He was very right. The purple and lemon-coloured
hazes of dusk and reflected day spread over the throbbing,
twinkling streets, masked the great outline of the
citadel and the desert hills, and conspired to confuse
and suggest and evoke memories, till Cairo the Sorceress
cast her proper shape and danced before me in the
heartbreaking likeness of every city I had known and
loved, a little farther up the road.
It was a cruel double-magic. For in the very
hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself
to the dream of the shadow that had turned back on
the dial, I realised all the desolate days and homesickness
of all the men penned in far-off places among strange
sounds and smells.
UP THE RIVER
Once upon a time there was a murderer who got off
with a life-sentence. What impressed him most,
when he had time to think, was the frank boredom of
all who took part in the ritual.
‘It was just like going to a doctor or a dentist,’
he explained. ’You come to ’em
very full of your affairs, and then you discover that
it’s only part of their daily work to them.
I expect,’ he added, ’I should have found
it the same if—er—I’d gone
on to the finish.’
He would have. Break into any new Hell or Heaven
and you will be met at its well-worn threshold by
the bored experts in attendance.
For three weeks we sat on copiously chaired and carpeted
decks, carefully isolated from everything that had
anything to do with Egypt, under chaperonage of a
properly orientalised dragoman. Twice or thrice
daily, our steamer drew up at a mud-bank covered with
donkeys. Saddles were hauled out of a hatch in
our bows; the donkeys were dressed, dealt round like
cards: we rode off through crops or desert, as
the case might be, were introduced in ringing tones
to a temple, and were then duly returned to our bridge
and our Baedekers. For sheer comfort, not to say
padded sloth, the life was unequalled, and since the
bulk of our passengers were citizens of the United
States—Egypt in winter ought to be admitted
into the Union as a temporary territory—there
was no lack of interest. They were overwhelmingly
women, with here and there a placid nose-led husband
or father, visibly suffering from congestion of information
about his native city. I had the joy of seeing
two such men meet. They turned their backs resolutely
on the River, bit and lit cigars, and for one hour
and a quarter ceased not to emit statistics of the
industries, commerce, manufacture, transport, and journalism
of their towns;—Los Angeles, let us say,
and Rochester, N.Y. It sounded like a duel between
two cash-registers.
One forgot, of course, that all the dreary figures
were alive to them, and as Los Angeles spoke Rochester
visualised. Next day I met an Englishman from
the Soudan end of things, very full of a little-known
railway which had been laid down in what had looked
like raw desert, and therefore had turned out to be
full of paying freight. He was in the full-tide
of it when Los Angeles ranged alongside and cast anchor,
fascinated by the mere roll of numbers.
