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The craft were all much the same type of small dhow or sanbuk which frequents the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, having little in common with the big-bellied buggalows which ply with rice and dates between the Persian Gulf and Indian ports but do not come into the Red Sea. These were much smaller and saucier-looking craft, some fifty to eighty feet long, with a turn of speed and raking masts.
Feeling now satisfied that nothing would prevail upon Hamed to let us have the dhow, I wished to quit the island and return to Ujiji, but found my crew had taken French leave, and gone foraging on the mainland, where, all grain being so much cheaper than at Ujiji, they wanted to procure a supply.
The deck of the dhow, on board which the midshipmen found themselves, presented a horrible appearance. The three men who had first been shot lay stiff and stark, weltering in their blood at the foot of the mast. Farther off sat the negoda, with a shot through his leg and another in his body, glaring fiercely at them; while another man lay not far off, writhing in agony, with life ebbing fast.
He was the sole survivor of the crew of some dhow or bunder-boat, they said.... He lived and worked with the Lascars till we got to Bombay. Yes...." "I was that native," said Colonel Ross-Ellison. "You," whispered Mrs. Dearman. "You," and scanned his face intently. "Yes. I. I am half a native. My father was a Pathan. He " "What?" asked the woman hoarsely, drawing away. "What? What are you saying?"
Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness. They are all children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope and patch.
Most of these crafts were dhows, similar to the felucca with which the party had become familiar in the Archipelago, and the boys observed one just astern of them with great interest. They are used on the Malabar Coast in the East Indies as well as in the Red Sea, where it is called a baggala, though dhow is the more common name in the far East.
The Hindu salaamed and returned to the group of villagers. An excited colloquy ensued, the man pointing now to the Englishman, now to the aeroplane, and now to the dhow alongside the jetty. Presently the Hindu came back. "Silly chaps say what for you come here, sahib. You know too much, they say."
Dinner being over, races were run, leap-frog indulged in, games of rounders played on a grand scale, and hits made such as only sailors could accomplish, and a variety of other sports which the nature of the ground and circumstances would allow. Business, however, had to be attended to. Adair had left four men on board the dhow, and two only besides the midshipmen had been recovered.
Even the escaping blacks halted to gaze at the spectacle, as the despairing shrieks of their wretched countrymen reached their ears; while the dhow, shattered to fragments, was carried off with all those remaining on board by the receding billows. The blacks stopped but a few moments, and then, terrorstricken, fled on into the desert, there in all probability to perish miserably.
She had seventy or eighty poor wretches stowed closely together in her hold, and was going to take them to an island in the north of Madagascar, where they were to be shipped on board a French vessel bound for some French island or other. Soon after I got on board a breeze sprang up, and the dhow made sail. We had been at sea four or five days when a large schooner hove in sight.
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