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Our Dragoman 87<br />

was very courageous. More than once when my ardour in<br />

sight-seeing had carried me to places in the Arab city where<br />

it was not really safe for English people to go, and the Arab<br />

hooligans began to hustle, they found they had a lion to<br />

deal with in Ali. One could go anywhere with him.<br />

One day I could not find him. Next day he told me<br />

that he had been in prison, waiting to be tried. He<br />

had had to fight a man while he was out with a foreign<br />

gentleman. " This morning tried," he said. " The man have<br />

to go to prison for two months. I have to pay a hundred<br />

piastres for constructing a disturbance." I offered to pay his<br />

fine, but he said, " English gentleman I with paid it." When<br />

I told the Commissioner of Police about this afterwards, he<br />

made a note of it in Ali's favour, though Ali had to go<br />

to prison for it. It is the Commissioner of Police who issues<br />

dragomans' licences.<br />

Ali was delightfully devout and sentimental. Sometimes<br />

when we went into a mosque—the mosque of the Sultan<br />

Shab'an for one—he said : " This very holy person's place ; I<br />

say my prayers here." Once as we were coming back from<br />

the Tombs of the Caliphs he stopped beside a little enclosure<br />

of graves and wept. " All I have in the world here," he said<br />

simply. " I all alone now."<br />

Sometimes when I asked him for a place like the Mosque<br />

of Abu-Bekr, which is not near any other, he said : " I think<br />

no such place ; but you know." I told him the directions<br />

they had given me for finding this mosque at the VVakfs<br />

(where they had recommended me not to miss it), and it<br />

was marked in a vague way on one of the maps, printed<br />

right across a nest of small streets. I took my bearings<br />

as well as I could and steered for it. Ali asked every<br />

one we met, but nobody knew it by that name, though<br />

gradually Ali began to receive hints that there was a very<br />

old and beautiful mosque in the district, and this mosque<br />

we eventually ran to earth. Then we discovered that it had<br />

a name about a yard long, with the words Abu-Bekr coming<br />

in the middle ! Europeans<br />

words—that was all.<br />

had not selected the significant

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