- voirs in the thicket, where he may always calculate
upon finding the requisite quantity of cool pure water. But in Arabia this rule does not hold. Our traveller, therefore, upon commencing his journey, took care to provide himself with a sufficient number of goat-skins, which were replenished every four or five days, or oftener, if wells were met with. Wine, likewise, and brandy, together with wheat-*flour, rice, biscuit, honey, oil, vinegar, olives, lentils, potted flesh, and such other articles of food as would keep sweet and wholesome during two months, were laid in; as well as barley, with a few beans intermixed, which, with balls made of the flour of the one or both of them, and a little water, constituted the whole sustenance of the camels. Their kitchen furniture consisted of a copper pot and wooden bowl, in the former of which they cooked, and from the latter ate their food, or kneaded therein their unleavened cakes. When the caravan halted for the purpose of cooking their breakfast or dinner, the dung left by the camels of preceding travellers was carefully gathered up, there being no wood; and this, when it had been a few days exposed to the sun, took fire quickly, and burned like charcoal. Their food being prepared, whether it was potted flesh boiled with rice, a lentil-soup, or unleavened cakes, served up with oil or honey, one of the Arabs belonging to the party, not, as the Scripture says, "to eat his morsel alone," placing himself upon the highest spot of ground in the neighbourhood, called out thrice, with a loud voice to all his brethren, "the Sons of the Faithful," to come and partake of it; though none of them, says the traveller, were in view or perhaps within a hundred miles of them. The custom, however, is maintained as a mark of benevolence, and, when an opportunity occurs, of their hospitality.
Upon arriving at the fountain of Elim, two leagues to the west of Suez, they found it brackish, and
