly, ‘Ajemi,’ all that are not Arabs; and boasts of the four precious gifts that Allah has bestowed on his nation: ‘turbans instead of diadems, tents in place of walls and bulwarks, swords instead of intrenchments, and poems instead of written laws.’