[p.258] labour, a Tekroury from the market is always employed. If any of them is attacked by disease, his companions attend upon him, and defray his expenses. I have seen very few of them ask for charity, except on the first days after their arrival, before they have been able to obtain employment. From Mekka, they either travel by land, or sometimes make a sea voyage by way of Yembo to Medina, where they again supply the town with fire-wood. Indeed, the hadjys would be much at a loss in the Hedjaz, if they could not command the laborious services of these blacks. During the Wahaby conquest, they continued to perform the pilgrimage; and it is said that Saoud expressed a particular esteem for them. [Makrisi states, in his treatise on the Khalifes who performed the Hadj, that in A.H. 724, a negro king called Mousa arrived at Cairo on his way to Mekka, and was splendidly entertained by Kalaoun, then Sultan of Egypt. He had with him, according to Makrisi, fourteen thousand chosen female slaves.] When these negroes have completed the Hadj, and the visit to Mekka, they repair to Djidda, where they continue to work till an opportunity offers of sailing to Souakin; for very few, if any, return by way of Abyssinia. On leaving the Hedjaz, they all possess a sufficient sum of money, saved from the profits of their industry, to purchase some small adventure, or, at least, to provide, on their reaching Souakin, for a more comfortable passage through the Desert than that which they experienced on their outward journey, and then proceed homewards by Shendy and Cordofan. Many of them, however, instead of returning on the completion of the pilgrimage, disperse over Arabia, visit the mosque at Jerusalem, or Ibrahim’s (Abraham’ s) tomb at Hebron, and thus remain absent from their home for many years, subsisting always upon the product of their own labour. The benefactors to the Kaaba have enriched the temple of Mekka, and the idle persons employed in it; but no one has thought of forming any establishment for facilitating the pilgrimage of the poor negroes and Indians, or of procuring for them a free passage across the gulf to the Hedjaz; the expense of which, amounting to a dollar or two, is that which they feel most heavily. They often arrive in the harbours of the African side of the gulf, after having spent the [p.259] little they had taken with them from home, or having been robbed of it on the journey; and finding, perhaps, no means there of earning as much as will pay their passage across the Red Sea, are obliged to wait till the return of their richer companions from the Hedjaz, who charitably pay for their passage.