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"The Arabs have arrived," he said, and drawing aside the curtain of his tent, he saw at least twenty coming through the blue dusk, white bournous, scimitars, and long-barrelled guns! "Saharians from the desert, the true bedouin."

"The bedouin but not the true Saharian," his dragoman informed him. And Owen retreated into his tent, thinking of the hawks which the Arabs carried on their wrists and how hawking had been declining in Europe since the sixteenth century. But it still flourished in Africa, where to-day is the same as yesterday.

And while thinking of the hawks he heard the voices of the Arabs growing angrier. Some four or five spurred their horses and were about to ride away; but the dragoman called after them, and Owen cried out, "As if it matters to me which hawk is flown first." The quarrel waxed louder, and then suddenly ceased, and when Owen came out of his tent he saw an Arab take the latchet of a bird's hood in his teeth, and pull the other end with his right hand. "A noble and melancholy bird," he said, and he stood a long while admiring the narrow flattened head, the curved beak, so well designed to rend a prey, and the round, clear eye, which appeared to see through him and beyond him, and which in a few minutes would search the blue air mile after mile.