They made the voyage from Naples to Port Said in four days. The weather was perfect, and at dawn they found themselves face to face with old Stromboli, whose cone-shaped summit rises almost perpendicularly from the sea.
“Nothing in my American experience,” Douglass claimed, “ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of fast, profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage through the Suez Canal, moving smoothly and noiselessly between two spade-built banks of yellow sand, watched over by the jealous care of England and France. We find here, too, the motive and mainspring of English Egyptian occupation and of English policy. On either side stretches a sandy desert, to which the eye, even with the aid of the strongest field-glass, can find no limit but the horizon; land where neither tree, shrub nor vegetation of any kind, nor human habitation breaks the view. All is flat, broad, silent and unending solitude. There appears occasionally, away in the distance, a white line of life which only makes the silence and solitude more pronounced. It is a line of flamingoes, the only bird to be seen in the desert, making us wonder what they find upon which to subsist.
“But here, too, is another sign of life, wholly unlooked for, and for which it is hard to account. It is the half-naked, hungry form of a human being, a young Arab, who seems to have started up out of the yellow sand under his feet, for no town, village, house or shelter is seen from which he could have emerged. But here he is, running by the ship’s side up and down the sandy banks for miles and for hours with the speed of a horse and the endurance of a hound, plaintively shouting as he runs: ‘Backsheesh! Backsheesh! Backsheesh!’ and only stopping in the race to pick up the pieces of bread and meat thrown to him from the ship. Far away in the distance, through the quivering air and sunlight, a mirage appears. Now it is a splendid forest and now a refreshing lake. The illusion is perfect.”[32]
The memory of this half-naked, lean young Arab with the mirage behind him made an indelible impression.
After a week in Cairo, Douglass wrote, “Rome has its unwashed monks, Cairo its howling and dancing dervishes. Both seem equally deaf to the dictates of reason.”
When they returned to Washington and to their home on Anacostia Heights they knew that they had savored the full meaning of abundant living. They had walked together in many lands and among many nationalities and races; they had been received together by peoples of all shades, who greeted them in many different languages; their hands had touched many hands. They had so much they could afford to be tolerant.
Arrows of ignorance, jealousy or petty prejudice could not reach them.
In June, 1889, Frederick Douglass was appointed Minister to Haiti.
Chapter Twenty
The Môle St. Nicolas