Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66 No.406, August 1849
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Wrecked a second time, Romer again reaches the coast of Africa, in
company with an old sailor named Jack Thompson. They fall into the
hands of the Bedouins, and suffer much ill treatment, an account of
which, and of various adventures and escapes, occupy many chapters,
and would have borne a little curtailment. Romer is wandering about
with a tribe, upon whom he has passed himself off as an Arab from a
distant region, when he is compelled to join in an attack on a caravan.
Kaloolah is amongst the prisoners. She has been captured by a party of
slave-hunters, and is on her way to Morocco, where her master hopes
her beauty will fetch a good price from the Emperor Muley Abderrahman.
In the partition of the spoil, she falls to the share of an old Arab,
who is ill satisfied with the acquisition. "He was extremely chagrined
at the turn of fortune which threatened to throw into the wrangling
elements of his domestic felicity a feminine superfluity--or, as he
expressed it, 'another tongue in his tent.'
"'Bismillah!' he exclaimed; 'God is great, but this is a small thing!
She is not a man; she is not a black--she cannot work; but won't she
eat and talk! They all eat and talk. I take a club sometimes, and knock
them down; beat them; break their bones; but they still eat and talk!
God's will be done! but it is too much to put such a thing upon me for
my share! She is good for nothing: I cannot sell her.'"
The grumbling old Bedouin did sell her, however, to Jonathan, for
three or four cotton shirts. Flight now becomes necessary, for Hassan,
son of the chief of the tribe, seeks Jonathan's life, and Mrs Ali,
the chief's wife, persecutes him with her misplaced affection, and is
spiteful to Kaloolah, whom she looks upon as the chief obstacle to its
requital. Upon this head our Yankee is rather good: "Respect for the
sex," he says, "and a sentiment of gentlemanly delicacy, which the
reader will appreciate, prevents me from dwelling upon the story at
length. It was wrong, undoubtedly, in Seffora to love any other than
her old, rugose-faced, white-bearded husband; but it is not for me to
blame her. One thing, however, in her conduct can hardly be excused.
True, I might have treated her affection with more tenderness; I might
have nursed the gentle flowers of passion, instead of turning away
from their fragrance; I might have responded to that 'yearning of the
soul for sympathy'--have relieved, with the food of love, 'the mighty
hunger of the heart;' but all this, and more that I might have done,
but did not do, gave her no right to throw stones at Kaloolah." To
avoid the pelting and other disagreeables, the lovers take themselves
off in the night-time, mounted on _heiries_--camels of a peculiar
breed and excellence, famed in the desert for endurance and speed. On
their road they pick up, in a Moorish village, an Irish renegade; at
some salt-works, they find Jack Thompson working as a slave; and soon
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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