and seemed so little interesting that we were not particularly sorry
that we could not go ashore. Far in the distance were mountains; and the
water all about us was the light, clear green of the sky at sunset.

Innumerable dhows and row-boats swarmed down, filled with eager salesmen
of curios and ostrich plumes. They had not much time in which to
bargain, so they made it up in rapid-fire vociferation. One very tall
and dignified Arab had as sailor of his craft the most extraordinary
creature, just above the lower limit of the human race. He was of a dull
coal black, without a single high light on him anywhere, as though he
had been sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a
wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed bands,
and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and wiry. He
clambered up and down his mast, fetching things at his master's behest;
leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar, as the case might be,
across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his toes that he might
almost have been classified with the quadrumana; and between times
squatted humped over on the rail, watching us with bright, elfish, alien
eyes.

At last the big German sailors bundled the whole variegated horde
overside. It was time to go, and our anchor chain was already rumbling
in the hawse pipes. They tumbled hastily into their boats; and at once
swarmed up their masts, whence they feverishly continued their
interrupted bargaining. In fact, so fully embarked on the tides of
commerce were they, that they failed to notice the tides of nature
widening between us. One old man, in especial, at the very top of his
mast, jerked hither and thither by the sea, continued imploringly to
offer an utterly ridiculous carved wooden camel long after it was
impossible to have completed the transaction should anybody have been