the siren song which charmed the senses of the old Arabian voyagers.[1]
Suddenly every trace of civilization fell from my companions as if it had been a garment. At Aden, shaven and beturbanded, Arab fashion, now they threw off all dress save the loin cloth, and appeared in their dark morocco. Mohammed filled his mouth with a mixture of coarse Surat tobacco and ashes—the latter article intended, like the Anglo-Indian soldier's chili in his arrack, to "make it bite." Gulad uncovered his head, a member which in Africa is certainly made to go bare, and buttered himself with an unguent redolent of sheep's tail; and Ismail, the rais or captain of our "foyst,"[2] the Sahalah, applied himself to puffing his nicotiana out of a goat's shank-bone. Our crew, consisting of seventy-one men and boys, prepared, as evening fell, a mess of Jowari grain[3] and grease, the recipe of which I spare you, and it was despatched in a style that would have done credit to Kafirs as regards gobbling, bolting, smearing lips, licking fingers, and using ankles as napkins. Then with a light easterly breeze and the ominous cliffs of Little Aden still in sight, we spread our mats on deck and prepared to sleep under the moon.[4]
My companions, however, felt, without perhaps comprehending, the joviality arising from a return to Nature. Every man was forthwith nicknamed, and
- ↑ The curious reader will find in the Herodotus of the Arabs, Al-Masudi's "Meadows of gold and mines of gems," a strange tale of the blind billows and the singing waves of Berberah and Jofuni (Cape Guardafui, the classical Aromata).
- ↑ "Foyst" and "buss," are the names applied by old travellers to the half-decked vessels of these seas.
- ↑ Holcus Sorghum, the common grain of Africa and Arabia: the Somali call it Hirad; the people of Al-Yaman, Ta'am.
- ↑ The Somal being a people of less nervous temperament than the Arabs and Indians, do not fear the moonlight.
