The Jemadar Mallok is a monocular, and the Sanscrit proverb declares:
“Rare a Kana (one-eyed man) is a good man and sound,
Rare a ladye gay will be faithful found.”
Mallok is no exception to this rule of the “Kana.” He is a man with fine Italian features, somewhat disfigured by the small-pox: but his one eye never looks you “in the face,” and there is an expression about the mouth which forbids implicit trust in his honesty. He proclaims himself to be somewhat fonder of fighting than of feeding, yet suspicious circumstances led me to believe that he was one of those whom the Arabs describe as “first at the banquet and last at the brawl.” He began with a display of zeal and activity which died young; he lapsed, through grumbling and discontent, into open insubordination as we progressed westward, or from home; he became submissive and somewhat servile as we returned to the coast, and when he took leave of me he shed a flood of crocodile’s tears.
Mohammed is the Rish Safid, or greybeard of the caravan, and without a greybeard no eastern caravan considers itself en règle. Of these indispensable veterans I had two specimens; but of what use they were, except to teach hot youth the cold caution of eld, I never could divine,—vieux soldat, vielle bête. In the civilised regiment age is not venerable in the private, as every grey hair is a proof that he has not merited or has forfeited promotion; so in the East, where there is a paucity of competitors in the race of fortune, the Rish Safid of humble fortune may be safely set down as a fool or a foolish knave, and though his escort is sought, he generally proves himself to be no better than he should have been.
Mohammed’s body is apparently hard as a rock, his mind is soft as putty, and his comrades, disappointed in their hopes of finding brains behind those wrinkles, derisively compare him to a rotten walnut, and say before his face, “What! grey hairs and no wits?” He has invested the fifteen dollars advanced to him as outfit by Lieut.-Col. Hamerton, in a slave-boy, whom presently he will exchange for a slave-girl, despite all the inuendoes of his friends. He was at first a manner of peace-maker, but soon my refusal to enlist and pay his slave as a hired porter acted like Ithuriel’s spear. This veteran of fractious temper and miserly habits ended, in a question of stinted rations, by drawing his sabre upon and cutting at his Jemadar; an offence which I was compelled to visit with a bastinado, inflicted out of the sight of man by the hand of Khudabakhsh.
Shahdad is the Chelebi of the party, the fast young man. He is decidedly not handsome. A figure short and trapu, a retrussed nose, small pigs’ eyes, a beard like a blackberry bush, and a crop of hair which, projecting its wiry waves in a deep long curtain from beneath a diminutive scarlet fez, makes his head appear top-heavy. Yet he does sad havoc amongst female hearts by means of his zeze or guitar, half a gourd with an arm to which is attached a single string, and by his lively accompaniment is a squeaking falsetto, which is here as fascinating and emollient to the sex as ever was the organ of Rubini in Europe. During a lengthened sojourn at Bombay he has enlarged his mind by the acquisition of the Hindostani tongue and of Indian trickery. He is almost the only Eastern whom I remember that abused the poor letter H like a thoroughbred Londoner. His familiarity with Anglo-Europeans, and his experience touching the facility of gulling them, has induced in him a certain proclivity for peculation, grumbling, and mutiny. His brother—or rather cousin, for in these lands all fellow-tribesmen are brethren—“Ismail” is a confirmed invalid, a man with a “broken mouth,” deeply sunken cheeks, and emaciated frame, who, though earnestly solicited to return eastwards, will persist in accompanying the party till he falls a victim to a chronic malady in Unyamwezi.
Belok is our snob; a youth of servile origin, with coarse features, wide mouth, everted lips, and a pert, or rather an impudent expression of countenance, which, acting as index to his troublesome character, at once prejudices the physiognomist against him. Belok’s comrades have reason to quote the Arab saw, “Defend me from the beggar become wealthy, and from the slave become a freeman!” He has invested his advance of salary in a youth; and the latter serves and works for the rest of the mess, who must patiently and passively endure the insolence of the master for fear of losing the offices of the man. After the fashion of a certain sort of fools, he applies the whole of his modicum of wit to mischief-making, and he succeeds admirably where better men, whose thoughts attempt a wider range, would fail. By his exertions the Baloch became, in point of social intercourse, not unlike the passengers of a ship bound on a long voyage: after the first month the society divides itself into two separate and adverse cliques; after the second it breaks up into little knots; and after the third it is a chequer-work of pairs and solitaires. Arrived at the “Pond of Ugogo,” I was compelled to address an official letter to Zanzibar, requesting the recal of Belok and his coadjutor in mischief, Khudabakhsh.
Abdullah is the type of the respectable, in fact, of the good young man. It is really pathetic to hear him recount, with accents broken by emotion, the “tale full of waters of the eye,”—the parting of an only son, who was led away to an African grave, from the aged widow his mamma; to listen to her excellent advice, and to his no less excellent resolves. He is capable of calling his bride elect, were such article a subject ever to be mentioned amongst Moslems, “his choicest blessing.” With an edifying mingling of piety and discipline, he never neglects the opportunity of standing in prayer behind the Jemadar Mallok, whose elevation to a superior grade—honneur oblige!—has compelled him to rub up a superficial acquaintance with the forms of devotion. Virtue in the abstract I revere; in the concrete I sometimes suspect. The good young man soon justified this suspicion by repeatedly applying to Said bin Salim for beads, in my name, which he converted to his own purposes.
Of Darwaysh little need be said. He is a youth about twenty-two years old, with a bulging brow, a pair of ferret-eyes, a “peaky” nose, a thin chin; in fact, with a face the quintessence of curiosity. He is the “brother”—that is to say, the spy—of the Jemadar, and his principal peculiarity is a repugnance to obeying an order because it is an order. With this individual I had at first many a passage of words. Presently prostrated in body and mind by severe disease, he obtained relief from European drugs; and from that time until the end of the journey, he conducted himself with a certain stiffness and decorum which contrasted pleasantly enough with the exceeding “bounce” of his earlier career.
The Seedy Jelai calls himself a Baloch, though palpably the veriest descendant of Ham. He resents with asperity the name of “Nigger,” or “Nig”—Jupiter Tonans has heard of the offensive dissyllable, which was a household word before the days of the Indian mutiny, but has he heard of the more offensive monosyllable which was forced upon the abbreviating Anglo-Saxon by the fatal necessity of requiring to repeat the word so frequently? Jelai clothes his long lank legs—cucumber-shinned and bony-kneed—in calico tights, which display the full deformity of those members; and taking a pride in the length of his mustachios, which distinguishes him from his African-born brethren, he twists them en croc like a hidalgo in the days of Gil Blas. The Seedy, judging from analogy, ought to be brave, but he is not. On the occasion of alarm in the mountains of Usagara, he privily proposed to his comrades to “bolt” and leave us. Moreover, on the “Sea of Ujiji,” where he was chosen as an escort, he ignobly deserted me.