Amy E. Zwemer

“ THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANGELS The Arabs are a proud and noble race. They are proud of their liberty and of their free open-air desert customs. They are proud of their religion and of their prophet. They are proud of their history and of their patriarchal descent. But most of all, they are proud of their language, one of the oldest and most wonderful forms of human speech. Mohammed himself in his Koran, which you know is the Moslem Bible, speaks of the Arab tongue as “the language of the angels.” ”

“ Will you not pray for the pearl divers of Bahrein that many of them may find the Pearl of great price, and that their humble homes,—mat-huts along the shore of the great sea—may be made glad by the joy of a Christian civilization and the knowledge of our Saviour? It is not hard to love them for their own sake, and I well remember many a happy hour spent with them in their boats or sitting on the beach, talking over their work. ”

“ Trained from birth in the hard school of fatigue and hunger and danger, the Bedouin children grow up saucy and impudent, but with cunning and a knowledge of all the ways of the desert and the life of the caravans.
The Bedouin children have no books nor toys. They play with dead locusts or dried-up camel’s bones; they make whistles out of desert grass, and love to use the sling as David did, with pebbles from the brook when he killed the giant. The girls help in the hard work of drawing water, making butter and driving the camels to and from pasture. ”

“ If the country had a good government and the people were Christians, it would be one of the happiest in the world; a country where the orange, lemon, quince, grape, mango, plum, apricot, peach and apple yield their fruit in their season; where you can also get pomegranates, figs, dates, plantains and mulberries; a country where wheat, barley and coffee are staple products, and where there is a glorious profusion of wild flowers—although the camel drivers call it grass. ”

“ Persia for goats, Egypt for crocodiles, Cashmere for sheep, Thibet for bulldogs, India for tigers, but Arabia for the camel! To see real live dromedaries, you must come to Arabia. For although the camel is often met with elsewhere, no country can show him in all his beauty like that country which is called by the Arabs themselves “Um-el-Ibl,” mother of the camel. The Oman dromedary is the prince of all camel breeds, and is so highly esteemed in the markets of the East as to fetch three times the price of any other camel. And no wonder that this animal has reached perfection in Arabia! ”

“ Every earnest believer takes a goat, a sheep or a camel, places it so as to face the Kaaba and plunges a knife into its throat as he cries out—“God is great and Mohammed is His apostle.” When the sacrifice is over the pilgrim is allowed again to shave his beard and trim his nails and put on his ordinary clothing, all of which was forbidden during the ten days of pilgrimage. ”

“ The ordinary camel is like a packhorse, but the dromedary by careful breeding has become a race-horse. The camel is thick-built, heavy footed, ungainly, jolting. The dromedary has more slender limbs, finer hair, a lighter step, a wonderfully easy pace and is more enduring of thirst. All the camels in Arabia have a single hump. The two-humped camel, which you sometimes see in the circus, does not come from Arabia, but from Central Asia. As for the ordinary camel, his life is as hard as the desert soil and as barren of all comfort as the desert is bare of grass. ”

“ The Arabs love to sit and swing back and forth as they chant its chapters. And lastly is something that looks very much like an amulet, but which is a traveller’s bag for bread and dates, often fastened to the camel saddle by leather thongs. Bread or dates kept in such a receptacle will keep moist for many, many hours in the hot, dry climate of Arabia.
The Arabs are not skilled as the Japanese and Chinese are with tools, nor are they much given to art of any kind, but you must admit that such every-day things are many of them artistic and some of them really beautiful. ”

“ In some parts of Arabia, Bedouin women when they travel ride on a camel saddle called a howdij, which protects them from the gaze of strangers. Sometimes they play peek-a-boo, as the camel trudges along. In many respects their life is most unhappy. Doughty and other travellers believe that over one-half of the nomad population seldom know the blessing of a full meal. When they hear from the lips of Western travellers of countries where there is bread and clothing and peace, and water in great abundance, they are surprised, and contrast the condition of other nations with their lives of misery. ”

“ The second lesson is that of patience, which is the chief virtue of the camel, the most necessary virtue for every little missionary, and absolutely necessary for every big missionary. As the long train of camels goes on through the narrow sand path and between the thorn-shrubs of the wilderness, step by step, without sound and without ceasing, tramp, tramp, tramp, I have often thought of the text: “They shall walk and not faint.” Patient walking is better than impatient hurrying, in mission work and everything else. ”

“ Every turn of the road brought us in sight of new villages, and everywhere the peasants have done their best to cultivate the soil by irrigation, until you can count a dozen terraces one above the other up the mountainside, in various shades of green of the different crops. Once and again we met caravans going down to the coast, carrying coffee or sheep-hides, as you see in the picture. One could hear the approach of a caravan by the camel drivers’ song. ”

“ Others loved the dry, clear, keen air of the high plateau, and making tents of goat-hair they lived with their flocks, and are the Bedouin tribes of to-day. Still others were driven to the west and, because the country was barren and dreadfully hot, settled near a spring called Zem Zem, and built the city of Mecca. The waters of the spring were good, they said, for fever and pain, and so Mecca became a health resort and a market-place, and finally a religions centre. Every year the distant tribes came in great caravans to visit the city and exchange mares, camel-foals and bits of poetry. ”

“ How long must they and others wait for Christian teachers? Shall the Bedouin babies have a better chance than their mothers had?
The kingdoms and governments of this world have frontiers which are guarded and must not be crossed without permission, but the kingdom of Jesus Christ has no frontier. It has never been kept within bounds. It has a message for the whole race, and the very fact that there are millions of people in the heart of Arabia who have never heard, becomes the strongest of reasons why we must carry that message to them. Difficulties and dangers should not hold us back. ”

“ Although they cannot read, and have no picture books, they all of them study without ceasing the great picture book of nature, and their little dark eyes, whether watching the sheep at pasture, or counting [122] the stars in the blue abyss from their perch on the lofty camel saddle in the midnight journeyings, are never at rest. ”

“ THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD If all Arabia is to hear the story of the Gospel, there are many zigzag journeys yet to be made. The country is much larger than most people imagine, and a great part of it is still unexplored. Fortunately the unexplored sections of the great peninsula are nearly all uninhabited as far as we know, but no one has been there to see or investigate. If you were to travel from New York to Chicago and back on a camel, the distance would be about as great as to cross Arabia once in its broadest direction. ”

“ The language of these little angels and the grown-up ones in Arabia is very poetical. The Arabs, because they live in the desert and look up into the big, blue sky and far out to the horizon where the mirage paints desert pictures every day, are full of imagination and live in an atmosphere of poetry. They love jingling words and proverbs and pretty sayings and figures of speech.
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A mosquito has only a sting in New Jersey. In Arabia they call him aboo fas, which means “father-of-an-ax”! In America a tramp is a tramp, but the Arabs call him a son-of-the-road. ”

“ When a camel grows footsore or breaks down, there is no alternative: the poor beast is left to die in the wilderness. The second day we passed villages and cultivated fields; that night we spread our blankets on the soft sand, surrounded by thousands of sheep and goats, driven in by Bedouin lasses from their mountain pastures. ”

“ Think of the children who are in the hospital to-day, many of them for the first time in contact with Christians, and that some of them have never yet had their first Christmas in Arabia. There are many, many little girls in this neglected country who would enjoy a Christmas so much if only they knew as Najma did about the Babe born in a manger for their sakes. It is nineteen hundred years ago that He came to the world as its Saviour and yet there are so many countries where the boys and girls have not yet heard of His coming. ”

“ On three sides are the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, and on the west is the great sea of sand which the Arabs call the “empty abode,” and which has never been crossed by any traveller as far as we know. The Arabs themselves are afraid to venture beyond the limits of the oases that touch its borders, and on all the maps of Arabia this desert is marked “blank and unexplored.” Because the people of Oman for centuries past lived on such an island with the sea on one side and the desert on the other, they are quite distinct from the other Arabs. ”

“ When the dwellers in the mat-huts heard of the arrival of foreigners with a medicine chest and books our room was filled with the curious or the ailing from early dawn until after sunset. That is the only drawback to their kindness; the Arab idea of hospitality does not include the blessing of privacy for their guest. ”

“ It takes a long time for grown-up people to learn a new language, but it does not seem hard for the Arab boys and girls.
Beside the proper talk of grown-up people there is baby talk in Arabia which mothers teach the little brown toddlers before they walk out of the mat-huts and the black, camel-hair tents into the wide world. Yes, and there are also slang words which the camel drivers and the donkey boys use with and on each other.
The baby talk is much like English. Father is baba; dog is wowwow; pretty is noonoo; stop is tootoo; chicken is kookoo, and when baby falls they say baff! ”

“ He has been at home in its deserts and trained by its tribes for many, many centuries. Arabia and the camel are so closely connected that one can neither understand the Arab nor his language without him. Without the camel, life in a large part of Arabia would at present [19] be impossible. Without the camel, the Arabic language itself would lose a vast number of words and ideas and possibly also a great many of its difficult sounds. There is not a page in the Arabic dictionary which does not have some reference to the camel and the life of this wonderful ship of the desert. ”

“ No missionaries have ever crossed Arabia although they have made journeys into the interior and along the coasts. It is surprising, but it is true that the most unknown country in the world to-day is Arabia. We have better maps of the North Polar regions and even of the moon than we have of Southeast Arabia and portions of the interior.
The barren desert, fear of the Bedouin, always ready to rob and waylay the caravan, and the hatred of the Moslem for the Christian have closed the country for many years against travellers and missionaries ”

“ A great part of this strange Camel Country is still unknown, and there are wide deserts which only the camel and his Arab guide have ever crossed. A few travellers and missionaries, however, have seen something of Arabia on their zigzag journeys along the coasts and inland. Would you like to hear the story?
The camels are waiting and the caravan is ready to start. You will not grow weary by the way, we hope. If the desert tracks are long and tiresome through the following chapters, just refresh yourself in the oasis of a picture. ”

“ The dress of the men and women is quite distinct from that in other parts of Arabia, and their houses are built like castles. Nearly every well is protected by a fort, and villages only a mile or two apart often carry on war with each other for many, many years. This is the chief obstacle to travel in the hill country of Oman.
Before you forget our journey across this part of Arabia, I want you to think of an Arab praying in the desert. One of the names the Arabs give to the desert is the “Garden of Allah,” because they say there is nothing but God ”

“ THE JEWS OF KHEIBAR Nearly all of the people who live in the country of the camel are Mohammedans, but it was not always so. Before the days of Mohammed, the prophet, there were very many Christians in Arabia and also many Jews. The former lived mostly in the southern part of the great peninsula, but the Jews had large settlements not only in the country of the Queen of Sheba—of which we have heard—but also at Mecca and Medina, which are now the two sacred cities, and especially in the country north of Medina, Kheibar. ”

“ THE ACORN SCHOOL To the American schoolboy a Moslem school and school-books would appear the dullest things possible. Yet the Arab boys do enjoy school for there is always something to distract the attention, especially if the teacher is a shopkeeper. While a customer bargains, or the water carrier passes, or the coffee-house man brings the daily “cup of cheer,” or, in the case of a woman teacher, callers come, all eyes and ears are open not towards the lesson but the conversation and the sights. ”

“ Our Arab servant had a hard time of it to secure a boat that would take us over because the people were still suspicious of Christians and were not at all anxious to have them begin work in new places. After a boat had been secured whose captain was willing for a good consideration to allow Christians to travel with him we still waited. When one travels by native boat in Arabia there is always delay; it may be a couple of hours or it may be a few days. Time and tide and the Arab temper are equally unreliable in the Persian Gulf. It is no use fussing and getting impatient. ”

“ And when dead the Arabs eat his flesh for food, use his leather to make sandals, and the big broad shoulder-blades are used as slates in the day-schools in many parts of Arabia. A camel march is the standard of distance among the Arabs, and the price of a milch camel is the standard of value among the Bedouins of the desert. The camel is the most patient animal in existence, and yet he often has an ugly temper and is undoubtedly stupid to a degree. He will never attempt to throw you off his back, but if you fall off he will never dream of stopping for you ”

“ PEARLS AND PEARL DIVERS Nearly all the British India steamers in their zigzag journeys up the Persian Gulf, calling first at the Arabian coast and then at the Persian coast, stop at the pearl islands of Bahrein. Half-way up the Gulf and thirty miles from the mainland of Arabia, this group of islands has been famous for centuries as the most valuable pearl fishery in the world. For at least two thousand years the Arabs have been diving in these waters and bringing up the costly shells. ”