AN INSOUCIANT SAVAGE 173 Tewfikieh, when my steamer was fighting against a nortli wind. She was blown hither and thither, not succeeding in facing the gale ; for the draught of these vessels is small, and the freeboard and tophamper great. Time after time she cannoned the shore, burying her nose in the rush-covered bank. The sturdy bahari tumbled ashore with their rope at the stern, and struggled in vain. ' Boreas v.

Bahari ' was the name of this great tug-of-war, which was evenly matched. Lackadaisy, close by, were half a dozen blacks looking on as one might at a sheep trying to nibble a tussock of grass beyond reach. Lend a hand ? Not a bit of it !

The sailors might pull themselves stiff before the noble savages would interfere, and a British carpenter would as soon think of assisting a plumber !

Beyond building a hut and tending their cattle or fishing, work does not lie in their scheme of existence, and so long as they remain as they are, an absolutely primitive people, with small imagination and less in the way of ideals, there is no impulse to tell them why it should. Their conditions, too, before British protection came on the scene, as elsewhere in barbarian Africa, have been hostile to work, save the tending of cattle and fishing. Stern logic of facts has caused them to hold themselves ready for war, to protect their property and lands or to raid in their turn, to absent themselves from their villages while their women-folk, always at home, did the work.

It was thus easy for them, so long as pressure of