Would you like to hear something about their language and their writing?
The language of this land is very old, almost as old as its camels or its
desert sands. The Moslems even go so far as to say that Adam and Eve spoke
Arabic in Paradise and they say it is called the language of the angels.
It is written from right to left just in the opposite way of this page of
English writing. The Arabic alphabet has twenty-eight letters, all of
which are considered consonants. There are marks put above and below the
line to show the sounds of the vowels; just as we wrote the word _potato_
in our first chapter.

Arabic grammar is much more difficult than English grammar, and even the
boys who attend the big Arabic college of El Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, must
find its study a bugbear. Just think of learning _fifteen_ conjugations
instead of the much smaller number in Latin or Greek! The books used in
Moslem schools would look very crude and dull to you who learnt your A, B,
C, from an illustrated primer perhaps with coloured pictures.

Strict Mohammedans do not allow their boys and girls to have pictures in
their books, because they say all pictures are idols. And yet the love for
beauty and the desire for ornament on the written or printed page was so
strong with the Arabs that they began from the earliest times to use
their alphabet to make arabesques. Arabesque is a big word and it really
means an Arab picture. But these pictures of the Arabs (which you find on
the arches of old mosques, in books and on tombstones) are ornaments or
designs made out of the beautifully curved letters of the alphabet. The
old Arab copyists and their sculptors wrote and carved the words of the
Koran, or the names of God, etc., in all sorts of ways to make pictures
_out of words only_, lest they break the law of their prophet. Here are
two examples of how pictures can be made out of letters. You have all
doubtless heard of a "wordless book"; and some of you have books without