Bedouins

If you’re wondering what Bedouins have to do with Bolivia, the answer is, “not much.” This is just an excuse to try to hook you on a book I enjoyed recently, Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on a trek through the Jordan River valley:

“‘Bedouins!’”

“Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle. My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins. My second was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that direction. I acted on the latter impulse. So did all the others. If any Bedouins had approached us then from that point of the compass, they would have paid dearly for their rashness. We all remarked that, afterwards. There would have been scenes of riot and bloodshed there that no pen could describe. I know that, because each man told what he would have done, individually; and such a medley of strange and unheard-of inventions of cruelty you could not conceive of. One man said he had calmly made up his mind to perish where he stood, if need be, but never yield an inch; he was going to wait, with deadly patience, till he could count the stripes upon the first Bedouin's jacket, and then count them and let him have it. Another was going to sit still till the first lance reached within an inch of his breast, and then dodge it and seize it. I forbear to tell what he was going to do to that Bedouin that owned it. It makes my blood run cold to think of it. Another was going to scalp such Bedouins as fell to his share, and take his bald-headed sons of the desert home with him alive for trophies. But the wild-eyed pilgrim rhapsodist was silent. His orbs gleamed with a deadly light, but his lips moved not. Anxiety grew, and he was questioned. If he had got a Bedouin, what would he have done with him—shot him? He smiled a smile of grim contempt and shook his head. Would he have stabbed him? Another shake. Would he have quartered him—flayed him? More shakes. Oh! horror, what would he have done?

“‘Eat him!’”

“Such was the awful sentence that thundered from his lips. What was grammar to a desperado like that? I was glad in my heart that I had been spared these scenes of malignant carnage. No Bedouins attacked our terrible rear. And none attacked the front. The new-comers were only a reinforcement of cadaverous Arabs, in shirts and bare legs, sent far ahead of us to brandish rusty guns, and shout and brag, and carry on like lunatics, and thus scare away all bands of marauding Bedouins that might lurk about our path. …”

In his author’s preface, Twain states his intention to allow the reader to see Europe and the Holy Land “how he [the reader] would be likely to see [them].” He goes on to describe the experiences of a most unlikely gang of adventurers, most of them pious folk in their fifties, on their first trip overseas. (“When they were not seasick they were uncommonly prompt when the dinner-gong sounded. Such was our daily life on board the ship—solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander…it would have made a noble funeral excursion.”)

You really have to read this book. Then pose yourself this little puzzle: was Twain writing straight-faced, or is the whole book—even the parts he narrates in the first person—a skewering of “The American” as he experiences life (and is experienced) in the Old World?

Click here to check out a review from December 1869, when Innocents Abroad was recently published.

P.S. Stay tuned for the next entry in the libraries program ABCs, “I is for improvisation.”