People are not left behind
and luggage is rarely mislaid on the railroads of the older world. There
is an ordained ritual for the handling of all things, to which if a man
will only conform and keep quiet, he and his will be attended to with
the rest. The people that I watched would not believe this. They charged
about futilely and wasted themselves in trying to get ahead of their
neighbours.
Here is a fragment from the restaurant-car: 'Look at here! Me and some
friends of mine are going to dine at this table. We don't want to be
separated and - '
'You 'ave your number for the service, sar?' 'Number? What number? We
want to dine here, I tell you.'
'You shall get your number, sar, for the first service?'
'Haow's that? Where in thunder do we get the numbers, anyway?'
'I will give you the number, sar, at the time - for places at the first
service.'
'Yes, but we want to dine together here - right now.'
'The service is not yet ready, sar.'
And so on - and so on; with marchings and counter-marchings, and every
word nervously italicised. In the end they dined precisely where there
was room for them in that new world which they had strayed into.
On one side our windows looked out on darkness of the waste; on the
other at the black Canal, all spaced with monstrous headlights of the
night-running steamers. Then came towns, lighted with electricity,
governed by mixed commissions, and dealing in cotton. Such a town, for
instance, as Zagazig, last seen by a very small boy who was lifted out
of a railway-carriage and set down beneath a whitewashed wall under
naked stars in an illimitable emptiness because, they told him, the
train was on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him. What stuck in his
sleepy mind was the absurd name of the place and his father's prophecy
that when he grew up he would 'come that way in a big steamer.'
So all his life, the word 'Zagazig' carried memories of a brick shed,
the flicker of an oil-lamp's floating wick, a sky full of eyes, and an
engine coughing in a desert at the world's end; which memories returned
in a restaurant-car jolting through what seemed to be miles of
brilliantly lighted streets and factories. No one at the table had even
turned his head for the battlefields of Kassassin and Tel-el-Kebir.
After all, why should they?
