i88i] A JOURNEY IN THE HEjAZ 591 



houses in town where it is known that slaves can be 

 purchased, and many shopkeepers, especially those 

 from Hadhramaut, have a black boy sitting by them 

 on the mastaba of the shop, who is apparently an assistant, 

 but really is there to be sold. In Mecca of course, the 

 slave mart is much opener ; and in Medina, I am told 

 that one often sees a boy led by the hand through the 

 street by one of those peripatetic auctioneers who are 

 always to be found in Arabian bazaars. 



A great question has been raised as to the ultimate 

 effect on the old Arab stock of constant intermixture 

 with African blood, and observers who have noted this 

 intermixture in the Tehama and the cities have gone so 

 far as to maintain that the Arabian race must ultimately 

 be absorbed in the inexhaustible population of Africa. 

 I am disposed to think that this is a false prediction. 

 The negro importation has gone on for so many centuries 

 that the limits of its influence ought to be already pretty 

 well denned. In the towns the blood is very mixed. 

 Of the natives of Jeddah comparatively few are of pure 

 blood. In the villages of the Tehama, in like manner, 

 there are many half-castes, and the population of the 

 coast north and south of Jeddah has lost all claim to 

 rank as genuinely Arabian. But the Qabail or tribesmen, 

 the true Bedouins up the country, do not intermarry 

 with Africans, and their stock is still so pure that, as the 

 people say, the tribal blood is seen in their countenances. 

 Now, in spite of immigration and importation, there is 

 no reason to think that the population of the Hejaz is 

 increasing. If a town like Jeddah grows, it does so only 

 by foreign merchants Syrians, Indians, and so forth 

 settling for purposes of trade. I apprehend that in 

 Arabia, as in Egypt, the town population, apart from 

 immigration from the inland tribes or from abroad, 

 would rather diminish than increase. It can hardly be 

 otherwise from the unhealthy conditions in which women 

 live, from the careless and unhealthy way in which children 



