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I had several times cured him, but, as Barrake insisted upon eating fruit, so he had a weakness for the strongest black coffee, which, instead of drinking, like the natives, in minute cups, he swallowed wholesale in large basins, several times a day; this was actual poison with his complaint, and he was completely ruined in health.
Mahomet had become simply unbearable, and he was so impertinent that I was obliged to take a thin cane from one of the Arabs and administer a little physical advice. An evil spirit possessed the man, and he bolted off with some of the camel men who were returning to Geera with dried meat. Our great loss was Barrake.
My snow-white blouse was soiled and greasy, and for the rest of the day I was a disagreeable compound of smells castor oil, tallow, musk, sandal-wood, burnt shells, and Barrake. Mahomet and Barrake herself, I believe, were the only people who really enjoyed this little event. "Ha!" Mahomet exclaimed, "this is your own fault!
They had given in; and Abderachman, the buffalo of the party, thanked me for my permission, and with tears in his eyes, as the camels were about to start, he at once said good-by. "Embrace him!" cried old Moosa and Hadji Ali; and in an instant, as I had formerly succumbed to the maid Barrake, I was actually kissed by the thick lips of Abderachman the unwashed!
We accordingly prepared for our expedition; but it was first necessary for me to go to Katariff, sixty miles distant, to engage men, and to procure a slave in place of old Masara, whose owner would not trust her in the wild region we were about to visit. I engaged six strong Tokrooris for five months, and purchased a slave woman for thirty-five dollars. The name of the woman was Barrake.
The name of the woman was Barrake; she was about twenty-two years of age, brown in complexion, fat, and strong; rather tall, and altogether she was a fine powerful-looking woman, but decidedly not pretty; her hair was elaborately dressed in hundreds of long narrow curls, so thickly smeared with castor oil that the grease had covered her naked shoulders; in addition to this, as she had been recently under the hands of the hairdresser, there was an amount of fat and other nastiness upon her head that gave her the appearance of being nearly grey.
The woman Barrake, who had discovered with regret that she was not a wife but a servant, had got over the disappointment, and was now making dhurra cakes upon the doka: this is a round earthenware tray about eighteen inches in diameter, which, supported upon three stones or lumps of earth, over a fire of glowing embers, forms a hearth.
You insisted upon speaking kindly, and telling her that she is not a slave, now she thinks that she is one of your WIVES!" This was the real fact; the unfortunate Barrake had deceived herself; never having been free, she could not understand the use of freedom unless she was to be a wife.
"I tell that slave woman same like master's word; I tell her master one very good master, she Barrake one very bad woman; all that good dollars master pay, too much money for such a bad woman. Now she's master's slave; she belong to master like a dog; if she not make plenty of good bread, work hard all day, early morning, late in night, master take a big stick, break her head."
She had understood my little address as a proposal, and of course she was disappointed; but, as an action for breach of promise cannot be pressed in the Soudan, poor Barrake, although free, had not the happy rights of a free-born Englishwoman, who can heal her broken heart with a pecuniary plaster, and console herself with damages for the loss of a lover.
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