Parliament's wage, under conditions of life that would horrify a
self-respecting operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men in a
year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of fever. He had been moved
to work very hard for this billet by the representations of a friend in
the same service, who said that it was a 'rather decent sort of
service,' and he was all of a heat to reach Khartum, report for duty,
and fall to. If he is lucky, he may get a district where the people are
so virtuous that they do not know how to wear any clothes at all, and so
ignorant that they have never yet come across strong drink.
The train that took us to Cairo was own sister in looks and fittings to
any South African train - for which I loved her - but she was a trial to
some citizens of the United States, who, being used to the Pullman, did
not understand the side-corridored, solid-compartment idea. The trouble
with a standardised democracy seems to be that, once they break loose
from their standards, they have no props. 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? 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.
Always keep a new city till morning, 'In the daytime,' as it is written
in the Perspicuous Book,[6] 'thou hast long occupation,' Our window gave
on to the river, but before one moved toward it one heard the thrilling
squeal of the kites - those same thievish Companions of the Road who, at
that hour, were watching every Englishman's breakfast in every compound
and camp from Cairo to Calcutta.
[Footnote 6: The Koran.]
Voices rose from below - unintelligible words in maddeningly familiar
accents. A black boy in one blue garment climbed, using his toes as
fingers, the tipped mainyard of a Nile boat and framed himself in the
window. Then, because he felt happy, he sang, all among the wheeling
kites. And beneath our balcony rolled very Nile Himself, golden in
sunshine, wrinkled under strong breezes, with a crowd of creaking
cargo-boats waiting for a bridge to be opened.
On the cut-stone quay above, a line of cab drivers - a ticca-gharri
stand, nothing less - lolled and chaffed and tinkered with their
harnesses in every beautiful attitude of the ungirt East. All the ground
about was spotted with chewed sugarcane - first sign of the hot weather
all the world over.
Troops with startlingly pink faces (one would not have noticed this
yesterday) rolled over the girder bridge between churning motors and
bubbling camels, and the whole long-coated loose-sleeved Moslem world
was awake and about its business, as befits sensible people who pray at
dawn.
