With these thoughts in my mind, I leaped to my feet and at once wandered out in the camp. To me it seemed one vast place of sepulture; for, go where I might, there I happened upon the victims of the cholera fiend or its terrible ally, fear. I saw them writhing on the ground, with limbs hideously contorted and faces blackened like charcoal; I heard the sick groaning from within the tents as I hurried by to the more convivial surroundings of the market-place; and I stumbled over the graves in which the dead had been shovelled with unseemly haste by their terror-stricken friends. The custom was to bury the dead outside their tents (or wherever they might happen to fall, if away from the camp), but to this custom the neighbours sometimes objected in a craven regard for their own safety; for my part, the longing to recreate my mind amid more companionable scenes, caused me to run all the way to the meidán. And there, carousing with the ragtag and bobtail of the loiterers and stragglers of the encampment, I counted private soldiers, our guardians of the peace, by the score. They filled the front benches of almost every coffee-booth, making the night merry with their hearty laughter, while their companions, not behindhand in conviviality, burst out singing love-songs to the accompaniment of the clapping of hands. The Bedouin Sheykhs, virile, dignified, and exclusive, did not deign to take part in these revels, but spent the vigil of the night on the Mountain of Mercy or in the cafés that they kept for their private use. They were not dressed in the pilgrim’s garb; they were arrayed in all the warlike trappings of their tribal splendour; and being impressed by this silent declaration of their independence, I came at length to the conclusion that they, regarding themselves as the chosen people of the Faith and the holy places as their inheritance, deemed it right that the winding-sheet of humility should be worn not by themselves, but by those who visited the Holy Land of Islám from beyond the seas. Another characteristic of theirs, a characteristic that runs on parallel lines with the first, is the attitude of the Sheykhs to their clansmen, and _vice versâ_, as it reveals itself in the expression of their faces. As every one knows who has studied the laws of this free and irresistible people, despotism, as it exists in the Muhammadan monarchies, is a thing impossible amongst them; and the consciousness of this inalienable grace, why, upon my word, their faces positively shone with it! Every Sheykh’s face is as free as is that of his clansman from that meek and submissive servility which is the mark of the Persian or (in a less degree) the Turkish dependent in the company of his master. A Sheykh, on the other hand, being first amongst equals, bears himself towards his followers with a dignity and charm commingled out of paternal pride and childlike modesty, nor does such an one consider his position to be threatened because his tribesmen never cringe.