[p.59]Murids (disciples), and delighted in kissing the hand of the Sahib Nafas[FN#18] or minor saint.

The Haji repaid me for my docility by vaunting me everywhere as the very phoenix of physicians.  My first successes were in the Wakalah; opposite to me there lived an Arab slave dealer, whose Abyssinians constantly fell sick.  A tender race, they suffer when first transported to Egypt from many complaints, especially consumption, dysentery and varicose veins.  I succeeded in curing one girl.  As she was worth at least fifteen pounds, the gratitude of her owner was great, and I had to dose half a dozen others in order to cure them of the pernicious and price-lowering habit of snoring.  Living in rooms opposite these slave girls, and seeing them at all hours of the day and night, I had frequent opportunities of studying them.  They were average specimens of the steato-pygous Abyssinian breed, broad-shouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of a prodigious size.  None of them had handsome features, but the short curly hair that stands on end being concealed under a kerchief, there was something pretty in the brow, eyes, and upper part of the nose, coarse and sensual in the pendent lips, large jowl and projecting mouth, whilst the whole had a combination of piquancy with sweetness.  Their style of flirtation was peculiar.

“How beautiful thou art, O Maryam!-what eyes!-what-”

[p.60]"Then why,"-would respond the lady-"don’t you buy me?”

“We are of one faith-of one creed-formed to form each other’s happiness.”

“Then why don’t you buy me?”

“Conceive, O Maryam, the blessing of two hearts-”

“Then why don’t you buy me?”

and so on.  Most effectual gag to Cupid’s eloquence!  Yet was not the plain-spoken Maryam’s reply without its moral.  How often is it our fate, in the West as in the East, to see in bright eyes and to hear from rosy lips an implied, if not an expressed, “Why don’t you buy me?” or, worse still, “Why can’t you buy me?”

All I required in return for my services from the slave-dealer, whose brutal countenance and manners were truly repugnant, was to take me about the town, and explain to me certain mysteries in his craft, which knowledge might be useful in time to come.  Little did he suspect who his interrogator was, and freely in his unsuspiciousness he entered upon the subject of slave hunting in the Somali country, and Zanzibar, of all things the most interesting to me.  I have, however, nothing new to report concerning the present state of bondsmen in Egypt.  England has already learned that slaves are not necessarily the most wretched and degraded of men.  Some have been bold enough to tell the British public that, in the generality of Oriental countries,[FN#19] the serf fares far