950 



Popular Science Monthly 



which is the Arabic equivalent for "insult 

 him." If these saucy sons of Ham are 

 laughing up their sleeves at us, they will 

 not get their mouthful of "eish" after all. 

 And yet what recks it? We are not out for 



Fig. 2. The combination of the first spelling and 

 this makes "eishtmo," Arabic for "insult him" 



intellectual recreation and have the satis- 

 faction of memorizing in these two groups 

 no less than seven letters of the Morse 

 alphabet. 



The Arabs now call upon several more of 

 their sun-scorched brethren to join them, 

 and, thus reinforced, proceed to entertain 

 us with a third grouping, a picturesque one 

 withal, for we here get a combined figure of 

 squatting and prone Egyptians, as in Fig. 3, 

 which is certainly not a complicated figure, 

 yet it helps us to tuck away in the recesses 

 of our brain boxes six more letters, namely: 



(A).- (U)..- (V)...- 



m— .. (D)-.. (B)— ... 



Happily these form no equivocal word in 

 Arabic so we conclude we have been enter- 

 taining unworthy suspicions of our desert 



Fig. 3. Positions of the men for making 

 A, U, V, N, D, and B in the Morse code 



friends. While we are mentally registering 

 the six symbols, however, the top two sets 

 of men begin quarreling and approach each 

 other in a menacing attitude; but as we are 

 at the safe distance of 500 ft. from the seat 

 of disturbance, we content ourselves with 

 merely adding another letter to the tablets 



of our memories, for the conjunction of the 

 two opposing factions represents the letter 



P (. .). Meanwhile the two couples 



commence stealthily to maneuver round one 

 another, so that, although they began 

 thus . - — - . they presently stand thus 

 — . . — which may be all quite fortuitous, 

 of course, still we manage to profit by the 

 chance grouping, since — . . — is X. 



Do we realize that we are already con- 

 siderably more than half way through the 

 alphabet? Not without casualties, how- 

 ever; for in the fracas above alluded to 

 three men are injured : the first is therefore 

 gently laid down, a dark visaged brother 

 sits at his head, fanning him with the tail 

 end of his robe, while another sits at the 

 injured man's feet and tickles his toes with 

 a spike of camel grass. We simply cannot 

 resist the temptation to place another let- 

 ter in our mental warehouse — viz., R (. — .) 

 for the three men are now grouped thus. 



.f&wji. 



Fig. 4. The men take their places as 

 shown which in the Morse code is W G ' 



The two other wounded fellows call out 

 faintly for "water," so they are likewise 

 tenderly laid out, head to head, and one of 

 the onlookers sits between them, giving 

 each alternately a sip of water out of his 

 inverted tarboosh, hastily filled from the 

 pump of Mena House Hotel close by ; thus 

 the group becomes — . — and as it must be 

 a hopelessly diseased wind that cannot 

 manage to blow somebody some good 

 somehow, we so far take advantage of the 

 woes of these two unhappy wretches as to 

 add the letter K to our rapidly growing 

 Morse alphabet, thereby accounting for 17 

 out of the 26 letters. 



Another group composed of six men 

 evolves itself as in Fig. 4, but the com- 

 ponent parts thereof immediately begin a 

 • i20-deg.-in-the-shade argument. As far as 

 our obliging Dragoman is able to make out 

 from this distance and the echoes thrown 

 back from the face of the pyramid, they are 

 talking about cricket, and the left three 



