and Yembo, the ports of the two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, they were the most fanatical of Mussulmans. One would always get on very well with these fine sailors of Arabia were it not for the fierce fanaticism lurking in their souls, ever ready to burst out, and maintaining such an impassable gulf between them and the Franks.
We soon got outside the sheltering Suakin reef, and found a heavy sea running, in which we rolled and plunged violently, occasionally shipping a good deal of water over our low sides, so that it became necessary to keep the hands constantly at the pumps. This operation was effected in a primitive fashion on board the El Hamdi. Pumps indeed there were none; a trough formed of a hollowed palm-tree was fastened across the vessel's waist transversely, its ends overlapping either bulwark. At the bottom of the vessel amidships was a square well, boarded in to prevent the sand ballast from falling into it. In this well stood one of the hands, knee-deep in water, filling goat-skin buckets from it as fast as he was able, and handing these out to a hand above, who, in his turn, emptied them into the trough, whence the water poured overboard from one side or the other as the vessel rolled; a slow and happy-go-lucky progress, indeed, by which it would have been impossible to bale out the dhow had we shipped a really heavy sea into our open hold.
We were running before a steep following sea, but there was but small chance of our being pooped;
