But We Undefeated Tourists Ran About In Droves And Saw All That
Could Be Seen Before Train-Time.
We missed, most of us, the Canal
Company's garden, which happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact
division between East and West.
Up to that point - it is a fringe of palms, stiff against the sky - the
impetus of home memories and the echo of home interests carry the young
man along very comfortably on his first journey. But at Suez one must
face things. People, generally the most sympathetic, leave the boat
there; the older men who are going on have discovered each other and
begun to talk shop; no newspapers come aboard, only clipped Reuter
telegrams; the world seems cruelly large and self-absorbed. One goes for
a walk and finds this little bit of kept ground, with comfortable
garden-gated houses on either side of the path. Then one begins to
wonder - in the twilight, for choice - when one will see those palms again
from the other side. Then the black hour of homesickness, vain regrets,
foolish promises, and weak despair shuts down with the smell of strange
earth and the cadence of strange tongues.
Cross-roads and halting-places in the desert are always favoured by
djinns and afrits. The young man will find them waiting for him in the
Canal Company's garden at Port Said.
On the other hand, if he is fortunate enough to have won the East by
inheritance, as there are families who served her for five or six
generations, he will meet no ghouls in that garden, but a free and a
friendly and an ample welcome from good spirits of the East that awaits
him.
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