‘A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the cradle of the Arab race. A visit to the court of the Arab Emir, and "Our Persian Campaign."' [‎168] (221/334)

1 68 A Pilgrimage to Nejd. [ch . vm.
wood of the NefM. He lias his delul with him, au
ancient bag of bones which looks as if it would
never last through the journey, and on which he
sits perched hour after hour in silence, pointing
now and then with his shrivelled hand towards the
road we are to take. He is carrying with him on
his camel one of the red sand-stone mortars of the
J6f for a relation of Ibn Rashid s, and this seems to
balance the water-skin hanging on the other side.
From time to time, however, he speaks, and he has
told us more than one interesting tale of those who
have perished here in former days. In almost every
hollow there are bones, generally those of camels,
" Huseyn's camels/' Radi calls them, and if any
body asks who Huseyn was, there is a laugh. At
the bottom, however, of one fulj there are bones of
another sort. Here a ghazu perished, deluls and
men. They were Koala who had crossed the Nefud
to make a raid upon the Shammar, and had not
been able to reach Shakik on their way back. The
bones were white, but there were bits of skin still
clinging to them, though Radi says it happened ten
years ago. In another place, he shewed us two
heaps of wood, thirty yards apart, which mark
the spot where a Shammar ghazu, which had been
lifting camels in the Wady Sirhdn, was overtaken
by their owner, a Sirhdn sheykh, who had thrown
his lance these thirty yards at the akid of the
Shammar and transfixed him, mare and all. Again,
he pointed out the remains of forty Suelmat camel