Note John Duncan — ARABIC

"JOHN DUNCAN was a lowland Scot, who lived in Edinburgh until he was between twenty and twenty-five years old. He was educated at one of the Scots schools, and knew his way about the University if he was not actually a student there. He certainly had enough money to live on. A love affair in which he must have been infamously treated caused him to leave Scotland. Within a year or two he was an established member of a small tribe of nomadic Arabs, and eventually he became in speech and appearance one of them, living their lazy, pastoral life and travelling up and down with them the whole line of the southwest coast of the Persian Gulf. Before his death, which occurred last year, at the age of forty-two or forty-three, he had become acquainted with the whole of habitable Arabia.