Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates Vol 2 - The Search For Mecca

cH. XXI.] Hundred & Fifty TJiousand Camels. 137
yards away from a tent. Sheep there were none,
however, except high up on the slopes of the surrounding
hills, and we were struck by tlie comparatively
small number of the mares.
everything, and of these herd after
Camels seemed
herd we passed
through, of a hundred, and five hundred, and a thousand
strong.
The tents themselves are smaller than
those of the Sebaa, and only the Sheykh's is an
imposing one. It is set on nine poles, and is perhaps
a hundred feet from end to end. Of creature
comfort, however, it is as destitute as the rest of
them. A bit of carpet and a few camel saddles are
all its furniture, with two tall coffee-pots and a
coffee ladle, two yards long set upon wheels.
Perhaps
a hundred people were seated in the tent.
little dark-faced man of aljout thirty, much pitted
with small-pox and Avearing a pink cotton kefiye,
received us as we dismounted, and with some difficulty
we recognised in him tSotamm ibn Shaalan,
the Sheykh of the Roala.
The family of Ibn Shaalan, though not accounted
of the oldest nobility, has nevertheless the greatest
hereditary position of any in the Desert. Sotamm
can boast that by right of birth he rules over a
population of at least twenty thousand souls, and
can bring five thousand men into the field. How
the family first acquired its position I have not
been able to find out, but they have held it now
for so respectable a number of generations, that the
sheykhdom is hereditary with tliem, the Ibn Jeudals
A