That rule (and it is rather rule than law) tends to eliminate all class and color prejudice.  Provided that a man will bow to Mecca three times daily and refrain from pork and wine, he may wear whatever skin God gave him and yet mingle with the best.  He may even marry whom he will and can afford; and he may be whatever his ability, ambition, and audacity dictate.

And Hassan Ah had never been a slave, so he had even less to overcome than might have been the case.  He stalked Adra socially uncondemned where once he had caught fish, groomed camels, and done other irritating jobs.  His old fish-catching days had given him an intimate acquaintance with the reef, and his small-boat seamanship, born of hard pulling in the trough of beam-on-seas, was well suited to the local type of craft.

So nobody questioned his right to the title of harbor pilot.  And if certain perquisites went with an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected.  Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor of it, in Arabia?

Nobody can pass the reef at night in shallow-draft lateen-sail boats without having him on board; and though he was never ostensibly paid for his services, it was understood that he performed pilot service in return for certain other opportunities that sometimes came his way.  When things happened on the high sea that were not discussed in public, it was understood that Hassan Ah could have discussed them as thoroughly as anybody if he chose.

On the whole, then, and within limits that were only more or less definable, he was something of a personality.  Men listened to him when he raised his voice in argument, and as one who could grant favors on occasion his words had weight.

The sun was very nearly in its zenith, beating down on dry Arabia between racing black clouds, when he had finished talking to the local council in the ramshackle old council-house, skin and mat curtained, that faced the sheik’s where the main street broadened for a hundred filthy yards into a market-place.  All through his argument he had held a pure-white bull terrier between his knees as proof that he knew whereof he spoke.

“Can any of you hold him without being bitten?” he demanded.  And they did not seem to care to try.

“I know the ways of these men!” be asserted, drawing extravagant expressions of contentment from the dog in proof of it.

So the others in the stuffy council place gave the dog a wide berth and no privilege, but conceded him the right to hold the beast, if he wanted to, without personal defilement.  And since the way of the world is that a man who has won the first of his contentions can win all the rest with half the ease, he persuaded them with a hurricane of black man’s rhetoric to do what Arabs consider almost wicked.

Unbelievers who are prisoners should die, beyond all question.

“As the dregs of oil shall the fruit of the tree of Al Zakkum boil in the bellies of the damned!” the sheik quoted.  “They should be hurried, therefore, to the punishment that waits!”