On the road is a waste over which Arabs roam to and fro without fixed abode…All of a sudden the Ishmaelites made an assault on us…We were seized, dispersed, and led off- or rather carried off- atop camels. We hung more than sat on our way across the vast desert, in constant fear…Flesh half raw was our food, camel milk our drink.
-Saint Jerome (347-420), Life of Malchus the Captive Monk, died c.391
Jerome’s Life of Malchus might well be the earliest source for that Orientalist cliché of a beautiful woman kidnapped by Arabs and taken deep into the desert as their slave. Jerome interviewed Malchus in person for his life story, which also happened to involve a woman captured with him whom the slave master forced him to marry but with whom he remained chaste. “Tell the story to them that come after,” said Malchus, “that in the desert, virtue is never a captive.” Maybe so among the drovers I knew, but a different story for Billa Ali, conniving camel thief of the Wadi al-Milk.