"Do not flatter yourselves with that hope," said Jim. "_I_ was amused with it for several years. Every master I have had gave me the same promise, and here I am yet. I did think when my late owners were saving the stones from the wreck, that I could get them to enter the walls of some seaport town, and that possibly they might take me along with them. But that hope has proved as delusive as all others I have entertained since shipwrecked on the shore of this accursed country. I believe there are a few who are fortunate enough to regain their liberty; but the majority of sailors cast away on the Saäran coast never have the good fortune to get away from it. They die under the hardships and ill-treatment to which they are exposed upon the desert--without leaving a trace of their existence any more than the dogs or camels belonging to their common masters.
"You have asked me to give an account of my life since I have been shipwrecked. I cannot do that; but I shall give you an easy rule by which you may know all about it. We will suppose you have all been three months in the Saära, and Bill here says that I have been here ten years; therefore I have experienced about forty times as long a period of slavery as one of yourselves. Now, multiply the sum total of your sufferings by forty, and you will have some idea of what I have undergone.
"You have probably witnessed some scenes of heartless cruelty--scenes that shocked and wounded the most sensitive feelings of your nature. I have witnessed forty times as many. While suffering the agonies of thirst and hunger, you may have prayed for death as a relief to your anguish. Where such have been your circumstances once, they have been mine for forty times.
"You may have had some bright hopes of escaping, and once more revisiting your native land; and then have experienced the bitterness of disappointment. In this way I have suffered forty times as much as any one of you."
Sailor Bill and the young gentlemen,--who had been for several days under the pleasant hallucination that they were on the high road to freedom,--were again awakened to a true sense of their situation by the words of a man far more experienced than they in the deceitful ways of the desert.