Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/47

Rh Shaykh Majid, inventor of the mariners' compass, It would be wonderful if Orientals omitted to romance about the origin of such an invention as the Dayrah, or compass. Shaykh Majid is said to have been a Syrian saint, to whom Allah gave the power of looking upon earth as though it were a ball in his hand. Most Moslems agree in assigning this origin to the Dayrah, and the Fatihah in honour of the holy man is still repeated by the pious mariner.

Easterns do not "box the compass" after our fashion: with them each point has its own name, generally derived from some prominent star on the horizon. Of these I subjoin a list as in use amongst the Somal, hoping that it may be useful to Oriental students. The names in hyphens are those given in a paper on the nautical instrument of the Arabs by Jas. Prinseps (Journal of the As. Soc., December, 1836). The learned secretary appears not to have heard the legend of Shaykh Majid, for he alludes to the "Majidi Kitab" or Oriental Ephemeris, without any explanation.

The south is called Al-Kutb and the west Al-Maghib. The western points are named like the eastern. North-east, for instance, is Ayyuk al-Matlai; north-west, Ayyuk al-Maghibi. Finally, the Dayrah Jahi is when the magnetic needle points due north. The Dayrah Farjadi (more common in these regions) is when the bar is fixed under Farjad, to allow for variation, which at Berberah is about 4° 50′ west. and evening saw us dancing on the bright clear tide, whose "magic waves," however, murmured after another fashion