Old Port Said had disappeared beneath acres of new buildings where one could walk at leisure without being turned back by soldiers.

Two or three landmarks remained; two or three were reported as still in existence, and one Face showed itself after many years—­ravaged but respectable—­rigidly respectable.

‘Yes,’ said the Face, ’I have been here all the time.  But I have made money, and when I die I am going home to be buried.’

‘Why not go home before you are buried, O Face?’

’Because I have lived here so long.  Home is only good to be buried in.’

‘And what do you do, nowadays?’

‘Nothing now.  I live on my rentes—­my income.’

Think of it!  To live icily in a perpetual cinematograph show of excited, uneasy travellers; to watch huge steamers, sliding in and out all day and all night like railway trucks, unknowing and unsought by a single soul aboard; to talk five or six tongues indifferently, but to have no country—­no interest in any earth except one reservation in a Continental cemetery.

It was a cold evening after heavy rain and the half-flooded streets reeked.  But we undefeated tourists ran about in droves and saw all that could be seen before train-time.  We missed, most of us, the Canal Company’s garden, which happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact division between East and West.

Up to that point—­it is a fringe of palms, stiff against the sky—­the impetus of home memories and the echo of home interests carry the young man along very comfortably on his first journey.  But at Suez one must face things.  People, generally the most sympathetic, leave the boat there; the older men who are going on have discovered each other and begun to talk shop; no newspapers come aboard, only clipped Reuter telegrams; the world seems cruelly large and self-absorbed.  One goes for a walk and finds this little bit of kept ground, with comfortable garden-gated houses on either side of the path.  Then one begins to wonder—­in the twilight, for choice—­when one will see those palms again from the other side.  Then the black hour of homesickness, vain regrets, foolish promises, and weak despair shuts down with the smell of strange earth and the cadence of strange tongues.

Cross-roads and halting-places in the desert are always favoured by djinns and afrits.  The young man will find them waiting for him in the Canal Company’s garden at Port Said.

On the other hand, if he is fortunate enough to have won the East by inheritance, as there are families who served her for five or six generations, he will meet no ghouls in that garden, but a free and a friendly and an ample welcome from good spirits of the East that awaits him.  The voices of the gardeners and the watchmen will be as the greetings of his father’s servants in his father’s house; the evening smells and the sight of the hibiscus and poinsettia will unlock his tongue in words and sentences that he thought he had clean forgotten, and he will go back to the ship (I have seen) as a prince entering on his kingdom.