Letters of Travel (1892-1913) Part 12

'But I am sheik of the village. One must not bring devils into a village. I _said_ I would shoot him.'

'This matter is in the hands of the law. _I_ judge.'

'What need? I shot him. Suppose that _your_ son had brought a devil in a box to _your_ village----'

They explained to him, at last, that under British rule fathers must hand over devil-dealing children to be shot by the white men (the first step, you see, on the downward path of State aid), and that he must go to prison for several months for interfering with a government shoot.

We are a great race. There was a pious young judge in Nigeria once, who kept a condemned prisoner waiting very many minutes while he hunted through the Hausa dictionary, word by word, for, 'May--G.o.d--have--mercy--on--your--soul.'

And I heard another tale--about the Suez Ca.n.a.l this time--a hint of what may happen some day at Panama. There was a tramp steamer, loaded with high explosives, on her way to the East, and at the far end of the Ca.n.a.l one of the sailors very naturally upset a lamp in the fo'c'sle. After a heated interval the crew took to the desert alongside, while the captain and the mate opened all c.o.c.ks and sank her, not in the fairway but up against a bank, just leaving room for a steamer to squeeze past. Then the Ca.n.a.l authorities wired to her charterers to know exactly what there might be in her; and it is said that the reply kept them awake of nights, for it was their business to blow her up.

Meantime, traffic had to go through, and a P. & O. steamer came along.

There was the Ca.n.a.l; there was the sunken wreck, marked by one elderly Arab in a little boat with a red flag, and there was about five foot clearance on each side for the P. & O. She went through a-tiptoe, because even fifty tons of dynamite will jar a boat, perceptibly, and the tramp held more--very much more, not to mention detonators. By some absurd chance, almost the only pa.s.senger who knew about the thing at the time was an old lady rather proud of the secret.

'Ah,' she said, in the middle of that agonised glide, 'you may depend upon it that if everybody knew what, I know, they'd all be on the other side of the ship.'

Later on, the authorities blew up the tramp with infinite precautions from some two miles off, for which reason she neither destroyed the Suez Ca.n.a.l nor dislocated the Sweet Water Ca.n.a.l alongside, but merely dug out a hole a hundred feet or a hundred yards deep, and so vanished from Lloyd's register.

But no stories could divert one long from the peculiarities of that amazing line which exists strictly for itself. There was a bathroom (occupied) at the windy end of an open alleyway. In due time the bather came out.

Said the steward, as he swabbed out the tub for his successor: 'That was the Chief Engineer. 'E's been some time. Must 'ave 'ad a mucky job below, this mornin'.'

I have a great admiration for Chief Engineers. They are men in authority, needing all the comforts and aids that can possibly be given them--such as bathrooms of their own close to their own cabins, where they can clean off at leisure.

It is not fair to mix them up with the ruck of pa.s.sengers, nor is it done on real ships. Nor, when a pa.s.senger wants a bath in the evening, do the stewards of real ships roll their eyes like vergers in a cathedral and say, 'We'll see if it can be managed.' They double down the alleyway and shout, 'Matcham' or 'Ponting' or 'Guttman,' and in fifteen seconds one of those swift three has the taps going and the towels out. Real ships are not annexes of Westminster Abbey or Borstal Reformatory. They supply decent accommodation in return for good money, and I imagine that their directors instruct their staffs to look pleased while at work.

Some generations back there must have been an idea that the P. & O. was vastly superior to all lines afloat--a sort of semipontifical show not to be criticised. How much of the notion was due to its own excellence and how much to its pa.s.senger-traffic monopoly does not matter. To-day, it neither feeds nor tends its pa.s.sengers, nor keeps its ships well enough to put on any airs at all.

For which reason, human nature being what it is, it surrounds itself with an ungracious atmosphere of absurd ritual to cover grudged and inadequate performance.

What it really needs is to be dropped into a March North Atlantic, without any lascars, and made to swim for its life between a C.P.R. boat and a North German Lloyd--till it learns to smile.

II

A RETURN TO THE EAST

The East is a much larger slice of the world than Europeans care to admit. Some say it begins at St. Gothard, where the smells of two continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Venice on warm April mornings. But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail--that shark's fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a suggestion of menace, a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or fruiting or coasting.

'This is _not_ my ancestral trade,' she whispers to the accomplice sea.

'If everybody had their rights I should be doing something quite different; for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, she was the Dhow, and between the two of 'em they made Asia.' Then she tacks, disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, as it were, up her baggy sleeves.

Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness. They are all children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope and patch.

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 Ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.l 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.

There was a man in our company--a young Englishman--who had just been granted his heart's desire in the shape of some raw district south of everything southerly in the Sudan, where, on two-thirds of a member of Parliament's wage, under conditions of life that would horrify a self-respecting operative, he will see perhaps some dozen white men in a year, and will certainly pick up two sorts of fever. He had been moved to work very hard for this billet by the representations of a friend in the same service, who said that it was a 'rather decent sort of service,' and he was all of a heat to reach Khartum, report for duty, and fall to. If he is lucky, he may get a district where the people are so virtuous that they do not know how to wear any clothes at all, and so ignorant that they have never yet come across strong drink.

The train that took us to Cairo was own sister in looks and fittings to any South African train--for which I loved her--but she was a trial to some citizens of the United States, who, being used to the Pullman, did not understand the side-corridored, solid-compartment idea. The trouble with a standardised democracy seems to be that, once they break loose from their standards, they have no props. People are _not_ left behind and luggage is rarely mislaid on the railroads of the older world. There is an ordained ritual for the handling of all things, to which if a man will only conform and keep quiet, he and his will be attended to with the rest. The people that I watched would not believe this. They charged about futilely and wasted themselves in trying to get ahead of their neighbours.

Here is a fragment from the restaurant-car: 'Look at here! Me and some friends of mine are going to dine at this table. We don't want to be separated and--'

'You 'ave your number for the service, sar?' 'Number? What number? We want to dine _here_, I tell you.'

'You shall get your number, sar, for the first service?'

'Haow's that? Where in thunder do we _get_ the numbers, anyway?'

'I will give you the number, sar, at the time--for places at the first service.'

'Yes, but we want to dine together here--right _now._'

'The service is not yet ready, sar.'

And so on--and so on; with marchings and counter-marchings, and every word nervously italicised. In the end they dined precisely where there was room for them in that new world which they had strayed into.

On one side our windows looked out on darkness of the waste; on the other at the black Ca.n.a.l, all s.p.a.ced with monstrous headlights of the night-running steamers. Then came towns, lighted with electricity, governed by mixed commissions, and dealing in cotton. Such a town, for instance, as Zagazig, last seen by a very small boy who was lifted out of a railway-carriage and set down beneath a whitewashed wall under naked stars in an illimitable emptiness because, they told him, the train was on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him. What stuck in his sleepy mind was the absurd name of the place and his father's prophecy that when he grew up he would 'come that way in a big steamer.'

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 Ka.s.sa.s.sin 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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.