It Was Another Generation That Picked Up The Ball Ten Years Later And
Touched Down In Khartoum.
Several people aboard the Cook boat had been
to that city.
They all agreed that the hotel charges were very high, but
that you could buy the most delightful curiosities in the native
bazaar. But I do not like bazaars of the Egyptian kind, since a
discovery I made at Assouan. There was an old man - a Mussulman - who
pressed me to buy some truck or other, but not with the villainous
camaraderie that generations of low-caste tourists have taught the
people, nor yet with the cosmopolitan light-handedness of appeal which
the town-bred Egyptian picks up much too quickly; but with a certain
desperate zeal, foreign to his whole creed and nature. He fingered, he
implored, he fawned with an unsteady eye, and while I wondered I saw
behind him the puffy pink face of a fezzed Jew, watching him as a stoat
watches a rabbit. When he moved the Jew followed and took position at a
commanding angle. The old man glanced from me to him and renewed his
solicitations. So one could imagine an elderly hare thumping wildly on a
tambourine with the stoat behind him. They told me afterwards that Jews
own most of the stalls in Assouan bazaar, the Mussulmans working for
them, since tourists need Oriental colour. Never having seen or imagined
a Jew coercing a Mussulman, this colour was new and displeasing to me.
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