Another interesting group consisted of three gaily dressed Orientals, in bag trousers tight at the knees, turban, and highly embroidered jackets. They made their way to the quarter-deck abaft the paddle box, and were about being summarily ejected by the steward in consequence of being deck passengers, when I interposed, and got him to let them stay for a while. They perfectly well understood that it was owing to my interference they were allowed to remain, and so we knocked up a sort of acquaintance, and carried on a lame, very lame conversation by the help of the youngest, who could speak a very few words of Italian. I could not make out any thing about them, whence they came, or whither they were going, but from their features I could easily see they were Asiatics, Arabs most probably, and the youngest, who was also the lightest in colour, had three scars on each cheek, not unlike in shape to our broad arrow.
How I longed for a knowledge of Arabic, how I envied Captain Burton! If he had been there we should at once have known all about them, and the dervish and everyone else, including a tall, handsome Soudani slave, who kept grinning and showing his teeth from ear to ear, while I was carrying on my lame conversation with the Arabs.
Up to this point, Italian and German had enabled me to get on famously; but now that I was getting among Asiatics, although I was still in Europe, I felt my utter helplessness, and the absolute necessity for a knowledge of the language of the Koran, for those who wish to visit the East with pleasure and profit.
The whole deck forward was encumbered with passengers. In one corner seated on a pile of luggage, but well bolstered up by rolls of Persian carpets, was a most truculent-looking Oriental, attended by an intelligent-looking young negro, with a most astonishing Caucasian type of countenance. He wore nothing but a white calico sort of shirt with loose sleeves, and a string of red beads round his neck. He had none of the characteristics of the negro except the colour; had I known anything of Arabic, I could most probably have learnt something about his origin.
In another corner of the deck a Mahomedan merchant (as I was informed he was) had contrived to screen off a place for himself and his family, one of whom, about three years old, was sprawling stark naked on a rug in the broiling sun, while a closely veiled female, his mother I suppose, was chasing small deer all over his person, which was closely spotted as if with measles—but they were only bites!