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.
THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE
At Halfa one feels the first breath of a frontier.
Here the Egyptian Government retires into the background,
and even the Cook steamer does not draw up in the
exact centre of the postcard. At the telegraph-office,
too, there are traces, diluted but quite recognisable,
of military administration. Nor does the town,
in any way or place whatever, smell—which
is proof that it is not looked after on popular lines.
There is nothing to see in it any more than there
is in Hulk C. 60, late of her Majesty’s troopship
Himalaya, now a coal-hulk in the Hamoaze at
Plymouth. A river front, a narrow terraced river-walk
of semi-oriental houses, barracks, a mosque, and half-a-dozen
streets at right angles, the Desert racing up to the
end of each, make all the town. A mile or so up
stream under palm trees are bungalows of what must
have been cantonments, some machinery repair-shops,
and odds and ends of railway track. It is all
as paltry a collection of whitewashed houses, pitiful
gardens, dead walls, and trodden waste spaces as one
would wish to find anywhere; and every bit of it quivers
with the remembered life of armies and river-fleets,
as the finger-bowl rings when the rubbing finger is
lifted. The most unlikely men have done time
there; stores by the thousand ton have been rolled
and pushed and hauled up the banks by tens of thousands
of scattered hands; hospitals have pitched themselves
there, expanded enormously, shrivelled up and drifted
away with the drifting regiments; railway sidings by
the mile have been laid down and ripped up again,
as need changed, and utterly wiped out by the sands.
Halfa has been the rail-head, Army Headquarters, and
hub of the universe—the one place where
a man could make sure of buying tobacco and sardines,
or could hope for letters for himself and medical
attendance for his friend. Now she is a little
shrunken shell of a town without a proper hotel, where
tourists hurry up from the river to buy complete sets
of Soudan stamps at the Post Office.
I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the
place to the other, and found a crowd of native boys
playing football on what might have been a parade-ground
of old days.
