Mohammed’s body is apparently hard as a rock, his mind is soft as putty, and his comrades, disappointed in their hopes of finding brains behind those wrinkles, derisively compare him to a rotten walnut, and say before his face, “What! grey hairs and no wits?” He has invested the fifteen dollars advanced to him as outfit by Lieut.-Col. Hamerton, in a slave-boy, whom presently he will exchange for a slave-girl, despite all the inuendoes of his friends. He was at first a manner of peace-maker, but soon my refusal to enlist and pay his slave as a hired porter acted like Ithuriel’s spear. This veteran of fractious temper and miserly habits ended, in a question of stinted rations, by drawing his sabre upon and cutting at his Jemadar; an offence which I was compelled to visit with a bastinado, inflicted out of the sight of man by the hand of Khudabakhsh. Shahdad is the Chelebi of the party, the fast young man. He is decidedly not handsome. A figure short and _trapu_, a retrussed nose, small pigs’ eyes, a beard like a blackberry bush, and a crop of hair which, projecting its wiry waves in a deep long curtain from beneath a diminutive scarlet fez, makes his head appear top-heavy. Yet he does sad havoc amongst female hearts by means of his zeze or guitar, half a gourd with an arm to which is attached a single string, and by his lively accompaniment is a squeaking falsetto, which is here as fascinating and emollient to the sex as ever was the organ of Rubini in Europe. During a lengthened sojourn at Bombay he has enlarged his mind by the acquisition of the Hindostani tongue and of Indian trickery. He is almost the only Eastern whom I remember that abused the poor letter H like a thoroughbred Londoner. His familiarity with Anglo-Europeans, and his experience touching the facility of gulling them, has induced in him a certain proclivity for peculation, grumbling, and mutiny. His brother--or rather cousin, for in these lands all fellow-tribesmen are brethren--“Ismail” is a confirmed invalid, a man with a “broken mouth,” deeply sunken cheeks, and emaciated frame, who, though earnestly solicited to return eastwards, will persist in accompanying the party till he falls a victim to a chronic malady in Unyamwezi.