Page:First Footsteps in East Africa, 1894 - Volume 1.djvu/72

26 there are many words; the verbosity of these anti-Laconic Oriental dialects renders at least half the subject intelligible to the most opposite thinkers. When the society is wholly Somal, I write Arabic, copy some useful book, or extract from it, as Bentley advised, what is fit to quote. When Arabs are present, I usually read out a tale from "The Thousand and One Nights," that wonderful work, so often translated, so much turned over, and so little understood at home. The most familiar of books in England, next to the Bible, it is one of the least known, the reason being that about one-fifth is utterly unfit for translation; and the most sanguine Orientalist would not dare to render literally more than three-quarters of the remainder. Consequently, the reader loses the contrast—the very essence of the book—between its brilliancy and dulness, its moral putrefaction, and such pearls as—

And in a page or two after such divine sentiment, the ladies of Baghdad sit in the porter's lap, and indulge in a facetiousness which would have killed Pietro Aretino before his time.

Often I am visited by the Topchi-Bashi, or master of the ordnance—half-a-dozen honey-combed guns—a wild fellow, Bashi Buzuk in the Hijaz and commandant of artillery at Zayla. He shaves my head on Fridays, and on other days tells me wild stories about his service in the Holy Land; how Kurdi Usman slew his son-inlaw, Ibn Rumi, and how Turkchih Bilmaz would have