Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/180

162 youth of twenty or thereabouts who is approaching us and say what he reminds you of. Truly, you need but to clap a negroid skull with a Nubian nose and lips on that noble Perseus of Cellini who stands in bronze before the Loggia dei Lanzi at Florence holding the dripping Gorgon's head in his hand and you have him!

The African demigod advances with hand outstretched; he wants a piastre. If half a dozen of us unwieldy and ill-shapen Westerns would each contribute a sum equal to twopence halfpenny English his display of godlike strength and skill would seem to him amply rewarded. But alas! the supply even of such "ridiculously small" coins is limited, and these divine athletes reverse the proportion between the harvest and the reapers in the parable. They are many in number, from the aged man who is a little "out of it" among his younger competitors in the hunt for bakshîsh, to the urchin at whose precocious pluck you have been wondering, till