“You have asked me to give an account of my life since I have been shipwrecked. I cannot do that; but I shall give you an easy rule by which you may know all about it. We will suppose you have all been three months in the Saara, and Bill here says that I have been here ten years; therefore I have experienced about forty times as long a period of slavery as one of yourselves. Now, multiply the sum total of your sufferings by forty, and you will have some idea of what I have undergone.
“You have probably witnessed some scenes of heartless cruelty—scenes that shocked and wounded the most sensitive feelings of your nature. I have witnessed forty times as many. While suffering the agonies of thirst and hunger, you may have prayed for death as a relief to your anguish. Where such have been your circumstances once, they have been mine for forty times.
“You may have had some bright hopes of escaping, and once more revisiting your native land; and then have experienced the bitterness of disappointment. In this way I have suffered forty times as much as any one of you.”
Sailor Bill and the young gentlemen who had been for several days under the pleasant hallucination that they were on the high road to freedom, were again awakened to a true sense of their situation by the words of a man far more experienced than they in the deceitful ways of the desert.
Before separating for the night, the three mids learnt from Bill and his brother that the latter had been first officer of the ship that had brought him to the coast. They could perceive by his conversation that he was an intelligent man, one whose natural abilities and artificial acquirements were far superior to those of their shipmate, the old man-of-war’s-man.
“If such an accomplished individual,” reasoned they, “has been for ten years a slave in the Saara, unable to escape or reach any place where his liberty might be restored, what hope is there for us?”