Once when I was reading aloud some of the Homeric effusions of al-Mutanabbi, he said to me, as he was playing his lute, ‘In the heart of this,’ pointing to the lute, ‘and in the heart of me, there be more poetry than in that book with which you would kill me.’
And one day, after wandering clandestinely through the steamer, he comes to me with a gesture of surprise and this: ‘Do you know, there are passengers who sleep in bunks below, over and across each other? I saw them, billah ! And I was told they pay more than we do for such a low passage—the fools! Think on it. I peeped into a little room, a dingy, smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silkworms at home. I wouldn’t sleep in one of them, billah ! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely, we are above them—at least, in the night. What matters it, then, if ours is called the Fourth Class and theirs the Primo. Wherever one is happy, Shakib, there is the Primo.’ ”
But this happy humour is assailed at Marseilles. His placidity and stolid indifference are rudely shaken by the sharpers, who differ only from the boatmen of Beirut in that they wear pantaloons and intersperse their Arabic with a jargon of French. These brokers, like rapacious bats, hover around the emigrant and before his purse is opened for the fourth time, the trick is done. And with what ceremony, you shall see.
- From the steamer the emigrant is led to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. * From the dealer of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the hostelry, where he is detained a