Under the guidance of sheikhs of great ability,
they emerged from their stony wilderness and settled on the Syrian
border.
But they could not maintain themselves against the disciplined nations
of Palestine, and they fell back to their desert, which they found
intolerable. Like some of the Bedouin tribes of modern times in the
rocky wastes contiguous to the Red Sea, they were unable to resist the
temptations of the Egyptian cities; they left their free but distressful
wilderness, and became Fellaheen. The Pharaohs, however, made them pay
for their ready means of sustenance, as Mehemet Ali has made the Arabs
of our days who have quitted the desert to eat the harvests of the Nile.
They enslaved them, and worked them as beasts of burden. But this was
not to be long borne by a race whose chiefs in the early ages had
been favoured by Jehovah; the patriarch Emirs, who, issuing from
the Caucasian cradle of the great races, spread over the plains of
Mesopotamia, and disseminated their illustrious seed throughout the
Arabian wilderness. Their fiery imaginations brooded over the great
traditions of their tribe, and at length there arose among them one of
those men whose existence is an epoch in the history of human nature:
a great creative spirit and organising mind, in whom the faculties
of conception and of action are equally balanced and possessed in the
highest degree; in every respect a man of the complete Caucasian model,
and almost as perfect as Adam when he was just finished and placed in
Eden.
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