of a pilgrim declaring himself to be an infidel the authorities would be powerless to protect him.
The question of Cui bono?—of what good I did to others or to myself by the adventure—is not so easily answered. My account of El Medinah is somewhat fuller than that of Burckhardt, whose health was breaking when he visited it. And our caravan’s route between the Holy Cities was not the beaten track along the Red Sea, but the little-known eastern or desert road. Some critics certainly twitted me with having “turned Turk”; one might turn worse things. For the rest, man is ever most tempted by the useless and the impossible.
To appear in character upon the scene of action many precautions were necessary. Egypt in those days was a land of passports and policemen; the haute-police was not inferior to that of any European country. By the advice of a brother-officer, Captain Grindley, I assumed the Eastern dress at my lodgings in London, and my friend accompanied me as interpreter to Southampton. On April 4th, 1853, a certain Shaykh Abdullah (to wit, myself) left home in the P. & O. Company’s steamer Bengal, and before the end of the fortnight landed at Alexandria. It was not exactly pleasant for the said personage to speak broken English the whole way, and rigorously to refuse himself the pleasure of addressing the other sex; but under the circumstances it was necessary.
Fortunately, on board the Bengal was John Larking, a well-known Alexandrian. He was in my secret,
and I was received in his house, where he gave me a little detached pavilion and treated me as a munshi, or language-master. My profession among the people was that of a doctor. The Egyptians are a medico-ridden race; all are more or less unhealthy, and they could not look upon my phials and pill-boxes without yearning for their contents. An Indian doctor was a novelty to them; Franks they despised; but how resist a man who had come so far, from east and west? Men, women, and children besieged my door, by which means I could see the people face to face, especially that portion of which Europeans as a rule know only the worst. Even learned Alexandrians, after witnessing some of my experiments in mesmerism and the magic mirror, opined that the stranger was a manner of holy man gifted with preternatural powers. An old man sent to offer me his daughter in marriage—my sanctity compelled me to decline the honour—and a middle-aged lady offered me a hundred piastres (nearly one pound sterling) to stay at Alexandria and superintend the restoration of her blind left eye.
After a month pleasantly spent in the little garden of roses, jasmine, and oleanders, I made in early June a move towards Cairo. The first thing was to procure a passport; I had neglected, through ignorance, to bring one from England. It was not without difficulty, involving much unclean dressing and expenditure of horrible English, that I obtained from H.B.M.’s Consul at Alexandria a certificate declaring me to be an Indo-British subject named Abdullah, by profession
a doctor, and, to judge from frequent blanks in the document, not distinguished by any remarkable conformation of eyes, nose, or cheek. This paper, duly countersigned by the zabit, or police magistrate, would carry me anywhere within the Egyptian frontier.
At Alexandria also I provided a few necessaries for the pilgrimage: item—a change or two of clothing; a substantial leather money belt to carry my gold in; a little cotton bag for silver and small change, kept ready for use in the breast pocket; a zemzimiyah, or water-bag of goatskin; a huge cotton umbrella of Cairene make, brightly yellow, like an overgrown marigold; a coarse Persian rug, which acted as bed, table, chair, and oratory; a pea-green box, with red and yellow flowers, capable of standing falls from a camel twice a day, and therefore well fitted for a medicine chest; and, lastly, the only peculiar article—viz., the shroud, without which no one sets out en route to Meccah. This memento mori is a piece of cotton six feet long by five broad. It is useful, for instance, when a man is dangerously sick or wounded; the caravan, of course, cannot wait, and to loiter behind is destruction. The patient, therefore, is ceremonially washed, wrapped up in his kafan, partly covered with sand, and left to his fate. It is hard to think of such an end without horror; the torturing thirst of a wound, the sun heating the brain to madness, and, worst of all—for they do not wait for death—the attacks of the jackal, the vulture, and the ravens of the wilds. This shroud was duly sprinkled, as is the custom, with the holy water
of the Zemzem well at Meccah. It later came to a bad end amongst the villainous Somal in Eastern Africa.
Equipped in a dervish’s frock, I took leave of my kind host and set out, a third-class passenger, upon a steamer facetiously known as the Little Asthmatic. In those days the rail had not invaded Egypt. We had an unpleasant journey up the Mahmadiyah Canal and the Nile, which is connected by it with Alexandria. The usual time was thirty hours. We took three mortal days and nights. We were nearly wrecked at the then unfinished Barage, we saw nothing of the Pyramids but their tops, and it was with a real feeling of satisfaction that we moored alongside of the old tumble-down suburb, Bulak.