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A Portuguese servant I had hired in Bombay cooked my dinner and looked after me generally. We sailed along the sometimes bare, and occasionally palm-fringed, shores with that indifference to time and progress which is often the despair and not unfrequently the envy of Europeans. The hubble-bubble passed from mouth to mouth, and the crew whiled away the evening hours with their monotonous chants.
Four or five noses were engaged in snoring. Several mosquito-tormented, sleepless wretches were consoling themselves by pulls at their hubble-bubble pipes; and above all, there rose those variations on the mode Bhairab! Finally, at half-past three in the morning, some fussy busy-bodies began loudly inciting each other to get up.
"I said you would be an ideal convalescent nurse. But what would become of the pigs?" "Oh, Edward could look after them. I think too little attention has been paid to the poor boys who are getting well. I could read to them and write their letters home for them," and she looked pathetically sympathetic. "Hubble-bubble, toil and trouble," quoted Sir Antony.
There was a beautifully shaped glass bottle, and into it went a very long twisting tube, like a snake coiled on the floor, and the other end of the serpent, instead of a head, had an amber mouth-piece which went between a pair of lips. Lucy knew it for a hubble-bubble or Turkish pipe, and saw that the lips were in a brown face, with big black eyes, round which dark bluish circles were drawn.
Servants' belongings, an excessively grimy mat, hubble-bubble pipes, tobacco, tinder, and two wooden chests littered the floor, besides sundry packing-cases full of useless odds and ends, such as a rusty kettle lid, a bottomless iron stove, a discoloured old nickel teapot, a soup-plate full of treacle blackened with dust.
The good fellow took a pretty little house in the native style in the heart of the Arab town, with inner courtyard, banana-trees, cool verandahs, and fountains. He dwelt, afar from noise, in company with the Moorish charmer, a thorough woman to the manner born, who pulled at her hubble-bubble all day when she was not eating.
We could see in the middle of the little camp a man seated on a rug and wrapped in a heavy garment of some kind, quietly smoking a common hubble-bubble. Beside him stood another who reflected more moonlight than the rest, and who was therefore, by his trappings, the captain of the band. The seated smoker could be no other than Shere Ali.
So they passed in streets of the thronging people, where yards of new dyed cotton, purple and yellow, stretched drying in the sun, where a busy tom-tom called the pious to leave coppers before a blood-red, goldened-tongued Kali, half visible through the door of a mud hut where all the dealers in brass dishes and glass armlets, nine-yard turban cloths, blue and gold, and silver gilt stands for the comfortable hubble-bubble, squatted in line upon their thresholds and accepted them with indifference.
There was a beautifully shaped glass bottle, and into it went a long, long twisting tube, like a snake coiled on the floor, and the other end of the serpent, instead of a head, had an amber mouth-piece which went between a pair of lips. Lucy knew it for a hubble-bubble or narghilhe, and saw that the lips were in a brown face, with big black eyes, round which dark bluish circles were drawn.
The crew rest; and one brings out the hubble-bubble from the peak, with a burning coal on the bowl; it is passed round and each of them takes three or four long inhalations through his hands over the mouth-piece, to avoid touching it with his lips, and the smell of the tobacco is not unpleasant, diluted as it is with the tropical sea air.
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