My dervishhood was perfectly successful. I happened by chance to touch the elbow of an Anglo-Indian officer, and he publicly and forcibly condemned my organs of vision. And I made an acquaintance and a friend on board. The former was a shawl and cotton merchant, Meyan Khudabaksh Namdar, of Lahore, who, as the caravanserais were full of pilgrims, lodged me at his house for a fortnight. The conversations that passed between us were published two years later in 1855.[2] They clearly pointed to the mutiny which occurred two years afterwards, and this, together with my frankness about the Suez Canal,[3] did not tend to make me a favourite with the then effete Government of India.
My friend was a Turkish trader, named Haji
Wali-el-din. He was then a man about forty-five, of middle stature, with a large round head closely shaven, a bull neck, limbs sturdy as a Saxon’s, a thin red beard, and handsome features beaming benevolence. A curious dry humour he had, delighting in “quizzing,” but in so quiet, quaint, and solemn a way that before you knew him you could scarce divine his drift. He presently found for me rooms next his own at the wakalah, or caravanserai, called Jemeliyah, in the Greek quarter, and I tried to repay his kindness by counselling him in an unpleasant Consular suit.
When we lived under the same roof, the haji and I became inseparable. We walked together and dined together, and spent the evening at a mosque or other place of public pastime. Sometimes we sat among the dervishes; but they are a dangerous race, travelled and inquisitive. Meanwhile I continued to practise my profession—the medical—and devoted myself several hours a day to study in the Azhar Mosque, sitting under the learned Shaykh Mohammed Ali Attar. The better to study the “humours,” I also became a grocer and druggist, and my little shop, a mere hole in the wall, was a perfect gem of Nilotic groceries. But although I sold my wares under cost price to fair customers, my chief clients were small boys and girls, who came, halfpence in hand, to buy sugar and pepper; so one day, determining to sink the thirty shillings which my stock in trade had stood me, I locked the wooden shutter that defended my establishment and made it over to my shaykh.
The haji and I fasted together during the month of Ramazan. That year it fell in the torrid June, and it always makes the Moslem unhealthy and unamiable. At the end preparations were to be made for departure Meccah-wards, and the event was hastened by a convivial séance with a bacchanalian captain of Albanians, which made the gossips of the quarter wonder what manner of an Indian doctor had got amongst them.
I was fortunate enough, however, to hire the services of Shaykh Nur, a quiet East Indian, whose black skin made society suppose him to be my slave. Never suspecting my nationality till after my return from Meccah, he behaved honestly enough; but when absolved by pilgrimage from his past sins, Haji Nur began to rob me so boldly that we were compelled to part. I also made acquaintance with certain sons of the Holy Cities—seven men from El Medinah and Meccah—who, after a begging-trip to Constantinople, were returning to their homes. Having doctored them and lent them some trifling sums, I was invited by Shaykh Hamid El Shamman to stay with him at El Medinah, and by the boy Mohammed El Basyuni to lodge at his mother’s house in Meccah.
They enabled me to collect proper stores for the journey. These consisted of tea, coffee, loaf sugar, biscuits, oil, vinegar, tobacco, lanterns, cooking-pots, and a small bell-shaped tent costing twelve shillings. The provisions were placed in a kafas, or hamper, of palm sticks, my drugs and dress in a sahharah,
or wooden box measuring some three and a half feet each way, covered with cowskin, and the lid fitting into the top. And finally, not wishing to travel by the vans then allotted to the overland passengers, I hired two dromedaries and their attendant Bedouins, who for the sum of ten shillings each agreed to carry me across the desert between Cairo and Suez.
At last, after abundant trouble, all was ready. At 3 p.m., July 1st, 1853, my friend Haji Wali embraced me heartily, and so did my poor old shaykh, who, despite his decrepitude and my objections, insisted upon accompanying me to the city gate. I will not deny having felt a tightening of the heart as their honest faces and forms faded in the distance. All the bystanders ejaculated, “Allah bless thee, Y’all Hajj (O pilgrim!), and restore thee to thy family and thy friends.”
We rode hard over the stretch of rock and hard clay which has since yielded to that monumental work, the Suez Canal. There was no ennui upon the road: to the traveller there was an interest in the wilderness—