One afternoon a representative from the British Intelligence Office took me a few miles distant from Khartum to call on “the holiest man in the Sudan.” So rich had the natives grown from the war that they were refusing to sell their grain supplies, which were badly needed by the armies in Palestine and Arabia. I had expressed a desire to meet this holy man, and it occurred to the authorities that a visit from a foreigner might flatter him and put him in a sufficiently pleasant frame of mind to enable them to wheedle him into selling his store of grain, which would cause the other natives to follow suit.
We set out in the governor’s gharry, a picturesque victoria drawn by high-spirited white horses. Our driver was a wild-eyed fuzzy-wuzzy with a mop of crinkly hair full of mutton fat, with long wooden skewers sticking out at all angles. Off we galloped across the desert to the village of Berri, where we found Shereef Yusef el Hindi, the holy man, awaiting us at the gate of his mud-brick palace. The shereef, a tall, thin-faced, distinguished-looking Arab with hypnotic eyes, garbed in sandals, a robe of green and white silk, and green turban, ushered us into his garden, where we were invited to review the most bewildering array of drinks that I had ever seen. There were concoctions of everything from pomegranate-juice to sloe gin and from rose-water to a horse’s neck. They were of every shade from mauve to taupe. They were served in every sort of container from cut-glass tumblers to silver goblets. Fortunately, custom only required us to take a sip of each; otherwise the result would have been catastrophic for many were of subtle potency.
I remember that afternoon call as a series of surprises, of which the first was the beauty of the garden inside the ugly adobe outer walls of the shereef’s palace. The second was the variety of fluid refreshment placed before us. Surely Shereef Yusef el Hindi must have one of the genii from “The Arabian Nights” mixing drinks in his palace. Even in pre-prohibition days, when assigned to cover a national college fraternity convention, never was I invited to pass through such an ordeal by drink as I faced at Shereef Yusef el Hindi’s oasis. The third surprise came when I saw the attractive interior of his palace as we passed through on our way to a Moorish balcony near the roof, where we were confronted with another relay of drinks. But the climax came when I discovered that my host instead of being an African witch-doctor was a savant of wide learning. His library even contained Arabic translations of the speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. In fact I found that this Sudanese holy man knew more about the history of my own country than I did!
We discussed religion, and I was impressed by his spirit of tolerance. “I believe, as do all Moslems who deserve to be called educated,” said he, “that the fundamental principles underlying the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism—are the same; that there is but one God and that he is supreme; that we should be tolerant of the opinions of others; that all men should live together as brothers and do unto others as we would have others do unto us.”
It was not difficult to understand why Shereef Yusef el Hindi was looked upon as a holy man by his ignorant, half-civilized fellow-countrymen. His princely manners, his dignity and poise, his musical bell-like voice, his large, lustrous, hypnotic brown eyes, and his wisdom would have won him distinction in any country. He is not an Ethiopian but is a descendant of the Arabian tribe of Koreish to which Mohammed belonged.
Being a holy man in the Sudan is a lucrative profession. Shereef Yusef el Hindi spends most of his time naming babies. When a child is born the father comes running to him, prostrates himself at the shereef’s feet, and says, “O noble one, what name shall I bestow upon my child?”
Whereupon the holy man replies: “O faithful one, arise! Go thy way and return again upon the morrow.”
Then, when the father returns the next day, the shereef intones: “Allah be praised. In a vision last night the Prophet appeared and revealed to me that your faith should be rewarded and your child blessed with the name of his own daughter, Fatima. Five dollars, please!”
From Khartum we crossed the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Here, as we had hoped, we found a tramp steamer bound for the Arabian coast. She was a much torpedoed cargo-boat which had been transferred from the British Indian coastal service to the Mediterranean, where during the first years of the war she had survived several harrowing years serving as a target for the kaiser’s U-boats. On board with us were 226 Sudanese sheep, 150 horses and mules from America and Australia, sixty-seven donkeys from Abyssinia, ninety-eight deserters from the Turkish army, eighty-two Egyptian fellaheen laborers, thirty-four Gordon Highlanders, six British officers, and two obsolete aëroplanes. Our crew consisted of Hindus, Javanese, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The skipper of this modern ark was a rotund, jovial Scotch-Irishman by the name of Rose. I doubt whether Captain Kidd in the palmiest days of Caribbean piracy ever put to sea with such a motley cargo and crew.
The different nationalities on board segregated themselves into little racial colonies and did their own cooking in various parts of the main deck. It would be impossible to imagine what the good ship Ozarda looked like after we had been at sea for a few days—and what she smelled like! Some of the Sudanese were from the Nubian Desert, where it is difficult enough to get water for drinking purposes, to say nothing of water for bathing; some of them had never had a real bath in their lives. But there was one of them whom the Highlanders nicknamed Bathing Bert. This man insisted on having his tub out of a bucket five times each day.