Alle nove!-at nine! at nine! Still appearing uncertain, I drove
him out of his chair, when he rose with a curse and read 8 A.M. An
unhappy Eastern, depending upon what he said, would have been precisely
one hour too late.
Thus were we lapsing into the real good old East-Indian style of doing
business. Thus Anglo-Indicus orders his first clerk to execute some
commission; the senior, having "work" upon his hands, sends a junior;
the junior finds the sun hot, and passes on the word to a "peon;" the
"peon" charges a porter with the errand; and the porter quietly sits or
doses in his place, trusting that Fate will bring him out of the
scrape, but firmly resolved, though the shattered globe fall, not to
stir an inch.
The reader, I must again express a hope, will pardon the length of
these descriptions,-my object is to show him how business is carried on
in these hot countries. Business generally. For had I been, not
Abdullah the Darwaysh, but a rich native merchant, it would have been
[p.28]the same. How many complaints of similar treatment have I heard
in different parts of the Eastern world! and how little can one realise
them without having actually experienced the evil! For the future I
shall never see a "nigger" squatting away half a dozen mortal hours in
a broiling sun patiently waiting for something or for some one, without
a lively remembrance of my own cooling of the calces at the
custom-house of Alexandria.
