“Walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin, with upturned moustache, he looked a most Teutonic German.

“You observed, my friend?” queried the Leading Gentleman (whose father was the son of a Negro-Arab who married, or should have married, a Jewess captured near Fez, and whose mother was the daughter of a Tunisian Turk by a half-bred Negress of Timbuctoo).

“I observed,” replied the fair young man in the mongrel Arabic-Swahili lingua franca of the Red Sea and East African littorals “that it is but natural for dogs to prey upon dogs.”

“There are times when the lion is driven to prey upon dogs, my dear son,” interposed the mild-eyed, benevolent-looking Arab—­a pensive smile on his venerable face.

“Yes—­when he is old, mangy, toothless and deserving of nothing better, my dear father,” replied the fair young man, and his glances at the white beard, scanty locks and mumbling mouth of the ancient gentleman had an unpleasantly personal quality.  To the casual on-looker it would have seemed that an impudent boy deliberately insulted a harmless benevolent old gentleman.  To the fair young man, however, it was well known that the old gentleman’s name was famous across Northern and Eastern Africa for monstrous villainy and fiendish cruelty—­the name of the worst and wickedest of those traders in “black ivory,” one of whose side-lines is frequently gun-running.  Also he knew that the benevolent-looking old dear was desirous that the Leading Gentleman, his partner, should join with him in a little scheme (a scheme revealed by one Moussa Isa, eaves-dropper) to give the fair young man some inches of steel instead of the pounds of Teutonic gold due for services (and rifles) rendered, when they should reach the quiet spot on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf where certain bold caravan-leaders would await them and their precious cargo—­a scheme condemned by the Leading Gentleman on the grounds of the folly of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.  But then the wealthy Arab patriarch was retiring from the risky business (already nearly ruined and destroyed by English gun-boats) after that trip, and the Leading Gentleman was not.  Thus it was that the attitude of the fair young man toward Sheikh Abou ben Mustapha Muscati did not display that degree of respect that his grey hairs and beautiful old face would appear to deserve.

The French-speaking Moslem Berber ex-Zouave, from Algiers, suggested that Moussa Isa, a slave, was certainly not fitting food for gentlemen who fight, hunt, travel, poach elephants, deal in “black ivory,” run guns, and generally lead a life too picturesque for an over-"educated,” utilitarian and depressing age—­but what would you?  “One eats—­but yes, one eats, or one ceases to live, and one does not wish to cease to live—­and therefore one eats” and he cocked a yellow and appraising eye at Moussa Isa.  The sense of the meeting appeared to be that though one would not have chosen this particular animal, necessity knows no rule—­and if the throat be cut while the animal be alive, one may eat of the flesh and break the Law by so much the less.  Moussa Isa must be halalled.[40] But the fair young man drawing a Khyber knife with two feet of blade, observed that it was now likely that there would be a plethora of food, as he would most assuredly cut the throat of any throat-cutter.