The Portal of Dreams. Charles Neville Buck

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      I was sitting on the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel on the evening of my arrival there. I was finding life flat, as one must who can discover no fascination in Cairo's appeal to the eyes, nostrils and ears. Before me was the olla-podrida of touring fashion and fellaheen squalor; the smell of camels and attar of roses; the polyglot chatter of European pleasure-seekers and the tom-toms of Arab pilgrims.

      Then once more I saw her. But still I did not see her face. I suppose there were other persons with her. I did not notice. I did notice the salient thing. She was boarding a motor 'bus, presumably for the Alexandria train, and was followed by the usual Cairene retinue of tarbooshed porters and luggage-bearers.

      My glimpse of her was again only in exit. My baggage had just been unpacked, and I also could not catch the Alexandria train. I had been foolish enough to announce my coming by postcard from Jerusalem to an acquaintance at the Turf Club and had found awaiting me at Shepheard's on my arrival a note informing me that George Clann, a friend of past days, had invited a few army officers and native men for dinner that evening to meet me. The note added that no excuse would be accepted. I had called up the club and signified my acceptance. That was before I had seen the departing goddess, but I was due in the Sharia el Magrabi an hour hence and so was once again completely anchored.

      Had I seen her in entrance instead of in exit only, I should perhaps have remained in Egypt and fanned into rebirth a languid interest in sarcophagi and cartouches and camel-riding and scrambling up the comfortless slants of pyramids.

      As it was I began to subscribe to the Oriental idea of an inevitable destiny. I admitted to myself that it was written that for me this lady was to remain as unseen as though she belonged to the latticed and veiled seclusion of some pasha's harem. I told myself that had my first glimpse been a full one I should have gone on my way with prompt forgetfulness and that a curiosity so strange and fantastic must influence me no further.

      I sought out an empty place on the terrace where unintentionally enough I overheard an earnest conversation between a fair-haired and enthusiastic young Englishman and a grizzled fellow in middle life. They were talking business in one of the writing-rooms which give out through open windows upon the terrace, and the enthusiasm of the younger gave a carrying quality to his voice.

      He was, it appeared from his solicitude, seeking a billet which it lay in the power of his elder vis-à-vis to bestow. From the discussion which neither of them treated as confidential I learned that there is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean a perfectly useless island from which certain ethnological data and exhibits might be obtained. It further appeared that the British Museum was deficient in these particular curios and that the glass cases were yearning to be filled. The youth had been employed in Soudanese excavations and research. Now that work had ended and with it the pay, the necessity for other work and pay had not ended.

      "The billet down there," suggested the elder man, "will be no end beastly, I dare say. A tramp steamer sails from Port Said in three days for Singapore, Sandakan and the South Seas. The pay will be one hundred and fifty pounds for the job. The fare will probably be maggoty biscuits—still, if you feel game to have a dash at it——" The speaker finished with a shrug which seemed to add, "It's never difficult to find a fool."

      But the young man laughed with a whole-hearted enthusiasm, that entirely missed the under note of contempt in the manner of his benefactor. "Well, rather," he declared. "And I say, you know, its jolly good of you, sir."

      Later I made the acquaintance of the young Briton in the American bar where over Scotch and soda we discussed the project, to the end that I nominated and elected myself an assistant forager for the British Museum, serving at my own expense. There was something likeable about my new and naïve acquaintance, who was so eager to shoulder his futile way across a third of the globe's circumference in search of crudely inscribed rocks and axe-heads and decaying skulls. My own experience in life had been even more futile. I had learned to speak five languages and had completely failed of gaining a foothold in five useful professions: Art, Law, Literature, Music and Contentment. Possibly the appeasement of my Salatheal hunger, the curing of the curse, did not after all lie along the routes of Cunarders and Pullmans. Maybe I was still nibbling at travel as the school-girl nibbles at chocolates. Perhaps his method of taking the long and empty trail was the heroic medicine my itching feet required. At all events, I sententiously quoted to myself, "I think It will kill me or cure, and I think I will go there and see."

      When I informed young Mansfield, for that proved to be his name, that I meant to be his traveling companion, his almost childlike face took on an incredulous expression. He was a great two-hundred-pound chap whose physique should logically have been the asset of a pirate or a pugilist, but the visage which surmounted it had a rosy pinkness and his blue eyes wore the guileless charity of essential innocence. With his physical power went a long-suffering good nature, and as he talked of the widely scattered places he had seen and the things which should have made him wise in his generation it seemed to me that his soul must have worn a macintosh, from which the showers of experience had been shed off without leaving a mark. I have seen mastiffs with eyes full of wistfulness because Nature has denied their affectionate temperaments the gentle lives of lap dogs. Mansfield struck me the same way. Why a man, by his spare and simple standards as rich as Cr[oe]sus, should care to ship with him on a voyage promising maggoty biscuits, was quite beyond his mental process. He confessed, in all frankness, that he did it merely for the money—the pitiful hundred and fifty. There was a girl back in England, probably as devoid of surprises and complications of character as a lane-side primrose. I pictured her to myself as a creature of pink and shallow prettiness. The day to which his ambition strained as the ultimate goal was the day when he could become a curator in the British Museum and transplant her to decent London lodgings. He longed to placard and arrange scarabs in a plate-glass case and to classify Chimbote pottery and on bank holidays to push a go-cart in the park.

      I was glad, however, when I went over the rust-red side of the Wastrel that Mansfield went with me. We had known that we were shipping on a mean vessel, and one shouldered out of more orderly chartings, because of her unworthiness. Liners did not ply the tepid waters for which we were bound: waters ridden by no commerce save the peddling of copra and pearl shell and beche-de-mer. Yet even the warning had not prepared me for what I found, as I first stepped upon her unclean decks and had my initial view of her more unclean crew. Perhaps there are other corroded hulks shambling here and there among the less frequented ports of the seven seas as uninviting in appearance and as villainously manned as was the Wastrel, but on this point I stand unconvinced. A glance told us that her sea-worthiness was questionable and that her over-burdening cargo pressed her Plimsoll mark close to the water line. We were to learn by degrees that her timbers were rotten, her plates rust-eaten and her engines junk. Her officers were outcasts from respectable seafaring, none too cordial in their relations with admiralty courts. They had fallen back on the hazardous command of such a vessel as this not from choice, but necessity, precisely as other types of unemployed and hopeless men fall back on vagrancy and crime. Her crew was picked from the dregs of scattered ports. They were Lascars, Kanakas, Chinese and non-descripts from here and there; haled forth and signed from dives where human garbage trickles down to the sea. At first they interested me as new and roughened types of men, yet as I say, I was more than grateful for the shoulder touch of at least one being of my own sort. From our arrival, none of them except the captain and officers took the slightest pains to conceal that they regarded us as unwelcome interlopers and even the courtesy of the after-guard was short-lived enough. In that desert of taciturnity Mansfield babbled like a brook and overflowed with young sentimentality.

      The first leg of our journey ended at Borneo, leaving us as unacquainted with officers and seamen, save in the surface details of personal appearance, as we had been at Port Said. Now we were dropping Sandakan harbor over the stern. Already the sprawling, СКАЧАТЬ