“I think it's a perfect shame,” cries Madame, when she hears of it, “not to see his family for a year!”
“But one of his sons is on board, you know, as a sailor. And the steersman spent most of his time with his wife the boy's mother, when we were at Assouan.”
“I thought you said his wife lived opposite here?”
“Yes, but this is a newer one, a younger one; that is his old wife, in Assouan.”
“Oh!”
“The poor fellow has another in Cairo.”
“Oh!”
“He has wives, I daresay, at proper distances along the Nile, and whenever he wants to spend an hour or two with his family, he runs us aground.”
“I don't care to hear anything more about him.”
The Moslem religion is admirably suited to the poor mariner, and especially to the sailor on the Nile through a country that is all length and no width.