Darkness fell soon after. I had signed on the Warwickshire under a promise that I might leave her at Port Saïd. Through all the voyage, however, the quartermasters had spent the hours of the dogwatch in pouring into my ears tales of the horrors that had befallen white men stranded among the Arabs. The shrieks that rose from the maze of buildings ashore, the snarling, scowling mobs that raced about our decks, called back these stories all too vividly. In the blackest of nights, this new and unknown world was in imagination peopled with diabolical creatures lying in wait for lone mortals who might venture ashore unarmed and well-nigh penniless. If I escaped a quick assassination among these black hordes, a lingering starvation on this neck of sand might be my lot. The captain had given me leave to continue to Rangoon. An Englishman, returning to the Burmese district he governed, had promised me a well-salaried position. Most foolhardy it seemed to halt in this “dumping ground of rascality” when in a few days I might complete half my journey around the globe and find a ready employment.
For an hour I sat undecided, staring into the black inferno beyond the wharves. Palestine and Egypt, however, were lands too famous to be lightly passed by. I bade farewell to the astonished quartermasters, collected my few days’ wages from the mate, and with some two pounds in francs, lire, and shillings in my pocket, dropped into a feluca and was rowed ashore.
A scene typically Oriental graced my landing. In my ignorance, I had neglected to spend a half-hour in bargaining with the swarthy boatman before stepping into his craft. That the legal fare I paid him was posted conspicuously on the wharf made him none the less assertive in his demands. For an hour he dogged my footsteps, howling threats or whining pleas in a cracked treble, now in his native Arabic, now in such English as he could muster. The summary vengeance of the Islamites, prophesied with such fullness of detail by my shipmates, seemed at hand; but I shook the fellow off at last and set out to find a lodging.
The task at which I had grown so proficient in Europe was a far more difficult problem in this strange world. To be sure, there were several hotels along the avenue facing the wharves, before which well-dressed white men lounged at little tables; and black, barefooted waiters flitted back and forth, carrying cool drinks that we of America are wont to associate with August mid-days rather than with December evenings. But a strong financial backing is nowhere so indispensable as in hostelries offering “European accommodations” in the Orient. There were, undoubtedly, scores of native inns in the maze of hovels into which I plunged at the first step off the avenue, but how distinguish them when the only signs that met my eye were as meaningless as so many spatters of ink? Even in Holland I had been able to guess at shop names. But Arabic! I had not the remotest idea whether the ensign before me announced a lodging house or the quarters of an undertaker. I returned to the avenue; but the few white men who paused to listen to my inquiry for a “native” hotel stared at me as at one who had lost his wits, and passed on with a shrug of the shoulders. A long evening I pattered in and out of crooked byways, bumping now and then into a swarthy Mussulman who snarled at me and made off, and bringing up here and there in some dismal blind alley. Fearful of wandering too far from the lighted square, I turned back toward the harbor and suddenly caught sight of a sign in English: “Catholic Sailors’ Home.” Whether the establishment was Catholic or Coptic was small matter, so long as it announced itself in a human language, and I dashed joyfully towards it.
The “Home” comprised little more than a small reading-room. Half-hidden behind the stacks of ragged magazines sat the “manager,” a Maltese boy, huddled over paper and pencil and staring disconsolately at an Italian-English grammar. I stepped forward and offered my assistance, and together we waded through an interminable lesson. Before we had ended, six tattered white men wandered in and carefully chose books over which to fall asleep.
“You must know,” said the manager, as he closed the grammar, “that there am no sleepings here. And we closes at eleven. But I am fix you oop. I am shelter all these seamans while I lose my place when the Catholic society found it out.”
He peered out into the night, locked the doors, blew out the lights, and aroused the sleepers. We groped our way along a stone-paved corridor to the back of the building.
“You are getting in here,” said the Maltese, pulling open what proved by morning light to be a heavy pair of shutters, “but be quietness.”
I climbed through after the others. A companion struck a match that lighted up a stone room eight feet square, once the kitchen of the Home. Closely packed as we were, it soon grew icy cold on the stone floor. Two “beachcombers” rose with exclamations of disgust and crawled out through the window, to tramp up and down the corridor. I groped my way to a coffin-shaped cupboard in one corner, laid it lengthwise on the floor, pulled out the shelves, and, crawling inside, closed the doors above me. My sleep was unbroken until morning.
By the light of day my bedfellows, squatted against the wall of the corridor, formed a heterogeneous group. At one end sat a Boer dressed in heavy, woolen garments of the veldt, of a faded, weather-beaten condition startlingly in keeping with the bronzed and bewhiskered countenance of the wearer. A seedy Austrian youth lolled open-mouthed between the South African and an oily Turk. A Liberian negro was sharing a mangled crust with a Russian Finn, half-hidden behind a forest of unpruned whiskers. A ragged Englishman stood stiffly erect near the door.