“Please come and see Ibrahim’s wife, she is very ill.” Even I could see that the woman was dying, and that nothing could be done for her, but at least I succeeded in saving the child from being fed on “samin,” stinking native butter, which might soon have killed him. The inconceivable stagnation of life in a desert coast village makes any event a godsend. Illness brings joy to all, even the sufferer seeming to be supported by the knowledge that he is a benefactor to the public. He is invariably surrounded by a deeply interested crowd, and never fails to shew appropriate symptoms. In case of wounds the men are absolutely stoical, where a white man could not restrain evidence of suffering, and the application of a red hot nail, which is a frequent treatment for most complaints, is borne without a murmur. And so the gentle groaning of the sick is never allowed to become indecorous, but merely serves to prove that the host and patient is conscious of, and means to fulfil, his duty to his guests. In this case things were very different, the woman was beyond even involuntary groans. The first thing to do was to send a boat for Ibrahim, who was absent on an island ten miles away. His return was delayed a full day by his going another five miles down the coast to the next village, where he spent a month’s wages on new clothes and borrowed all the jewellery he could. With these his dying wife was decked out, as a means of persuading the evil spirit, which had caused her illness, to depart. At home meanwhile drums were being vigorously beaten outside the tent, a few feet away from her unconscious head, in the hope that what suasion could not effect in the mind of the malignant spirit might result from fear. A stifling crowd of women and children filled the tiny tent, crowding upon the dying, while behind, in the shade, another party were making tea very cosily, around one who appeared to be already sewing the shroud. The day after Ibrahim arrived the shrieks of this crowd of women suddenly announced the death. Within half an hour the body was buried and the mourners were about their ordinary occupations. Ibrahim wept like a child, though why he should grieve for such a wife it is hard for a white man to say. Negro women, being escaped or liberated slaves, and so having no relatives who can settle disputes with their husbands, sometimes come in to complain of being beaten, though they owe protection to the fact that negro women are fewer than the men, so that a husband who is disagreeable to his wife runs the risk of losing that valuable property. Hamitic women only come to try and get an increased allowance from their husbands rarely to complain of ill-treatment, from which they are protected by their relatives.