"I cannot get you any more pearls because it is too hot, and if only you will stop you can go on doing some protecting, which, upon my soul, I do like better than anything in the world."
And even as he said this he began jumping about and shouting strange things and waving his gun, and Smith at once went away.
Then Mahmoud sat down sadly by the sea, and thought of how Smith had protected him, and how now all that was passed and the old monotonous life would begin again. But Smith went home, and all his neighbours asked how it was that he protected so well, and he wrote a book to enlighten them, called How I Protected Mahmoud. Then all his neighbours read this book and went out in a great boat to do something of the same kind. And Smith could not refrain from smiling.
Mahmoud, however, by his lonely shore, regretted more and more this episode in his dull life, and he wept when he remembered the fantastic Smith, who had such an enormous number of things in his bag and who had protected him; and he also wrote a poem, which is rather difficult to understand in connection with the business, but which to him exactly described it. And the poem went like this; having no metre and no rhyming, and being sung to three notes and a quarter in a kind of wail:
"When the jackal and the lion meet it is full moon; it is full moon and the gazelles are abroad."
"Why are the gazelles abroad when the jackal and the lion meet: when it is full moon in the desert and there is no wind?"
"There is no wind because the gazelles are abroad, the moon is at the full, and the lion and the jackal are together."
"Where is he that protected me and where is the great battle and the shouts and the feasting afterwards, and where is that bag?"
"But we dwell in the desert always, and men do not visit us, and the lion and the jackal have met, and it is full moon, O gazelles!"
Mahmoud was so pleased with this song that he wrote it down, a thing he only did with one song out of several thousands, for he wrote with difficulty, but I think it a most ridiculous song, and I far prefer Smith's, though you would never know it had to do with the same business.