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Updated: June 16, 2025
By this time, I learnt from Said that Haj Essnousee had sent for the Mandara slave to beat him. I then asked, "For what?" The slaves replied, "For nothing." This I could not believe. Looking towards the encampment of Essnousee, I saw the slave-driver greatly excited, and heard him call to two other slaves, "Fetch him, fetch him."
Of course I feel extremely annoyed and disheartened to have a quarrel of this sort with the man who has the greatest influence in the country. But I must hold out, since my situation is not yet desperate. As something agreeable, in counterpoise, I may mention that Haj Ibrahim, on visiting the Sultan, found His Highness reclining on the carpet-rug which I gave him.
The Turkish official, too, has learned to dispense with so many of the forms of his religion that he finds no difficulty in making himself excuses here. In fact, he seldom or never now performs the pilgrimage. The mass of the Ottoman Haj is made up of Kurds, Syrians, Albanians, Circassians, Lazis, and Tartars from Russia and the Khanates, of everything rather than real Turks.
He replied, much agitated, "Oh, no, it's a she-devil." Thinking she might be sulky, as Negroes often sulk, I made no other observation. A few minutes after I heard the noise of whipping, and turning round, to my great surprise, I saw the Haj beating her not very mercifully. He had a whip of bull's hide with which he gave her several lashes.
Still to a certain extent a proportion is preserved between it and the populations which supply it; and in default of better, statistics of the Haj afford us an index not without value of the degree of religious vitality existing in the various Mussulman countries.
This morning Haj Essnousee, being on foot, called out for his camel to stop, in a tone which denoted he had some important business on hand. I turned to see what was the matter, and so did all, as if something peculiar was about to happen. I then saw Essnousee bringing up a slave girl about a dozen years of age, pulling her violently along.
Resistance being very madness, the supper which Haj Ibrahim had prepared for himself, was brought out to them, the servant crying out, not "Il pranzo è servito!" but, "This is all the supper we have for ourselves!" And like a wise steward, he kept a little back for his lord and master.
Haj Ibrahim, who brings some thousand dollars' worth of goods to this part, pays only the paltry sum of some twenty or thirty dollars at the most. In fact, here is free-trade with a vengeance, existing long before it has been attempted to carry it out, with such tremendous consequences, as in Great Britain.
He had not come with the Haj, but had been first noticed as a beggar at Mecca ten days before, when he had asked and received an alms of the Sherif, and had since been several times found obtrusively in El Husseyn's path. No one at Jeddah holds the Turkish Governor to have been cognisant of the crime.
The merchants congratulate me on these circumstances, and say I shall have less presents to distribute. Met at Haj Ibrahim's a Shereef of Mourzuk, who pretends he is going to Soudan. This is a little thin fellow, who glides into people's houses through the keyhole, importunately begging on the strength of his being of the family of the Prophet, and lives by the same pretensions.
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