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Upon our first Expedition, we had noticed a splendid specimen, set in a Bedawi matchlock; and the people of El-'Akabah praised highly the produce of the Jebel el-Ghal. Lastly, I happened to have heard that an Arab lately brought to Ziba a turquoise which sold there for L3. Evidently the mine, like the gold-sands before alluded to, would be carefully hidden from us.
Nothing would be easier than to rebuild the town, and to prepare the basin for irrigation and cultivation; but destruction is more in the Bedawi line. Before leaving Bada I was careful to make all manner of inquiries concerning stone-coal; and the guides confirmed the suspicions which had long suggested themselves.
One of these reefs is laboriously scraped with Bedawi Wusum, and with Moslem inscriptions comparatively modern. The material is heavy, but shows no quartz; whereas the smaller valleys which debouch upon the northern or right bank of the main line, display a curious conformation of the "white stone," contorted like oyster shells, and embedded in the trap.
A cross-country climb led to the Jebel Malih, whose fame for metallic wealth gave us the smallest expectations hitherto all our discoveries came by surprise. A careful examination showed nothing at all; but a few days afterwards glorious specimens of cast copper were brought in, the Bedawi declaring that he had found them amongst the adjoining hills.
If the Great King was still something of a Bedawi Emir, bound to go a-raiding summer by summer, he had conceived, like Mohammed ibn Rashid, the Arabian prince of Jebel Shammar in our own days, the idea of extending his territorial dominion, so that he might safely and easily reach fresh fields for wider raids. Shalmaneser's later expeditions all passed the frontiers of that sphere of influence.
The annual razzia, however, is a Bedawi institution, proper to a semi-nomadic society which cultivates little and that lightly, and can leave such agricultural, and also such pastoral, work as must needs be done in summer to its old men, its young folk and its women, without serious loss.
Mahmûd, the muleteer, called to him from the mouth of a tent where he was feasting as the guest of a tall Bedawi. He proclaimed the safety of their lives a miracle, attributable solely to the fact that he himself had not ceased to assert the Unity of God from the moment he was taken captive till men came and blessed him. All gave praise to Allah.
A quick and intelligent race they are, like the Spaniards and Bedawi Arabs, a contradiction in religious matters: the Madeiran believes in little or nothing, yet he hates a Calvinista like the very fiend.
The desert between Palestine and Egypt was his chief camping-ground. He had occupied the wadis of Mount Seir before the Edomites had entered them, and a part of the later population of the country traced its descent from a mixture of the Bedâwi with the Edomite. The Egyptians had many names for the Bedâwin hordes.
Though the three peoples still continued to be spoken of separately, this was but a survival of ancient modes of speech, and after the accession of David all distinction between them disappears. From this time forward the kingdom of Judah is one undivided community. But the Amalekites were ever on its borders. The Amalekite of the Old Testament is the Bedâwi of to-day.
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