of their free open-air desert customs. They are proud of their religion
and of their prophet. They are proud of their history and of their
patriarchal descent. But most of all, they are proud of their language,
one of the oldest and most wonderful forms of human speech. Mohammed
himself in his Koran, which you know is the Moslem Bible, speaks of the
Arab tongue as “the language of the angels.” He and the Arabs believed
that Adam and Eve spake Arabic in Paradise, and that the language of
revelation in which God spoke to His prophets, Abraham, Moses and
Solomon, was none other than the language of the desert, the speech of
the Arabs.
One of the most learned Arabs who lived about three hundred years after
Mohammed said: “The wisdom of God hath come down upon three things:—the
brain of the Franks, the hand of the Chinese and the tongue of the
Arabs.” What this Arab philosopher meant was that while the people of
Europe are distinguished for their power of invention and discovery, the
Chinese are distinguished as artists and artisans, but the Arabs are all
of them born orators and poets. The people of Europe, he meant to say,
have brain power, the people of the Orient skill in handicraft, but the
Arabs, eloquence. If you will read the Book of Job, which was doubtless
written in Arabia and describes early Arabian life, or read the latter
chapters of Mohammed’s Koran, or better still some of the Arabian poetry,
you will appreciate the truth of this wonderful statement.
The first thing that is remarkable about the language of the Arabs is
its wide-spread use. Like English it has spilled itself all over the map
of the world, far beyond its original limits, and like English it was
carried by commerce and by conquest, by merchants and by missionaries.
[Illustration: FIRST CHAPTER OF THE KORAN]
Some time ago an American typewriter firm in advertising a machine with
Arabic characters made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by
more people than any other alphabet in the world. Some one thought that
this was an exaggeration, and asked a professor of languages, “How big
a lie is that?” He answered: “It is true.” The total population of all
the countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic “A B C”—if they use any
at all—is larger than the number of those who use the Latin alphabet or
the Chinese character. The Arabic Koran is read by the Moslem boys in the
day-schools not only of Arabia, but of Turkey, of Afghanistan, Persia,
Java, Sumatra, the whole of North Africa and throughout Central Asia.
In the Philippine Islands there are three hundred thousand Mohammedans
whose only alphabet came from Arabia, and as far west as the mosques of
Morocco the Arabic tongue has travelled and become the language of law
and commerce and religion.
When the early Arabs in their conquests crossed the strait between Africa
and Spain and conquered that country they left many words behind. And
therefore many of the place names in Spain to-day are Arabic. Gibraltar,
for example, is the corrupted form of Jebel Tarik, which means the
mountain of Tarik, the Arab general who first crossed the straits with
his soldiers. And Quadiliquiver, one of the rivers of Spain, should be
spelled Wady El Kebir, or the Big River.
Even the English language has a number of words that came as Arab guests
to the feast of reason and have been adopted into our family and put
into our dictionary. When you speak of _algebra_, _ciphers_, _zero_,
_alchemy_, _alcove_, _minaret_, _alcohol_, _coffee_, _sofa_, _amber_,
_artichokes_, _gazelles_ or _magazine_ you are using good Arabic words
which nearly every Arab would understand. To use these words, however,
is quite a different thing from speaking “the language of the angels”
correctly. It is easier to borrow a carpenter’s jack-knife than to
acquire his skill in building a house. Many languages have borrowed
from the Arabs and the Arabs have borrowed from them in return, but no
language is richer than the Arabic in its number of words.
Would you like to know how the boys and girls talk in Arabia? If you have
read “Topsy Turvy Land” you will remember how they write their words
backward and begin to read at what we call the end of the book. Their
talk as well as their writing seems to us at first very topsy turvy. Of
course, I need not tell you how much they talk, for in that respect they
are just like the boys and girls in America. As they speak a language,
however, very different from English, I am sure you would like to hear
a little about it. Arabic is one of the oldest and most beautiful
languages, and also one of the hardest to learn. It has so many words
that their name for a dictionary is “Kamoos,” which means “an ocean.”
They have five hundred different names for a lion and two hundred words
for serpent. It is said that there are one thousand different terms in
Arabic for _sword_, and eighty different words for _honey_.
Like English the Arabic language has grammar with many rules (and more
exceptions) and the boys dislike it just as much as some of you do. They
have a severe struggle with the alphabet because each letter has three
different forms, as it is used in the beginning, the middle or the end of
a word; and then there are but fifteen conjugations and twenty different
ways of forming the plural, not to speak of all the moods and tenses and
the irregular verbs.
Some people think that Arabic is the most difficult language in the
world. Keith Falconer, the first missionary to Arabia, said, “Arabic
grammars should be strongly bound because learners are so often found to
dash them frantically on the ground.” Another missionary said that he
would rather cross Africa from Alexandria to the Cape of Good Hope than
undertake a second time to master the Arabic speech.
I shall never forget my early struggles with the language, nor the place
where I sat down to learn my lesson with Dr. Cornelius Van Dyke. He was a
master of Arabic and with Dr. Eli Smith translated the whole Bible into
the Arabic speech. Here it was in the shade of his beautiful veranda at
Beirut, Syria, that I began to learn the irregular verb. It takes a long
time for grown-up people to learn a new language, but it does not seem
hard for the Arab boys and girls.
Beside the proper talk of grown-up people there is baby talk in Arabia
which mothers teach the little brown toddlers before they walk out of the
mat-huts and the black, camel-hair tents into the wide world. Yes, and
there are also slang words which the camel drivers and the donkey boys
use with and on each other.
The baby talk is much like English. Father is _baba_; dog is _wowwow_;
pretty is _noonoo_; stop is _tootoo_; chicken is _kookoo_, and when baby
falls they say _baff_!
The language of these little angels and the grown-up ones in Arabia
is very poetical. The Arabs, because they live in the desert and look
up into the big, blue sky and far out to the horizon where the mirage
paints desert pictures every day, are full of imagination and live in an
atmosphere of poetry. They love jingling words and proverbs and pretty
sayings and figures of speech.
A mosquito has only a sting in New Jersey. In Arabia they call him _aboo
fas_, which means “father-of-an-ax”! In America a tramp is a tramp, but
the Arabs call him a _son-of-the-road_. And what could be prettier than
their name for echo, _bint-el-jebel_, “daughter of the mountain”? Why,
there is a whole fairy story in that one word! And if you go down the
columns of the Arabic dictionary you can find many a story locked up in
some word and only waiting to be opened.
In North Arabia when they say, “How-do-you-do,” the proper expression is,
“What is the colour of your condition?” This may be philosophical, but
it does not make good sense in English. Strawberries are called _French
mulberries_, and the name given to potatoes when first brought to Bahrein
was _aliyeywellam_; why this name was given, I cannot tell. Where could
you find a better name for wine than the Arab _um-el-khabaith_, “mother
of vices”? No wonder all the Arab children are staunch prohibitionists.
And you will know more about the nights in Arabia when I tell you that
the common name for jackal is “_son-of-howling_”!
“The language of the angels” is not altogether lovely and beautiful;
alas, it bears the marks of a false religion all over it like scratches
on marble or ink-stains on a beautiful piece of handwriting. Mohammed’s
life and Mohammed’s teaching were not like the life and teaching of Jesus
Christ, and so the Arabic language abounds in words that are not pure
and not lovely. The missionaries in Egypt and in Syria have done much
to purify and elevate the language of the Arabs by giving them Christian
books and papers and above all the Holy Bible in their own tongue. The
Arab children in the mission schools now sing Christian hymns and many of
the stories that you love to read, such as “Ben Hur” and “Black Beauty”
and “Robinson Crusoe,” have been translated into Arabic. At the Beirut
press alone about twenty-five million pages of Christian books are
printed every year.
When the Bible takes the place of the Koran, the Arab speech with all
its beauty and strength will become more than ever “the language of the
angels.”
XI
PEARLS AND PEARL DIVERS
Nearly all the British India steamers in their zigzag journeys up the
Persian Gulf, calling first at the Arabian coast and then at the Persian
coast, stop at the pearl islands of Bahrein. Half-way up the Gulf and
thirty miles from the mainland of Arabia, this group of islands has been
famous for centuries as the most valuable pearl fishery in the world. For
at least two thousand years the Arabs have been diving in these waters
and bringing up the costly shells. Before the days of Christ, and even
before the time of Solomon, pearls from Bahrein were shipped to the
Western world, and it is probable that the dress and the conversation of
the men and the boys of to-day is about the same as it was a thousand
years ago. The boats are probably of the same pattern, with very little
improvement.
Bahrein is an Arabic word which means the _two seas_, and this name
was given to the islands because the Arabs fancied that here two seas
met, the fresh water and the salt water mingling together. The islands
have very little rainfall—during the summer none at all—and yet they
are famous for their fresh-water springs, which find their source on
the mainland of Arabia or Persia, and the water not only bubbles out in
pools and wells on shore, but below the tide level there are fresh-water
springs several miles out at sea. You would be interested to see the
Arabs go out in their boats, place a bamboo over the opening in the rock
and then collect fresh water above sea level in their great leather skins.
Bahrein is historically most interesting, because here the old Chaldeans
and Phœnicians made their home. Some of the mounds on the island are
older than the ruins of Babylon, and it is said that the Phœnicians
worshipped the fish-god who, it is supposed, carried Noah’s ark over the
flood.
The pearl fisheries at Bahrein employ about 3,500 boats, large and small.
The boats measure from one to fifty tons. The smaller boats carry from
three to fifteen men and work near the shore; the large boats, employing
from fifteen to thirty men, fish all over the Gulf. It is a pretty sight
to see the fleet sailing out of the harbour, the large sails, set to
the wind, gleaming white in the sun, the blue waters underneath and the
bluer sky overhead. Have you ever seen a diving outfit? It looks rather
ungainly to me. The Arab divers do not use anything so elaborate as do
the divers in America. White overalls to cover their dark skin (because
they say sharks do not care for white people), a _fatam_, or clothes-pin
on the nose, and leather thimbles for scratching up the shells, and a
basket to hold the catch, with a rope attached to a girdle to draw them
up with—this is the complete outfit. When prayers have been said and a
_Bismillah_, down he goes, quickly fills the basket, and with a tug on
the rope, he is hauled up, his basket is emptied while he takes a short
breathing spell, then down again; and so on from sunrise to sunset.
The divers pass through many dangers in bringing the pearls from the
bottom of the ocean to the surface. Sharks are the most terrifying,
and during the pearl season a number of divers lose their lives, or
are maimed; a leg or an arm has to be amputated because the cruel,
sharp, powerful mouth of the shark caught the fisherman while he was
seeking goodly pearls for us. A large number of them are afflicted with
rheumatism as a consequence of their calling. In the boat, besides the
men who are doing the work, is a man who is a substitute for them in
prayer. The divers are too busy to observe the stated hours of prayer, so
this man will repeat the prayers in place of each man. He is the Levite,
and performs the religious ceremonies for every other man and boy. He
must be occupied all the time on the boats where there is a crew of
thirty men, and he must say the prayers five times a day for each man.
[Illustration: The Evolution of a Pearl Button]
The Arabs say that pearls come from a raindrop which fell while the
oyster had its mouth open; each drop of rain thus caught is a prize
for the diver. “Heaven born and cradled in the deep blue sea,” it is
the purest of gems and, in their eyes, the most precious. When the
pearl oysters are brought up, they are left on deck over night, and
next morning are opened by means of a curved knife six inches long.
Until a few years ago, all the shells were thrown back into the sea as
useless, but now they are brought to shore by the ton and deposited
in some merchant’s yard. He employs natives to scrape off the outside
roughness, and then they are packed in wooden crates and exported in
large quantities.
On shore the pearls are classified according to weight, size, shape,
colour and brilliancy. You would think the pearl merchants a strange
kind of people. They carry the most valuable pearls around with them
everywhere, tied up in turkey-red twill. They have no safes nor banks, so
the only safe way they can think of is to carry them around and run the
risk of being knocked down and robbed; but since the Indian government
has made Bahrein a protectorate, such robberies are rare.
The pearl merchants are called _tawawis_, which means those who handle
the brass sieve, or _tas_. When the pearls are brought on shore, they are
classified according to size first of all, and to do this, each merchant
has a nest of beautiful sieves fitting one into the other. The smallest
has holes as big as the end of a pencil, and they go down gradually in
size until the largest sieve, which is about six inches across, has holes
as fine as mustard seeds. Any day during the pearl season you may see the
Arab merchants sitting cross-legged in their houses, sifting pearls, and
when they are classified and piled up in little heaps, white and shining
in the bright sunlight on the red cloth that covers the floor, it is a
sight worth seeing.
The total value of the pearl harvest each year is at least a million
dollars, but most of the profit goes into the hands of the dealers. The
divers work for wages, and many of them are heavily in debt. In spite of
the dangers they incur, the divers love their work, because pearl diving
always has in it the element of gambling. One may work a whole day and
find only pearls of small value, and then perhaps bring up a fortune in
an hour. The most beautiful pearl I ever saw was found in the waters at
Bahrein some ten years ago, and was sold for ten thousand dollars. It
must have been to such a fortunate pearl diver that Browning referred in
his verses:
“There are two moments in a diver’s life:
One when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
Then when, a prince, he rises with his prize.”
The time for pearl diving is from May until the end of September. During
the winter months the cold weather interferes with the work, and the men
live inshore. Then it is that they come in crowds to our hospital, and
we have the joy of preaching to them from the parable of the Pearl of
great price, and no audience appreciates a sermon on that text as much
as the men who know what it costs to bring up the pearls. You remember
the parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a merchant
seeking goodly pearls, and having found one pearl of great price, he went
and sold all that he had and bought it.” When we tell the Arabs that the
Pearl of great price was the kingdom of God, peace and righteousness
and joy, which Jesus Christ purchased for us at the cost of His own life
and now offers freely to all who will believe in Him, they understand
something of the message.
Will you not pray for the pearl divers of Bahrein that many of them may
find the Pearl of great price, and that their humble homes,—mat-huts
along the shore of the great sea—may be made glad by the joy of a
Christian civilization and the knowledge of our Saviour? It is not hard
to love them for their own sake, and I well remember many a happy hour
spent with them in their boats or sitting on the beach, talking over
their work. Sir Edwin Arnold referred to them in these lines:
“Dear as the wet diver to the eyes
Of his pale wife, who waits and weeps on shore,
By sands of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf;
Plunging all day in the blue waves; at night,
Having made up his toll of precious pearls,
Rejoins her in their hut upon the shore.”
XII
A PIONEER JOURNEY ON THE PIRATE COAST
It was on Saturday morning, February 9, 1901, that Elias, our colporteur,
and I started for a journey along the eastern coast of Arabia, and, as
we hoped, inland. Our expectations of a long camel journey and the sight
of villages not yet marked on the map between the coast and Muscat were
disappointed. But the result was a journey of 440 miles and more along
the coast to the rocky cape that guards the narrow entrance to the Gulf.
Our experiences were so interesting that I will relate some of them to
you.
Did you ever read the droll story, “Three Men in a Boat”? Well, we
were eleven men in a boat, not to speak of a fine Arab horse and a
yelping greyhound, presents from the Ruler of Bahrein to the Ruler of
Abu Thabi. Our boat was of the usual native style without any cabin
or even an awning, and measured twenty feet across the beam and fifty
from bowsprit to poop. The noble quadruped had the largest share of
the scanty space midships; the dog was confined to the forecastle lest
prayers be impossible; for the Mohammedans believe that the dog is an
unclean animal, and that it is impossible to pray in any place where
a dog has walked or sat without first washing it. The two first-class
passengers and their boxes were on the left side of the poop; the crew
slept, smoked, washed themselves, and ate their dried fish and rice
anywhere; and the captain with a priest and a merchant squatted at our
right. I will not weary your patience to relate how many days after we
intended to start the sail was hoisted and we were off. One never expects
a native sailing craft to leave until the three days of grace (and
grumbling impatience) are twice over. But good Abdullah bin Kambar was
not altogether to blame; two of his sailors ran away, and he had to look
them up and urge them on board. With a fair, brisk wind filling the huge
sail we were all happy to start and forgot the delays and our dried bread
baked three days too early.
Our boat was bound for Abu Thabi, the first important town on the coast
south. The wind continued favourable, and on Monday we were sailing
between two islands, mere rocks and uninhabited except by a few fishermen
during the season. A little further towards the mainland is the large
island of Dalma, and there was a long dispute between the captain and
the mate as to which island we were passing. When the words waxed warm
between them my chart decided the dispute. This island is an old centre
for the pearl-fishers, and every season there is a large gathering here
of merchants and divers; a sort of market-place on the highway of the sea.
The weariness of five days and nights in the boat was relieved in many
ways. There was opportunity to read and plenty of interruption.
We had our meals to cook and tried to fish with a line and hook; once the
captain hit a wild duck with his rusty gun, but although all helped to
lower the boat and they pursued the wounded bird, she escaped. One day we
saw a large shark, and that afternoon there were some good fish stories.
At night the black slave Abdullah sat at the wheel and told stories as
only a Negro-Arab can tell them; stories of the new Arabian Nights, and
of how an Arab sharper stole a favourite horse by putting the bridle on
his own neck and having his mate run off with the horse! Several times it
was our turn to lead the conversation, and we had a splendid opportunity
to give “line upon line and precept upon precept.” One can judge at once
of the ignorance and open-heartedness of the Arab sailors by the remark
they commonly make after they have had a missionary or colporteur for
passenger: “We had no idea that Christians were such decent folk and even
prayed to Allah.”
At three o’clock on Thursday afternoon we were in sight of Abu Thabi, or
“father-of-the-gazelle.” It was my first visit to this town, although
Elias had been there before. We found the ruler kind, friendly and very
intelligent. We were assigned to a large room in one of his houses,
and during our stay of four days there was abundance of food sent to
us from the ruler’s table, and all our wants were supplied from his
beneficence,—huge dishes piled with rice, steeped with gravy and crowned
with several pounds of prime roast mutton, the whole surrounded with
dates and bread loaves, on a large circular mat, and washed down with
perfumed water. We were never hungry.
When the dwellers in the mat-huts heard of the arrival of foreigners
with a medicine chest and books our room was filled with the curious or
the ailing from early dawn until after sunset. That is the only drawback
to their kindness; the Arab idea of hospitality does not include the
blessing of privacy for their guest. One is never left alone, and if you
seek solitude they set you down as a magician, or delver into the hidden
things of nature which are forbidden to all true believers. So we had
to forego meditation, reading, and even the change of clothing until
nightfall, after our long sea journey.
It was a queer crowd that collected in the court and filled our little
room; a long row of Arabs sitting on the mats all around the four sides
of the court. Most of them were Oman Arabs, but there was one priest from
Mecca who had more to say than all the rest. He was a wanderer who wore
a spotless white turban and a sneering smile. His present residence, he
said, was on the Island of Kais, in the Gulf, and he lived as do all of
his kind by teaching school and copying charms for the ignorant. We had
some discussions and more quiet talks together after the crowd left. It
was sad to hear from him what dense ignorance there is regarding our
religion. The news of Queen Victoria’s death had just reached there and
the sage from Mecca told fabulous stories of how and why Christians were
ruled by women! Our sales of Scripture were not large, but there was a
demand for other books. One poor but learned man brought a manuscript
copy of Al Hariri (the Arabian Shakespeare) in exchange for other books.
We left Abu Thabi by sailing-boat for Debai, eighty miles up the coast in
a straight line. The wind compelled us to go zigzag.
This place has become the metropolis of Western Oman, and in population,
progress, commerce and architecture far surpasses all the other towns.
Between Abu Thabi and Debai the coast is desert and neither date-tree nor
hut is seen; so flat is the country that a hill two hundred feet high
(the only landmark for sailors) is called “the High Mountain.”
We did not tarry long at Debai, although we had a pleasant morning at
the house of the ruler and met some Arabs from the interior. One of them
said he was willing for a proper consideration to take me all the way
across Arabia to Jiddah, the port of Mecca. In the afternoon we started
selling Scriptures on the outskirts of the town and in a very short time
the crowd collected. Women came with copper coins and bright boys brought
their savings to purchase Gospels—in the language of our trade, “the true
story of the Living Prophet Jesus.” After we left Debai on donkeys two
boys who were late ran after us and overtook us a mile from the town;
they brought money and paid for three more books. The captain of our
boat took us to his house for breakfast on our arrival, and showed us
some poetry his wife had written. She talked with us and seemed versed in
the Koran; we left her a Gospel.