The river recalls the names; the mind at once brings up the face and
every trick of speech of some youth met for a few hours, maybe, in a
train on the way to Egypt of the old days. Both name and face had
utterly vanished from one's memory till then.
It was another generation that picked up the ball ten years later and
touched down in Khartoum. Several people aboard the Cook boat had been
to that city. They all agreed that the hotel charges were very high, but
that you could buy the most delightful curiosities in the native
bazaar. But I do not like bazaars of the Egyptian kind, since a
discovery I made at Assouan. There was an old man - a Mussulman - who
pressed me to buy some truck or other, but not with the villainous
camaraderie that generations of low-caste tourists have taught the
people, nor yet with the cosmopolitan light-handedness of appeal which
the town-bred Egyptian picks up much 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.
VII
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.
'And what school is that?' I asked in English of a small, eager youth.
'Madrissah,' said he most intelligently, which being translated means
just 'school.'
'Yes, but what school?'
'Yes, Madrissah, school, sir,' and he tagged after to see what else the
imbecile wanted.
A line of railway track, that must have fed big workshops in its time,
led me between big-roomed houses and offices labelled departmentally,
with here and there a clerk at work. I was directed and re-directed by
polite Egyptian officials (I wished to get at a white officer if
possible, but there wasn't one about); was turned out of a garden which
belonged to an Authority; hung round the gate of a bungalow with an
old-established compound and two white men sitting in chairs on a
verandah; wandered down towards the river under the palm trees, where
the last red light came through; lost myself among rusty boilers and
balks of timber; and at last loafed back in the twilight escorted by the
small boy and an entire brigade of ghosts, not one of whom I had ever
met before, but all of whom I knew most intimately. They said it was the
evenings that used to depress them most, too; so they all came back
after dinner and bore me company, while I went to meet a friend arriving
by the night train from Khartoum.
She was an hour late, and we spent it, the ghosts and I, in a
brick-walled, tin-roofed shed, warm with the day's heat; a crowd of
natives laughing and talking somewhere behind in the darkness. We knew
each other so well by that time, that we had finished discussing every
conceivable topic of conversation - the whereabouts of the Mahdi's head,
for instance - work, reward, despair, acknowledgment, flat failure, all
the real motives that had driven us to do anything, and all our other
longings.
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