The second day at sea, when the two Baalbekian lads are snug on deck, their rugs spread out not far from the stalls in which Syrian cattle are shipped to Egypt and Arab horses to Europe or America, they rummage in their bags—and behold, a treat! Shakib takes out his favourite poet al-Mutanabbi, and Khalid, his favourite bottle, the choicest of the Ksarah distillery of the Jesuits. For this whilom donkey-boy will begin by drinking the wine of these good Fathers and then their—blood! His lute is also with him; and he will continue to practise the few lessons which the bulbuls of the poplar groves have taught him. No, he cares not for books. And so, he uncorks the bottle, hands it to Shakib his senior, then takes a nip himself, and, thrumming his lute strings, trolls a few doleful pieces of Arabic song. “In these,” he would say to Shakib, pointing to the bottle and the lute, “is real poetry, and not in that book with which you would kill me.” And Shakib, in stingless sarcasm, would insist that the music in al-Mutanabbi’s lines is just a little more musical than Khalid’s thrumming. They quarrel about this. And in justice to both, we give the following from the Histoire Intime .
“When we left our native land,” Shakib writes, “my literary bent was not shared in the least by Khalid.
I had gone through the higher studies which, in our hedge-schools and clerical institutions, do not reach a very remarkable height. Enough of French to understand the authors tabooed by our Jesuit professors—the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, the Diderots; enough of Arabic to enable one to parse and analyse the verse of al-Mutanabbi; enough of Church History to show us, not how the Church wielded the sword of persecution, but how she was persecuted herself by the pagans and barbarians of the earth;—of these and suchlike consists the edifying curriculum.
Now, of this high phase of education, Khalid was thoroughly immune. But his intuitive sagacity was often remarkable, and his humour, sweet and pathetic.