Ay, even the droll humour and stolidity of Khalid, are shaken, aroused, by the ghoulish greed, the fell inhumanity of these sharpers. And Shakib from his cage of fancy lets loose upon them his hyenas of satire. In a squib describing the bats and the voyage he says: “The voyage to America is the Via Dolorosa of the emigrant; and the Port of Beirut, the verminous hostelries of Marseilles, the Island of Ellis in New York, are the three stations thereof. And if your hopes are not crucified at the third and last station, you pass into the Paradise of your dreams. If they are crucified, alas! The gates of the said Paradise will be shut against you; the doors of the hostelries will be slammed in your face; and with a consolation and a vengeance you will throw yourself at the feet of the sea in whose bosom some charitable Jonah will carry you to your native strands.”
And when the emigrant has a surplus of gold, when his capital is such as can not be dissipated on a suit of shoddy, a fortnight’s lodging, and a passage across the Atlantic, the ingenious ones proceed with the Fourth Act of Open Thy Purse. “Instead of starting in New York as a peddler,” they say, unfolding before him one of their alluring schemes, “why not do so as a merchant?” And the emigrant opens his purse for the fourth time in the office of some French manufacturer, where he purchases a few boxes of trinketry—scapulars, prayer-beads, crosses, jewelry, gewgaws, and suchlike—all said to be made in the Holy Land. These he brings over with him as his stock in trade.
Now, Khalid and Shakib, after passing a fortnight in Marseilles, and going through the Fourth Act of the Sorry Show, find their dignity as merchants rudely crushed beneath the hatches of the Atlantic steamer. For here, even the pleasure of sleeping on deck is denied them. The Atlantic Ocean would not permit of it. Indeed, everybody has to slide into their stivy bunks to save themselves from its rising wrath. A fortnight of such unutterable misery is quite supportable, however, if one continues to cherish the Paradise already mentioned. But in this dark, dingy smelling hole of the steerage, even the poets cease to dream. The boatmen of Beirut and the sharpers of Marseilles we could forget; but in this grave among a hundred and more of its kind, set over and across each other, neither the lute nor the little that remained in that Ksarah bottle, could bring us any solace.
We are told that Khalid took up his lute but once throughout the voyage. And this when they were permitted one night to sleep on deck. We are also informed that Khalid had a remarkable dream, which, to our Scribe at least, is not meaningless. And who of us, thou silly Scribe, did not in his boyhood tell his dreams to his mother, who would turn them in her interpretation inside out? But Khalid, we are assured, continued to cherish the belief, even in his riper days, that when you dream you are in Jannat, for instance, you must be prepared to go through Jahannam the following day. A method of interpretation as ancient as Joseph, to be sure. But we quote the dream to show that Khalid should not have followed the setting sun. He should have turned his face toward the desert.
They slept on deck that night. They drank the wine of the Jesuits, repeated, to the mellow strains of the lute, the song of the bulbuls, intoned the verses of al-Mutanabbi, and, wrapping themselves in their rugs, fell asleep. But in the morning they were rudely jostled from their dreams by a spurt from the hose of the sailors washing the deck. Complaining not, they straggle down to their bunks to change their clothes. And Khalid, as he is doing this, implores Shakib not to mention to him any more that New-World paradise. “For I have dreamt last night,” he continues, “that, in the multicoloured robes of an Arab amir, on a caparisoned dromedary, at the head of an immense multitude of people, I was riding through the desert. Whereto and wherefrom, I know not. But those who followed me seemed to know; for they cried, ‘Long have we waited for thee, now we shall enter in peace.’ And at every oasis we passed, the people came to the gate to meet us, and, prostrating themselves before me, kissed the fringe of my garment. Even the women would touch my boots and kiss their hands, exclaiming, ‘Allahu akbar!’ And the palm trees, billah! I could see bending towards us that we might eat of their fruits, and the springs seemed to flow with us into the desert that we might never thirst. Ay, thus in triumph we marched from one camp to another, from one oasis to the next, until we reached the City on the Hills of the Cedar Groves. Outside the gate, we were met by the most beautiful of its tawny women, and four of these surrounded my camel and took the reins from my hand. I was then escorted through the gates, into the City, up to the citadel, where I was awaited by their Princess. And she, taking a necklace of cowries from a bag that hung on her breast, placed it on my head, saying, ‘I crown thee King of—’ But I could not hear the rest, which was drowned by the cheering of the multitudes. And the cheering, O Shakib, was drowned by the hose of the sailors. Oh, that hose! Is it not made in the paradise you harp upon, the paradise we are coming to? Never, therefore, mention it to me more.”
This is the dream, at once simple and symbolic, which begins to worry Khalid. “For in the evening of the day he related it to me,” writes Shakib, “I found him sitting on
