Two incidents of that month in Jaghbub interested me as illustrating how, with all their differences, the East and the West are often humorously alike. The one incident was comic, but the other had pathos in it as well as humor.
I had given instructions that no one who came to my house in quest of medicine should ever be turned away. Sidi Zwela, an ikhwan, had appealed for help for his cough, and I had given him a bottle of cough-syrup. Two days later he appeared again. He said the first few doses had done him so much good that he had quickly finished the bottle. Might he have another bottle? Abdullahi, who was present at the interview, after his departure growled out a cynical comment: “Yes, he found it sweet and pleasant to the taste. He takes it as a delicacy and not as a medicine.” The comment was probably accurate. More than one child I had heard of during my years in England whose cough persisted strangely so long as the cough-medicine was sweet and tasty.
I am afraid that my men used to boast about the things that could be done with what we had among our stores. The Baskari, after Ahmed had been pulling his leg about my having medicine for everything, came to me to ask for something to cure a slave-girl of absent-mindedness. I could only reply that from my experience in various lands to keep a servant from forgetting was as easy as to prevent water from sinking into the sand.
The second incident involved two men as different as day and night. There came to my house one day a slave of the wakil sent by his master to consult me. It was a matter about which Sidi Hussein could not approach me in person. Bedouin etiquette forbids a man to talk to another about his wife, or even about any particular woman who is not known to both of them. But a slave could say for him what his dignity forbade him to speak in person. The slave’s message was that the wife of the wakil had borne no children, which was a keen disappointment to the husband. Surely, his master thought, I must have, in my medicine-chest filled with the wonders of the science of the West, some remedy for the poor woman’s childless state.
My thoughts went straight back to my last days at Oxford. An old college servant was an excellent fellow, but most inordinately shy. He came to me one day as I was preparing for the journey home, and with a tremendous summoning of his courage proffered a request.
“If you would allow me, sir,” he said, “to ask a favor? My wife and I have no children. The doctor can’t help us; he has nothing to suggest. Now, sir, back in that country of yours, I’ve heard it said, they have wonderful talismans that will do all kinds of things. I’m not one who has believed much in having to do with magic, but this is a very special case. Do you think you might find me a talisman and send it on? If it’s not asking too much, sir?”
DESERT SANDS COVERING DATE-TREES
In a few years if the wind continues in the same direction the trees will be embedded forever in the sands
In the face of his anxiety and the courageous breaking down of the barriers of his shyness, I could only answer gravely but sympathetically that I would do what I could. But the necessity did not arise. He had died, remembered by Balliol men past and present, before I came to Oxford again.