camel, always loitering to snatch a bite of desert-thorn with his giant
jaws. A short time before sunset I saw the two children mount the animal
by climbing up its neck, as only Arabs can, but now, at call to prayer
they devoutly slipped down. Hand in hand they ran ahead a short distance,
shuffled aside some sand with their bare feet, rubbed some on their hands,
(as do all pious Moslems in the absence of water), faced Mecca, and
prayed.

As they did then, so at sunrise and at noon and at four o'clock and sunset
and when the evening star disappeared--five times a day--they prayed. It
is not true, as is generally supposed, that women in Moslem lands do not
pray. Only at Mecca, as far as I know, of all Arabia, are they allowed a
place in the _public mosques_, but at home a larger per cent. observe the
times of prayer than do the men.

When Noorah had ended her prayer and resumed the task of belabouring the
white camel, she turned to me with a question, _"Laish ma tesully anta?"_
which with Bedouin bluntness means, "_You_, why don't you pray?" The
question set me musing half the night; not, I confess, about my own
prayers, but about hers. Why did Noorah pray? What did Noorah pray? Did
she understand that

Prayer is the burden of a sigh, the falling of a tear,
The upward glancing of the eye when only God is near,

as well as the dead formalism of the mosque? How could I answer her
question in a way that she might well understand? And if hers, too, was a
sincere prayer, as I believe,--the prayer of an ignorant child of the
desert,--did she pray words or thoughts? What do Noorah and her more than
two million Bedouin sisters ask of God five times daily? Leaving out vain