And The Veiled Countrywomen,
Shuffling Side By Side, Elbow Pressed To Hip, And Eloquent Right Hand
Pivoting Round, Palm Uppermost, To Give Value To Each Shrill Phrase,
Might Have Been The Wives Of So Many Punjabi Cultivators But That They
Wore Another Type Of Bangle And Slipper.
A knotty-kneed youth sitting
high on a donkey, both amuleted against the evil eye, chewed three
purplish-feet of sugar-cane, which made one envious as well as
voluptuously homesick, though the sugar-cane of Egypt is not to be
compared with that of Bombay.
Hans Breitmann writes somewhere:
Oh, if you live in Leyden town
You'll meet, if troot be told,
Der forms of all der freunds dot tied
When du werst six years old.
And they were all there under the chanting palms - saices, orderlies,
pedlars, water-carriers, street-cleaners, chicken-sellers and the
slate-coloured buffalo with the china-blue eyes being talked to by a
little girl with the big stick. Behind the hedges of well-kept gardens
squatted the brown gardener, making trenches indifferently with a hoe or
a toe, and under the municipal lamp-post lounged the bronze policeman - a
touch of Arab about mouth and lean nostril - quite unconcerned with a
ferocious row between two donkey-men. They were fighting across the body
of a Nubian who had chosen to sleep in that place. Presently, one of
them stepped back on the sleeper's stomach. The Nubian grunted, elbowed
himself up, rolled his eyes, and pronounced a few utterly dispassionate
words. The warriors stopped, settled their headgear, and went away as
quickly as the Nubian went to sleep again. This was life, the real,
unpolluted stuff - worth a desert-full of mummies. And right through the
middle of it - hooting and kicking up the Nile - passed a Cook's steamer
all ready to take tourists to Assuan. From the Nubian's point of view
she, and not himself, was the wonder - as great as the Swiss-controlled,
Swiss-staffed hotel behind her, whose lift, maybe, the Nubian helped to
run. Marids, and afrits, guardians of hidden gold, who choke or crush
the rash seeker; encounters with the long-buried dead in a Cairo
back-alley; undreamed-of promotions, and suddenly lit loves are the
stuff of any respectable person's daily life; but the white man from
across the water, arriving in hundreds with his unveiled womenfolk, who
builds himself flying-rooms and talks along wires, who flees up and down
the river, mad to sit upon camels and asses, constrained to throw down
silver from both hands - at once a child and a warlock - this thing must
come to the Nubian sheer out of the Thousand and One Nights. At any
rate, the Nubian was perfectly sane. Having eaten, he slept in God's own
sunlight, and I left him, to visit the fortunate and guarded and
desirable city of Cairo, to whose people, male and female, Allah has
given subtlety in abundance. Their jesters are known to have surpassed
in refinement the jesters of Damascus, as did their twelve police
captains the hardiest and most corrupt of Bagdad in the tolerant days of
Harun-al-Raschid; while their old women, not to mention their young
wives, could deceive the Father of Lies himself.
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