i24 AMONG THE BEDOUINS

as ever the redskins were by isolated prairie settlers—and,
I fear5 for equally good cause.

Only three months before, a tribe less than a hundred
miles to the south had raided, burned, and massacred a
Jewish "fenced farm" of some thirty persons. There was
no survivor. The women and children were found out-
side the charred ruins, with their throats cut like sheep.
Nor was this regarded as a "shame" to the tribe which
had done it, for between the men of the desert and the
Yahoud colonists, there is declared blood feud. This
death proscription is not against Jews in general, but
against all colonists who have been allotted lands which
the Arabs regard as their own. "This land was ours,"
they say, "before Moses and his thieving horde of run-
away slaves ever came ravaging it out of Egypt. It re-
turned to us under caliph and sultan, and it shall yet
be ours again."

So, naturally, the Jew on the edge of Palestine regards
the Bedouin as a cruel and ruthless savage who gives no
quarter. The only good they will grudgingly admit of
him is that he does not torture and does not rape. He
has no habits, like the Sahara Tuaregs, of mutilating cap-
tives or slitting off their eyelids and pegging them out in
the sun. He brings massacre, but "clean," quick death.
So far as I could learn, the Arab Bedouin does not prac-
tice torture. The only physical punishment ever inflicted
in the black tents is plain old-fashioned beating with any-
thing that comes to hand, usually a rope halter or camel-
stick. The only torture of which I ever had knowledge
in modern Arabia was that undergone voluntarily by
Dervishes and fakirs in the name of religion, and that