'The Penetration of Arabia a record of the development of Western knowledge concerning the Arabian Peninsula with illustrations from drawings, photographs, and maps by J. G. Bartholomew.' [‎274] (391/496)

274 ARABIA
the town s independence, till the annual " butter-cara
van " set forth for Mecca, and he could journey
with it across the Ateiba steppes to the last station
before the Holy City. There the end all but came
at the hands of a fanatic shartf, eager for the blood
and the goods of the sacrilegious stranger, and
hardly did Doughty, plundered and beaten, prevail
with his tormentors to appeal to the prince in Taif.
That humane potentate, mindful of his commerce with
India, and of the price that Christian guns had ex
acted for Christian lives in Jidda once on a time, was
better disposed to hang the captors than their captive.
He clothed and fed the stranger, exacted restitution
of his loss, and even offered furtherance to the
southern parts about \\ ady Bishe. But Doughty,
sick and penniless, asked only for convoy to Jidda,
and was honourably escorted down Wady Fatima to
the end of his long wandering in Arabia.
No one has looked so narrowly at the land and
the life of Arabia as Doughty, and no one has painted
them in literature with a touch so sensitive, so sincere,
and so sure. And not only Bedawin life, of whose
hardships he suffered the last, wandering as one poorer
than the poorest, but also the life of the oasis towns
of Nejd. For even of Palgrave, who had a sympathy
with town Arabs which he denied to Bedawins, the
best one may say is this: that his vivid picture of Hail
is only less convincing than Doughty's, and that his
account of life in Riad is worthy to be compared with
his successor's description of life in Aneiza. Of the