“’Ow can that be?” asked Bill. “Dang it, man, you’ll not be forty years old till the fourteenth o’ next month. You ’ave lost yer senses, an’ in troth, it ain’t no wonder!”
“That is true, for there is nothing in the Saara to help a man keep his reckoning. There are no seasons; and every day is as like another as two seconds in the same minute. But surely I must have been here for more than eleven years?”
“No,” answered Bill, “ye ’ave no been here only a wee bit langer than tin; but afther all ye must ’ave suffered in that time it is quare that ye should a know’d me at all, at all.”
“I did not know you until you spoke,” rejoined Jim. “Then I couldn’t doubt that it was you who stood before me, when I heard our father’s broad Scotch, our mother’s Irish brogue, and the talk of the cockneys amongst whom your earliest days were passed, all mingled together.”
“You see, Master Colly,” said Bill, turning to the young Scotchman, “my brother Jim has had the advantage of being twelve years younger than I; and when he was old enough to go to school, I was doing something to help kape him there, and for all that I believe he is plased to see me.”
“Pleased to see you!” exclaimed Jim. “Of course I am.”
“I’m sure av it,” said Bill. “Well, then, brother, go ahead, an’ spin us your yarn.”
“I have no one yarn to spin,” replied Jim, “for a narrative of my adventures in the desert would consist of a thousand yarns, each giving a description of some severe suffering or disappointment. I can only tell you that it seems to me that I have passed many years in travelling through the sands of the Saara, years in cultivating barley on its borders, years in digging wells, and years in attending flocks of goats, sheep, and other animals. I have had many masters, all bad, and some worse, and I have had many cruel disappointments about regaining my liberty. I was once within a single day’s journey of Mogador; and was then sold again and carried back into the very heart of the desert. I have attempted two or three times to escape; but was recaptured each time, and nearly killed for the unpardonable dishonesty of trying to rob my master of my own person. I have often been tempted to commit suicide; but a sort of womanly curiosity and stubbornness has prevented me. I wished to see how long Fortune would persecute me; and I was determined not to thwart her plans by putting myself beyond their reach. I did not like to give in: for anyone who tries to escape from trouble by killing himself shows that he has come off sadly worsted in the war of life.”
“You are quite right,” said Harry Blount; “but I hope that your hardest battles in that war are now over. Our masters have promised to carry us to some place where we may be ransomed by our countrymen, and you of course will be taken along with us.”
“Do not flatter yourselves with that hope,” said Jim. “I was amused with it for several years. Every master I have had gave me the same promise, and here I am yet. I did think when my late owners were saving the stone from the wreck, that I could get them to enter the walls of some seaport town, and that possibly they might take me along with them. But that hope has proved as delusive as all others I have entertained since shipwrecked on the shore of this accursed country. I believe there are a few who are fortunate enough to regain their liberty; but the majority of sailors cast away on the Saaran coast never have the good fortune to get away from it. They die under the hardships and ill-treatment to which they are exposed upon the desert, without leaving a trace of their existence any more than the dogs or camels belonging to their common masters.