2-979-064 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Travellers' Encampment in the Desert, 1857. '...the travellers' encampment...consists of about half-a-dozen chadirs, or tents. One tent is set aside as a sleeping apartment for the lady and gentleman; another answers the same purposes for the servants; another for the drago-man, or interpreter (a very consequential personage in a traveller's train of followers); another to cook in; and one (generally the largest) is fitted up as a dining and sitting room, Here many of the camel-drivers congregate when all the rest have retired to rest, partly to guard over the luggage in case some stray Arab Bedouins should be on their track, partly for the sake of shelter from the heavy night dews. These sing and tell tales during the early part of the night, and one of their number alternately, gun in hand, keeps watch outside the tent doors'. From "Illustrated London News", 1857.