A pilgrimage to the temples and tombs of Egypt, Nubia, and ...

ARAB CREW. 115
it quite as submissively as a dog could do, there-
by showing that their training has been much the
same, and that they have been driven by blows
instead of led by reason; and v^^hen I remon-
strated with Mohammed upon such a system, he
replied in his broken English, " You not beat
these men, you do nothing with them— you soft
with them, they laugh at you ! They not the
same as English people,— they must get stick. If
I not beat these men, others will run away the
first place we stop at." A good illustration of
the King in one of A^oltaire's tales, who cut off*
the heads of some of his subjects " pour en-
courager les autres."
I do not think that years of residence among
these people would ever reconcile me to such a
brutalizing way of managing them^ but that of
the two evils I should prefer being laughed at by
them to countenancing the use of the stick, as
advocated by Mohammed. In less than half an
hour after this rough beginning to our voyage,
the whole crew were seated on the forecastle of
the vessel in a group, Arab fashion (that is, upon
their heels), round an immense wooden bowl
filled with a mess made of lentils and onions
boiled in water, and poured over a quantity of
broken rye-bread, and, before commencing this
I 2