Two or three times I expostulated, and finally I threatened to thrash him with my cane if he struck the donkey again without orders.
“I understand,” he said, “no strike donkey no more,” and we were off again.
Within two minutes he struck the animal. The promised thrashing was administered, and even that was not enough to make the boy mindful of what I wanted, and several times he involuntarily hurried the animal ahead. It was the force of habit, which to him was perfectly uncontrollable.
The donkey is a patient beast; he never kicks or runs away, never takes fright, never asks for backsheesh, and he can bear a burden that seems out of all proportion to his size. He does not get drunk or stay away from home by circumstances which he cannot control, and he can be boarded and lodged at a very cheap rate. His food consists of beans and chopped straw, with an occasional bonne bouche of fresh cut grass, of which you see great loads coming daily into the city on the backs of camels and donkeys.
The pace of the donkey is a walk, an amble, or a gallop according to circumstances, and at whatever speed he is going he is generally as easy as a cradle. The natives ride without stirrups, owing to the donkey’s tendency to stumble; he does not fall very often, but you never know when he will go down in a heap under you, and he is most likely to do this when at full speed, the very time when you least relish this sort of business.
When I reached Cairo I was not up to the dodge of riding without my feet in the stirrups, but I soon concluded that I had better learn. One afternoon I had a donkey that was very good, from a progressive point of view. There was a party of us, and we went at a gallop, and my beast was ahead most of the time. Suddenly he went down, very much as a wet towel falls on the floor when you drop it from your hand, and I went down like another wet towel when it is not dropped but flung into a corner.
Had my feet been out of the stirrups they would have touched the ground as I fell, and I should have been standing erect and dignified, and could have contemplated my donkey in a heap as Xerxes contemplated the remains of his fleet at Salamis. But I was comfortably fixed in the stirrups, and so I went forward and turned about eleven-sixteenths of a somersault before I settled into a sprawling position on and in the sand, to the great delight of the multitude who are never happier than when seeing a stranger make an ass of himself. I got up and found myself uninjured, though I presented the appearance of having been used as a street sweeping machine.