THE CHA'B ARABS

IN one of the most remote corners of the world, on a bit of alluvial soil, marshy, grassy, and sandy, as it passes into rock and desert; in an angle formed by the scriptural and classic streams, the Oreatis, the Ulai, the Pasitigris, and the Euphrates; fertilised in its heart by the drainage of a whole river, the antique Hedyphon-which the poets of olden time would have represented as a nymph dying in the embraces of that gloomy king whom all the goddesses refused to wed-there dwells a tribe of buffalo-feeding, degenerate, and once piratical Arabs, hitherto little known, and who, but for the said piratical habits, the restlessness of modern travellers, whom nothing can escape, and the miserable policy of a French consul in setting the Turks and Persians by the ears, would probably have long enjoyed the same enviable obscurity.