little saddlery; half a camel-load of corn; a broken cart-wheel and
rickety furniture put up to auction; one or two halfa-mats of admirable
workmanship; grinding-stones; musty pressed dates, onions, huge but
insipid turnips and other green things, red peppers----

Those peppers! An adult Arab will eat two pounds of them a day. I have
seen, native women devouring, alternately, a pepper, then a date, then
another pepper, then another date, and so on, for half an hour. An infant
at the breast, when tired of its natural nourishment, is often given one
of these fiery abominations to suck, as an appetizer, or by way of change
and amusement. Their corroding juices are responsible for half the stomach
troubles of the race; a milk diet would work wonders as a cure, if the
people could be induced to do things by halves; but they cannot; it is
"all peppers or all milk," and, the new diet disagreeing with them at
first, they return to their peppers and a painful disease.

It is this lack of measure and reasonableness among them which accounts
for what I believe to be a fact, namely, that there are more reclaimed
drunkards among Arabs than among ourselves. They will break off the
alcohol habit violently, and for ever. And this they do not out of
principle, but from impulse or, as they prefer to call it, inspiration;
indeed, they regard our men of fixed principles as weaklings and cowards,
who stiffen themselves by artificial rules because they cannot trust their
judgments to deal with events as they arise--(the Arab regards terrestrial
life as a chain of accidents)--cowards and infidels, trying to forestall
by human devices the unascertainable decrees of Allah.

Allah wills it! That is why they patiently bear the extremes of hunger,
and why, if fortune smiles, they gorge like Eskimos, like
boa-constrictors.