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.

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.