Like the saint he had no store of food and but little water; it was dead calm, and only those who have been exposed to the Red Sea sun can appreciate the wonder of his endurance, in paddling for eight days, and of his good fortune in landing at the only village in three hundred miles of coast. The present Governor of the Red Sea Province, being on a tour of inspection, revived the half dead man with wine, food, and water, and sent him on to Suakin, where the “Pasha” gave him three months’ pay and offered him work on another sambûk. He was tired of the sea, and preferred to wander up the coast in his stolen canoe, gaining a precarious living by fishing.
The old man’s misfortunes have left him some humour yet, he chuckles delightedly at the idea of his secure and honourable possession of the stolen canoe, forgetting the suffering with which he paid for it, and how near he was to death by thirst, or more mercifully, by the waves of the sea.
Another, who was skipper of a coasting vessel until he went blind lately, and whose portrait is on [Plate VII], was stolen in Kordofan when a boy, and taken to Cairo, where shopping with the cook is all the hard labour he remembers. Then his master, in pious mood, gave him his paper of freedom, “for the sake of our Lord.” This happened at Suez, which led the freedman to the life on merchant and pearling sambûks which he has followed since, and which has thrice taken him as far as Basra on the Euphrates.
It was at Aden he heard that money was to be had in vast quantities by labourers, in the making of the new town of Port Sudan, and there he was engaged for me as ordinary sailor by the Arabian skipper of my little schooner, who once had been his cabin boy or midshipman, or whatever the equivalent may be aboard a sambûk!
From what I gather, this is the first time he has spent more than a year in one place, or had a hut he could call his own, though his beard is going grey.
After a few years’ service in my vessels he went blind, and is reduced to living on charity, for once well deserved. Even this was not his only trouble, for the Hamites wished to take away his baby son, to be brought up as a slave, denying his paternity. This may, we hope, be prevented.
Having placed our man among the other nationalities in the country, we want to know what he is like to meet and to deal with, how he spends his time and gets his living, what he thinks about, and how this reacts upon his actions, in short, what kind of a man he is.
Plate IX
Fig. 16. An elderly Bishari