“Oh, yes; here you are!” and the voyager pointed to his breast.
The Professor inspected, with unconcealed delight, some small tattooings of irregular form.
“It is, it is,” he cried, “the wasm, the sharat,* the Semitic tribal mark, the mark with which the Arab tribes brand their cattle! Of old time they did tattoo it on their bodies. The learned Herr Professor Robertson Smith, in his leedle book, do you know what he calls that very mark, my dear sir?”
* Sharat or Short.—“The shart was in old times a tattooed
mark.... In the patriarchal story of Cain...the institution
of blood revenge is connected with a ‘mark’ which Jehovah
appoints to Cain. Can this be anything else than the
sharat, or tribal mark, which every man bore on his
person?”
—Robertson Smith, Kinship in Ancient Arabia, p.215.
“Not I,” said the sailor; “I’m no scholar.”
“He says it was—I do not say he is right,” cried the Professor, in a loud voice, pointing a finger at his victim’s breast—“he says it was the mark of cain!”
The sailor, beneath his mahogany tan, turned a livid white, and grasped at a bookcase by which he stood.
“What do you mean?” he cried, through his chattering teeth; “what do you mean with your damned Hebrew-Dutch and your mark of Cain? The mark’s all right! A Hadendowa woman did it in Suakim years ago. Ain’t it on that chart of yours?”
“Certainly, good sir; it is,” answered the Professor. “Why do you so agitate yourself? The proof is complete!” he added, still pointing at the sailor’s breast.
“Then I’ll put on my togs, with your leave: it’s none so warm!” grumbled the man.