I Made Haste To Cross The Bridge And To Hear The Palms In The Wind On
The Far Side.
They sang as nobly as though they had been true coconuts,
and the thrust of the north wind behind them was almost as open-handed
as the thrust of the Trades.
Then came a funeral - the sheeted corpse on
the shallow cot, the brisk-pacing bearers (if he was good, the sooner he
is buried the sooner in heaven; if bad, bury him swiftly for the sake of
the household - either way, as the Prophet says, do not let the mourners
go too long weeping and hungry) - the women behind, tossing their arms
and lamenting, and men and boys chanting low and high.
They might have come forth from the Taksali Gate in the city of Lahore
on just such a cold weather morning as this, on their way to the
Mohammedan burial-grounds by the river. 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. Delhi is a great
place - most bazaar storytellers in India make their villain hail from
there; but when the agony and intrigue are piled highest and the tale
halts till the very last breathless sprinkle of cowries has ceased to
fall on his mat, why then, with wagging head and hooked forefinger, the
storyteller goes on:
'But there was a man from Cairo, an Egyptian of the Egyptians,
who' - and all the crowd knows that a bit of real metropolitan devilry is
coming.
III
A SERPENT OF OLD NILE
Modern Cairo is an unkempt place. The streets are dirty and
ill-constructed, the pavements unswept and often broken, the tramways
thrown, rather than laid, down, the gutters neglected. One expects
better than this in a city where the tourist spends so much every
season. Granted that the tourist is a dog, he comes at least with a bone
in his mouth, and a bone that many people pick. He should have a cleaner
kennel. The official answer is that the tourist-traffic is a flea-bite
compared with the cotton industry. Even so, land in Cairo city must be
too valuable to be used for cotton growing. It might just as well be
paved or swept. There is some sort of authority supposed to be in charge
of municipal matters, but its work is crippled by what is called 'The
Capitulations.' It was told to me that every one in Cairo except the
English, who appear to be the mean whites of these parts, has the
privilege of appealing to his consul on every conceivable subject from
the disposal of a garbage-can to that of a corpse. As almost every one
with claims to respectability, and certainly every one without any,
keeps a consul, it follows that there is one consul per superficial
meter, arshin, or cubit of Ezekiel within the city.
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