ABDI AND ABDULLAH 
351 
like him and often during our rests after long hours 
afield we would talk of our travels and adventures. 
One day we stopped at the edge of the Molo 
River. A little bridge crossed the stream and I re¬ 
membered that the equator is supposed to pass di¬ 
rectly across the middle of this bridge. It struck 
me as being quite noteworthy, so I tried to tell 
Hassan all about it. I was hampered somewhat be¬ 
cause he didn’t know that the world was round, but 
after some time I got him to agree to that fact. 
Then by many illustrations I endeavored to de¬ 
scribe the equator and told him it crossed the bridge. 
He got up and looked, but seemed unconvinced as 
well as unimpressed. Then I told him that it was 
an imaginary line that ran around the world right 
where it was fullest—half way between the north 
pole and the south pole. He brightened up at this 
and hastened to tell me that he had heard of the 
north pole from a man on a French ship. As I per¬ 
severed in my geographical lecture he gradually 
became detached from my point of view, and when 
we finished I was talking equator and he was talk¬ 
ing about a friend of his who had once been to Rot¬ 
terdam. 
The lecture was a “draw.” But I noticed with 
satisfaction that when we walked across the bridge 
he looked furtively between each crack as if ex¬ 
pecting to see something. 
It was rather a curious thing, speaking of Has¬ 
san, to observe the respect with which the other na- 
