Sakhr manner to shoot over strangers. Ali accepted this as their habit, and a good habit in the desert, but protested that their unheralded appearance against us from three sides showed a premeditated ambush. The Beni Sakhr were a dangerous gang, not pure enough nomads to hold the nomadic code of honour or to obey the desert law in spirit, and not villagers enough to have abjured the business of rapine and raid.
Our late assailants went into Bair to report our coming. Mifleh, chief of their clan, thought it best to efface the ill-reception by a public show in which all men and horses in the place turned out to welcome us with wild cheers and gallopings and curvettings, and much firing of shots and shouting. They whirled round and round us in desperate chase, clattering over rocks with reckless horsemanship and small regard for our staidness, as they broke in and out of the ranks and let off their rifles under our camels’ necks continually. Clouds of parching chalk dust arose, so that men’s voices croaked.
Eventually the parade eased off, but then Abd el Kader, thinking the opinion even of fools desirable, felt it upon him to assert his virtue. They were shouting to Ali ibn el Hussein “God give victory to our Sherif” and were reining back on their haunches beside me with “Welcome, Aurans, harbinger of action.” So he climbed up his mare, into her high Moorish saddle, and with his seven Algerian servants behind him in stiff file, began to prance delicately in slow curves, crying out “Houp, Houp,” in his throaty voice, and firing a pistol unsteadily in the air.
The Bedu, astonished at this performance, gaped silently; till Mifleh came to us, and said, in his wheedling way, “Lords, pray call off your servant, for he can neither shoot nor ride, and if he hits someone he will destroy our good fortune of today.” Mifleh did not know the family precedent for his nervousness. Abd el Kader’s brother held what might well be a world’s record for three successive fatal accidents with automatic pistols in the circle of his Damascus friends. Ali Riza Pasha,