Eft to their meditations, while a couple of Arab sentries guarded
the door. CHAPTER TWENTY THREE. SHOWS
THAT SUFFERING TENDS TO DRAW OUT SYMPATHY. The word _captivity_,
even when it refers to civilised lands and peoples, conveys, we
suspect, but a feeble and incorrect idea to the minds of those who have
never been in a state of personal bondage.
Still less do we fully appreciate its dread
significance when it refers to foreign lands and barbarous people. It
was not so much the indignities to which the captive Britons were
subjected that told upon them ultimately, as the hard,
grinding, restless toil, and the insufficient food and rest--sometimes
accompanied with absolute corporeal pain.
"A merciful man is merciful to his beast."
There is not much of mercy to his beast in an Arab. We have seen an
Arab, in Algiers, who made use of a sore on his donkey's back as a sort
of convenient spur! It is exhausting to belabour a thick-skinned
and obstinate animal with a stick. It is much easier, and much more
effective, to tickle up a sore, kept open for the purpose, with a
little bit of stick, while comfortably seated on the creature's back.
The fellow we
refer to
did that. We do not say or think that all Arabs are cruel;
very far from it, but we hold that, as a race, they are so. Their great
prophet taught them
cruelty by example and precept,
and the records of history, as well as of the African slave-trade,
bear witness to the fact that their
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