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.
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.
