Bedouin Rescue Service

Neither of us said anything. We just watched the Hanjii ride out of sight into the line of the horizon, an undulating line of black against the brown. The sun beat down on our heads, reminding us of its presence, and I wished it was a god.
Because then we might reason with it.
Del turned to face me squarely. She waited.

I sighed. "We walk." I answered her unasked question, "and hope we're found by a caravan"

—Jennifer Roberson, Sword-Dancer

Our heroes are in the desert without food or water for some reason. Maybe the Big Bad has stolen their supplies. Maybe their car needed repair, and they had to abandon the water for some reason. Or maybe the water is just spent.

Anyway, our heroes have been walking for days without drinking a single drop. They faint and the screen turns to black. This is the end of our heroes, right?

Wrong: It turns out that our heroes were rescued by a traveling caravan and are now safe again.

This happens often enough that one may wonder whether dying people are a magnet for Bedouins. Of course, a Doylist will point to the Anthropic Principle as an explanation.

If not in a desert, substitute: friendly Noble Savage natives on the American plains or in the jungle, Sherpas or Buddhist monks in the mountains, Aborigines in Australia, Inuit or Aleuts in the frozen north, or Bushmen in South Africa. In Speculative Fiction, any Fantasy Counterpart Culture for the above can fill in. Any of these groups may try to teach the hero something as he recovers. For shipwrecked people in the ocean, native fishermen or dolphins might pitch in.

When the Bedouins or other firstcomers are actually just there to rob our heroes blind, they're Salvage Pirates.

Often overlays with Good Samaritan and/or Sacred Hospitality. Note that actual aloof, practical, eccentric but ultimately noble Bedouins in modern settings have been supplanted in pop culture and the minds of the audience by Kalashnikov-waving insurgents or Mujahadeen, for however accurate or inaccurate that might be. Also, notice that this trope has its roots on real life: the Bedouin and the Pashtun tribes have a strict code of honor, which says a tribe must always rescue anyone who got lost in the desert, no matter if he's a friend, a stranger, or an enemy. (Although in regions such as North Africa, this only became common after government officials realized the Bedouin practice of taking shipwrecked sailors as slaves was killing their chances of western trade.)

Examples of Bedouin Rescue Service include:

Anime and Manga

• Happens in the Saiyuki manga. Twice.
• Happens to the photojournalist Rocky in the Area 88 manga after his helicopter is shot down. This leads to a Crowning Moment of Awesome when the nomads' camp is attacked and he rams a tank with a Jeep.
• Subverted and lampshaded in Mai-Otome, where a foot traveller in the desert collapses in sight of a large, train-like vehicle passing by...which does not stop. The traveller leaps to their feet, complaining that they had planned on getting rescued so they wouldn't have to walk all the way to town.
• In the backstory of Fullmetal Alchemist, when Hohenheim is aimlessly wandering the great desert in Heroic BSOD after unwittingly destroying his homeland of Xerxes, he's rescued by a caravan of Xingese traders, with the implication he was taken back to Xing and taught them alkahestry.
• Sis saved Sara in Now and Then, Here and There.

Comic Books

• Tintin
• Bruce Banner was rescued in the Arabian desert at one point by a local sheik who then became the Arabian Knight almost as a side-effect of this.
• At the end of the DCU's Infinite Crisis, all that's left of the robot Red Tornado is a head that can only say "52!" which lands in Australia. He is not only found by aboriginals, but taken to a auto repair shop/metalworking studio where the local welder attempts to build him a new body.
• The first few issues of Legends Of The Dark Knight has a pre-Batman Bruce Wayne rescued from a blizzard by natives. He returns the favor years later.

Film

• Star Wars: C-3PO and R2-D2 are "rescued" in the desert by Jawas who want to sell them.
  • This scene is parodied in Spaceballs, by the Dinks who rescue Lone Starr and company and take them to see Yogurt.
• Subverted in The Flight of the Phoenix, the nomads prove to be hostile.
• Interestingly treated in The Proposition: Charlie, while on a mission into the Australian Outback to kill his brother, gets "speared by a savage! How extraordinarily quaint!" The rescue service comes in the form of... his brother. Awkward.
• The English Patient: When the protagonist crashes down in the Sahara at the beginning of the story.
• Hilariously featured in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert: the three protagonists are stuck in the Outback after their bus breaks down on a cross-country trip. They're in the middle of rehearsing their drag show when one of them suddenly turns and notices an Aborigine called Alan watching them. They both scream, but Alan ends up helping them out.
• In the film Walkabout a girl and her brother, stranded in the Australian outback, are rescued by an Aboriginal boy on walkabout.
• Subverted in Bran Nu Dae, when the Aboriginal characters are dumped in the outback by their previously gullible marks, one of them uses "magic" to make their van break down. To the surprise of everyone.
• Iron Man: When Stark escapes the terrorists and is wandering the Afghan deserts, he's rescued by Bedouins...no actually, he's picked up the U.S. Air Force and his buddy Colonel Rhodes.
  • Who were actually looking for him, too.
• Subverted in Gladiator, when Russell Crowe's character is "rescued," but then sold into slavery.
• White Sun of the Desert, several times.

Sukhov: Why you're here?
Said: Heard the shots...

• In the CG animated movie of The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin and Haddock crash land into the desert with a stolen plane and force to trudge through the blazing hot sand. They are later saved by passing group of soldiers who were notified by Snowy's barking.

Literature

• Played with in the Discworld novel Jingo!, where Vimes and his men are lost in the deserts of Klatch and run into the notoriously hostile D'regs, who fortunately are feeling nice enough to give them the traditional three days of hospitality before trying to kill them. Then, because of Carrot...
  • Vimes later rescues a native Klatchian...technically. The son of Mr. Gorif from back home, who had moved his family back to Klatch in order to escape anti-Klatchian sentiment, had been conscripted into the D'Reg army and sent into the desert to 'get' the Ankh-Morpork invaders. Side-switching ensues.
• This happens to two characters in A Study in Scarlet. Just after they resign themselves to dying of thirst they are rescued by a caravan of Mormons heading west to Utah.
• In Dune, Jessica and Paul Atreides are rescued by Fremen. They then have to jump through religious hoops and trial by personal combat to prove that they're worth saving.
  • Justified as they were more or less looking for the Fremen, and the Fremen were looking for them.
  • Also in that (in the book, at least) Jessica & Paul were specifically heading towards the only sign of habitation visible for miles around, which turned out to be a Fremen campsite.
    • Note that this is an unusual thing for the Fremen to do. Generally, if they find someone stranded in the desert, they'll simply kill them and drain their body of water.
      • Which, it should be noted, was actually suggested by one of the Fremen.
      • The reasons they spared them was they would accept Paul, and Jessica is Bene Gesserit making her more valuable alive.
  • Also note that the Missionaria Protectiva deliberately spread rumors of a Bene Gesserit who'll give birth to a future messiah so any stranded Bene Gesserit can take advantage of this belief to get help.
• In The Thrawn Trilogy, Talon Karrde - the calm, information-brokering successor to Jabba the Hutt - is traversing space in his ship when he finds Luke Skywalker adrift in his X-Wing. He poses as this, agreeing to save and transport the Jedi for a small fee, and usually he'd be perfectly happy to do that, but Grand Admiral Thrawn has just put out word that Luke is adrift in this general area and there is a substantial reward. Karrde is generally honorable and doesn't like Thrawn, but he can't directly antagonize the head of Imperial forces - Thrawn is the absolute best at figuring out who did what. Karrde ends up imprisoning Luke so he can decide what to do, and things proceed from there.
• Aeriel is rescued by desert nomads in The Darkangel Trilogy after the icarus attacks her and leaves her for dead. Slightly more defensible in this version, as the Pendarlon brings them to her instead of them just stumbling across her.
• In A Good Clean Fight by Derek Robinson, an RAF fighter pilot crashes in the desert in North Africa. The Bedouin, of course, pick him up and care for his injuries. Being Greek, he's able to blend in with them better than a fair-skinned Brit would...which doesn't stop a German patrol finding him and shooting him for a spy anyway.
• Lone Survivor: After his team is killed in a horrendous fight with the Taliban, Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrel is rescued by Pashtun villagers, for whom Sacred Hospitality is literal. They take their obligation so seriously they defend him against said Taliban. Since most of the Talib recruits are drawn from the ultra-conservative Pashtun, it is very likely they were opposing their own kin to protect Luttrel. Why? Because they promised.

Live Action Television

• The X-Files: Mulder gets buried under rubble in the desert but is rescued by Native Americans.
  • They knew he was out there and saw the cause of the trouble coming in to begin with... if we're thinking of the same rescue.
    • The episode even did the whole "Mulder's spirit communicating with his ancestors to determine if he should stay in this world or move on to the next life." thing.
• Strangely subverted in Lost, when Ben teleports into the Tunisian desert and get harassed by two AK-47-wielding Bedouins who Ben promptly kills in a textbook definition of Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • It happens in SEASON 5 episode: "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham". Locke teleports to that same place, but his leg is broken and the pain immobilizes him. He's left there all day and the only at night do the AK-47-wielding Bedouins come and save the day, albeit they seem to have been working for Mr. Widmore, who knew Locke had arrived by setting up surveillance at the "exit", as he called it.

Tabletop RPG

• Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game). This can happen in "The City Without A Name" adventure in the supplement Curse of the Chthonians. After the investigators leave Irem, if they run out of camels and water in the desert they can be rescued by a small band of Bedouins.

Video Games

• Subverted in Uncharted 3. The Bedouins really don't rescue Nate in the whole "We found you unconscious and near death in the desert" thing. They find him in an abandoned city, nearly kill him, and its only through his quick talking that they spare him and take him to their place. Even then, they do not trust Nate, only helping him because they both have a common goal of stopping the bad guys from reaching Iram.
  • They would've taken him to their camp regardless. When he was asked, Salim said that even enemies are deserving of some hospitality and after that, he asks Nate if he is friend or enemy and then it goes from there.
    • However, it's played very straight in Uncharted 2 when Nate passes out in the mountains of Tibet and is rescued by a local Tibetian man.
• Justified in Jak 3, as Jak happened to be carrying a homing beacon used by the Wastelanders who rescued him.
• Fire Emblem 7 starts with the player character passing out from exhaustion and being rescued by Lyn, the last survivor of a nomad tribe. She even lives in a yurt.
• In a rather nasty twist, during the opening to dungeon-crawler Brandish 2: The Planet Buster, protagonist Ares faints in the middle of the desert and wakes up in a prison cell!
  • Chun-soft later ripped off this intro frame-for-frame in their own dungeon crawler Furai no Shiren GB2
• Attempting to enter the Corel Desert without a chocobo and wandering around for a few screens ends up with you passing out and being rescued by a chocobo-driven caravan. You also get picked up by a mountain man when trying to find Gaea's Cliff for the first time and failing.
  • Don't forget the not-so-subtly named Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, who do indeed rescue Tidus, although it's doubly subverted in that this one rescue actually occurs underwater, and that Rikku initially wants to kill Tidus (he looks like a fiend).

Web Comics

• Justified in a Wandering Ones sidestory: the rescuer had been following the victim all day to see if he could survive in the desert on his own.
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, dolphins fill in this role for stranded CIA agent Bear Claw, despite the fact that he once murdered dolphins with his bare hands to prove how macho he was. He's initially suspicious of the rescue, but warms up to the dolphins when they bring him to an island. Then the dolphins shoot him.

Western Animation

• The timely Inuit rescue in The Simpsons Movie.
• Timon and Pumba in "The Lion King".
• Subverted in The Wild Thornberrys, where after hiking off on her own, Eliza succumbs to altitude sickness and comes very well near death. That is until she wakes up to find herself inside an igloo and being handed hot cocoa by a friendly Inca. However, it is soon revealed that it was her father (whom she pretty much had been treating like a jerk all day) who had found her and build the igloo from scratch (actually something of an inversion, because it turned out the Incas were lost as well).
• In one of the Scooby Doo movies, Where's My Mummy, the Mystery Machine breaks down in Egypt, but luckily for Fred, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby, there's the Bedouin Rescue Service. Complete with incredibly obvious Captain Ersatz of Ardeth Bey!
• A Liliputian variation appears in the The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack episode "Lost at Land"
• Averted in Asterix Versus Caesar. Tragicomix and Panacea manage to escape the Romans but end up dying of thirst in the Sahara. They are rescued by a caravan. Unfortunately for them, this caravan is composed of slave traders, and they are sold back to the Romans afterwards.

Real Life

• Averted in the story of shipwrecked sailor James Riley. In 1815 he and his crew were stranded in North Africa and captured by a tribe of Bedouins. It was their custom to take sailors as slaves, and proceeded to brutally mistreat the crew who survived by drinking camel urine. Riley and some of his crew survived and were eventually ransomed, but some of the crew were murdered, died, or seperated from the group and never seen again. Whether being taken as a slave counts as a "rescue" is a matter of interpretation.
  • Slave-taking was a common practice until Westerners started to avoid North Africa. After the economic impact became clear, local governments forbade the practice and forced the tribes to begin aiding lost travellers.
• Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the famed author of The Little Prince, actually crashed in the middle of the Sahara desert with little food and water on him. He was rescued by a traveling caravan run by literal Bedouins.
  • Happens in quite a few biographies and histories of westerners in the Middle East and N. Africa, as can be expected when you have a significant group of constantly traveling nomads and a relative clear view (other than dunes and mountains) for a considerable distance. While many are from fiction, just look at how many by+ bedouins%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi= search results from Google you get.
    • Plus, the people who aren't found usually don't get to have biographies written about them.
• It was discovered that crashed U.S. Navy pilot Scott Speicher, shot down at the beginning of the Gulf War, had been found dead by a group of Bedouins who gave him a dignified burial.
• On a similar note, U.S. Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell was sheltered from the Taliban by a friendly village. Interestingly, the Taliban knew where he was (and took an opportunity to beat the half crippled hero and give him a Hannibal Lecture) but they were bound not to kill him. For details see his book "Lone Survivor."