I nodded and passed on, wondering to myself why Stephen had suddenly determined to stay the night on the Maria.

CHAPTER V

HASSAN

I suppose it must have been two hours after dawn on the following morning that I was awakened by knocks upon the door and the voice of Jack saying that Sam, the cook, wanted to speak to me.

Wondering what he could be doing there, as I understood he was sleeping on the ship, I called out that he was to come in.  Now this Sam, I should say, hailed from the Cape, and was a person of mixed blood.  The original stock, I imagine, was Malay which had been crossed with Indian coolie.  Also, somewhere or other, there was a dash of white and possibly, but of this I am not sure, a little Hottentot.  The result was a person of few vices and many virtues.  Sammy, I may say at once, was perhaps the biggest coward I ever met.  He could not help it, it was congenital, though, curiously enough, this cowardice of his never prevented him from rushing into fresh danger.  Thus he knew that the expedition upon which I was engaged would be most hazardous; remembering his weakness I explained this to him very clearly.  Yet that knowledge did not deter him from imploring that he might be allowed to accompany me.  Perhaps this was because there was some mutual attachment between us, as in the case of Hans.  Once, a good many years before, I had rescued Sammy from a somewhat serious scrape by declining to give evidence against him.  I need not enter into the details, but a certain sum of money over which he had control had disappeared.  I will merely say, therefore, that at the time he was engaged to a coloured lady of very expensive tastes, whom in the end he never married.

After this, as it chanced, he nursed me through an illness.  Hence the attachment of which I have spoken.

Sammy was the son of a native Christian preacher, and brought up upon what he called “The Word.”  He had received an excellent education for a person of his class, and in addition to many native dialects with which a varied career had made him acquainted, spoke English perfectly, though in the most bombastic style.  Never would he use a short word if a long one came to his hand, or rather to his tongue.  For several years of his life he was, I believe, a teacher in a school at Capetown where coloured persons received their education; his “department,” as he called it, being “English Language and Literature.”

Wearying of or being dismissed from his employment for some reason that he never specified, he had drifted up the coast to Zanzibar, where he turned his linguistic abilities to the study of Arabic and became the manager or head cook of an hotel.  After a few years he lost this billet, I know not how or why, and appeared at Durban in what he called a “reversed position.”  Here it was that we met again, just before my expedition to Pongo-land.