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? That work is done, and children are getting
ready to be born who will say: 'I can remember Gondokoro (or El-Obeid
or some undreamed of Clapham Junction, Abyssinia-way) before a single
factory was started - before the overhead traffic began. Yes, when there
was a fever - actually fever - in the city itself!'
The gap is no greater than that between to-day's and t'other day's
Zagazig - between the horsed vans of the Overland Route in Lieutenant
Waghorn's time and the shining motor that flashed us to our Cairo hotel
through what looked like the suburbs of Marseilles or Rome.
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