Round the Wonderful World. Mitton Geraldine Edith

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      The crouching figure is lion-like in attitude, but how human of face in spite of its broken nose. It was carven of the solid rock and fashioned with its face to the sunrise and its back to the desert. No one knows the thought in the mind of the puny artist who brought it into being and then shrivelled beside it like a blade of grass. Was it intended to be a god? It has been silted up by sand and unburied again; it has been worshipped and hated. It has been reverenced and shot at, so that its face is chipped and its nose broken away, and still it smiles with fierce serenity.

      Sit silently.

      "Poste-carte – "

      "Imshi, imshi."

      That Arabic word, picked up at hazard from the dragoman, has acted like a talisman – the pest has actually gone!

      There creeps up beside you, very slowly and determinedly, an old, old man. "Fortune told," he says almost in a whisper, groping for your hard boyish hand. So be it! He at least does not send the spirit of the place flying away. Nonsense it may be, but these fellows do know something —

      Give him that five piastre piece that looks like a large shilling and listen to his quaint expressive English.

      "Clever head, head very much good, gooder than many men, but an enemy inside there. You see a long, long road, and you go that road, then coming hills and that road grow tiresome and you stop and say, 'Not worth it, I don't care,' an enemy here – slay him!

      "Much work lies to your hands to do when they grow large. In many lands I see them plucking down cities and raising ships from the depths of the sea. Strange things be waiting for those hands in all the world. Many tongues you speaking, and many things you gain. But the hand not opening easily. What it gains it grips, hard and tight; it is a close hand, and that which comes thereout drops slowly between the fingers to friends also as to foes. Riches and work and honour hold the hands, and only death will tear them away. With them all is a bitterness and a glory greater than the shine of what men count joy. But in that day when you eat with kings the desire of life shall pass from you!"

      Hullo, old boy! He gave you a good shilling's worth, anyhow! Though it was rather a nasty hit that at your Scottish national character! You don't believe it surely? Look at the Sphinx and laugh. What does it matter if we two midges, among all the midges that have crawled about his paws, don't exactly enjoy ourselves the whole of our brief day?

      What is that? How you start! No, it's not a lion roaring, though it's a pretty good imitation; it's only a camel cursing and snarling with all his might while his owner piles a few bushels' weight on his back. He doesn't really mind it, but it is the immemorial custom of camels to protest with hideousness and confused noise, and if he didn't do it his trade union would be down upon him.

      "Poste-carte – "

      Come, let us go!

      CHAPTER V

      THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT

      Of course you have been in a cinematograph theatre, and there, seated comfortably, have watched the various scenes pass before you. The great charm of these scenes is that the people really did do the things which we here see them doing, even down to the smallest gestures. But often the pleasure is spoilt by knowing that the actors were only making these gestures for the purpose of being photographed; also the scenes are sometimes disconnected and scrappy, and seldom indeed is it that they are represented in colour, and then, though the colour is clever enough, it is not like that of nature.

      To-day we are watching a cinematograph which has none of these drawbacks. We are seated in a leather-lined railway carriage running from Cairo southward up the country to a place called Luxor, and passing before us every minute are vivid pictures of the life of Egypt. The railway runs along the middle of Egypt, just as the Nile does, but we do not often see the river from the line, for at this time of the year it flows low down between its banks. It is on the other side of the railway that the main interest lies. Here there is a canal as straight as the line and close beside it, and on the far side of it is a sort of raised tow-path – the great highway of Egypt. We see it against a fringe of bushy palm trees at one minute, and the next against a field of tall, green-growing stuff, which looks exactly like those rushes found on the banks of our own rivers. This, however, is maize, or, as you probably know it better, Indian corn, which forms the staple food of the people. The brown feathery heads wave in the wind, but the corn itself is tucked away in the thickness of the stalk. You must have seen a "cob" of Indian corn some time, with all the flat yellow grains nestling in a honeycomb of little cells. To-day in Egypt you will see everyone eating them; even the solemn baby seated astride its mother's shoulder picks out the grains and nibbles them like a little monkey. The straw part of the plant is used for many things: it feeds the numerous domestic animals of the Egyptians to begin with – the donkeys, camels, buffaloes, bullocks, goats – and it forms thatch for the huts and makes bedding.

      Notice that man over there in the field; his cotton gown is of the purest blue, which shows up richly against the vivid green of the maize stalks. There is another seated far back on the rump of a small donkey who is tripping along on its stiff little legs. It wears no harness of any kind beyond a cord round its neck, which enables anyone to catch hold of it. The man has no saddle and he holds his long legs straight forward to prevent his feet from touching the ground, and from time to time he guides or goads the donkey with a little sharp-pointed stick. Close behind him, walking fast to keep up, is a tall woman in black with a black shawl covering her mouth, her dress is a mass of grey dust as far as the waist, and drags up the dust in clouds as she moves. On her head is a large bundle and on her hip a large baby. She is the wife of the lordly individual riding so comfortably ahead, and she takes this state of affairs as a matter of course. The scene arouses anger in the breast of a nice American with a grey moustache and keen grey eyes, who shares our compartment.

      "So long as they treat their womenfolk like that they'll never rise to anything better," he says emphatically. "The higher the civilisation of a nation is the higher the position of its women. A nation of men who ride and let the women carry the burdens is bound to be rotten and flabby."

      Next there passes across our window-frame a flock of goats, but they are not much like those we know – they are dark brown and black, with thick rough coats and cheeky tufted tails; numbers of kids dance up and down the steep sides of the tow-path after the manner of kids all the world over. A small boy, dressed in what appears to be a striped flannel night-shirt, with a tiny skull-cap on his head, is driving them. He pulls his single garment up to his waist as he dances and pirouettes as if the joy of living were almost too much for him. He is enveloped in a cloud of dust raised by the goats, but he snatches handfuls of the dust from the ground and flings it in the air around as if he could never get enough of it!

      "The Lady of Shalott," in Tennyson's poem, who watched in her mirror all who went down to Camelot, cannot ever have seen anything half so interesting as this.

      Presently we meet a long string of fine-looking camels, one of them pure white; they are fastened by a connecting rope and so covered with loads of bristling twigs that each looks like a walking bush, out of which the great padded feet are planted with deliberate steps and the haughty heads swaying at the ends of the long necks stick out. It is the scrub of the cotton bush that they are carrying; you will see fields of it presently, some of it bursting into fluffy pods, for cotton growing is one of the most extensive and profitable of Egyptian industries. The twigs and branches are used as fuel by the people, who have a happy knack of letting nothing be wasted.

      "I never!" exclaims the American. "If that isn't like them!" We are overtaking a second string of СКАЧАТЬ