"I'll cure Ibrahim!" said the wrathful
dragoman; and at it he went, tooth and nail.

He roused him out of bed, he called him
"dog!" three hundred times, he spat at the
invalid, he asked him how he dared to catch
inflammation of the lungs just after signing
a contract with a dragoman, and that dragoman
Abool Hoosayn; he swore by the beard of
the Prophet that Ibrahim was sheklehan (humbug)
for not, at least, delaying such an illness
until we reached Thebes, ten days farther on.
He stormed at him, he reviled at him as a
cheating lazy old woman, referred again to
the dog, until even the Arab captain had to
rise, gravely shake his brown robes, and
request "Peace." The poor old cook feebly
retaliated, but could make no head at all against
the storm. He drew his ragged zaboot around
him, and, with tottering step, crawled to clean
some dishes: groaning out, "I am very ill;
truly, O Abool! thou art barbarous, O Abool!"
and other gentle recriminations. But nothing
moved the iron-hearted Abool, and, wonderful
to relate, the scolding seemed to act as a tonic
and counter-irritant upon the cook, for he got
better after it, and resumed his cooking. It
was a cruel, and yet, for the time, certainly an
effectual remedy.

Unhappy, indeed, the traveller who, entirely
ignorant of the language of the country he
travels in, wanders as a dumb man among deaf
men, a child led about by a servant, compelled to
witness the caprices, the insolence, the folly, the
selfishness, the vulgarity, of an ignorant upstart,
who, with the soul of a valet assumes a swagger
which he thinks makes him pass for a gentleman,
and who prejudices you against the honest,
the well-meaning, and the no-flatterer, and
praises those who do him court, who fee him,
and who answer his ends; unhappy the traveller
in the power of a man who secretly despises
him as an infidel, who has no sympathy with
him, who hates the work of showing him "old
buildings;" who is a formalist, yet without
religion; whose only interest it is to finish the
journey and get his money; who is probably
a coward, possibly a thief, and certainly a cheat.
Lose no time, travellers, in learning the language
of the country you travel in, if only to frustrate
the deceptions and plots, tricks frauds and
robberies, of that nuisance of all nuisances, a
dragoman.

The moment the camels set down your
luggage at the door of an Eastern hotel,
and you have obtained the key of your cool
stone-floored room—looking out, maybe, on
flowering sont-trees, or a stubby palm-tree
and an indigo-bush, or a great lavish-leaved
castor-oil plant, or a large sycamore strung
with flesh-coloured fruit—the dragoman plague
begins. You have washed, and are
loosening the buckles of your trunk, hoping to
be able to arrange your clothes before the
second dinner gong sounds. Suddenly a low
knock comes at your door—such a knock as
Edgar Poe's raven gave; you open it, and find
it is a dragoman, who hears you are going to
Jerusalem, or Damascus, or Second Cataract,
or anywhere, and comes to show you his
testimonials. Five other similar vultures are waiting
for you on benches in the passage. Achmed
Doodeh, with the First Cataract in his eye;
Abdallah Bumba, with the Second; Osman
Saffra, with the Third; the wretch at the door,
who is fumbling for forged certificates in
an embroidered bag, is that notorious rascal,
Mahommed Kammoonee, a Maltese, better
known as Giovanni Balducchi: a great thief who
was last year tied to the mast at Assonam by
his employers, three American gentlemen, and
there left, some hundreds of miles from Cairo, to
find his way back as he could. He has an
irresistible weakness for gold watches. The fourth
is Ghorab, a Christian—that is, a Copt—a
greater rascal than Kammoonee, for he takes his
travellers cheap, and then half starves them.
The sixth is that notorious liar, the long-nosed
Hoosan Aswed, a man who, in the days of the
severe Mohammed Ali, could have saved his
nose and ears, only by angelic interference. His
father died rather publicly in a certain sandy
square under the walls of the citadel.

There is a great variety in the manner of these
vultures who feed on travellers. Doodeh is a
shellabee, or dandy (the Arabic word means
literally "an effeminate person"). His beard is
a scented sable, his sash is of the daintiest
colours, his tarboosh of the most blooming
crimson, his under cap of the purest white.
I tremble to think what it costs to keep up
that style of dressing. Bumba is, on the
contrary, careless, slovenly, and repeats the words
"my master" before every sentence. Ghorab
is very old and shaky, and is ready to take
anything, being, indeed, worn out, and of no
use to any traveller. Aswed is preposterous in
his prices. Saffra is a sanguine man, who treats
you at once as his own, and requests you to
abandon dinner and come at once and look at a
boat.

The testimonials, generally forged, or
borrowed, or inherited, are of most unqualified
kind. The bad and genuine testimonials are all
at the bottom of the Nile, or blowing about the
giant dust-heaps that environ Cairo. The
produced testimonials are generally dated three or
four years back, and run somewhat in this way:

"Mr. and Mrs. Hushman having travelled
through Syria and up the Nile with Mohammed
Kammoonee as their dragoman, beg to say that
they found him intelligent, well informed, low
in his charges, untiring, and particularly attentive
to the cooking and supply of food, and
cordially and unhesitatingly recommend him to
all English travellers contemplating a similar
tour. They beg to add, that Mohammed is a
most sincere and devoted Christian. He is
cleanly and obliging, and leaves nothing to be
desired."

Now, from the formal and mannered tone of
all these testimonials, one may be tolerably
certain that they have generally been written as mere
matters of course, like servants' testimonials in
our own country. Who in the flush of travel