‘Two or three,’ he replied placidly. ‘They are all generous; but they are all ridiculous. Egypt is not a place where one should promulgate ridiculous ideas.’
‘But my shares–my shares!’ I cried. ‘They have already dropped several points.’
‘It is possible. They will drop more. Then they will rise.’
‘Thank you. But why?’
‘Because the idea is fundamentally absurd. That will never be admitted by your people, but there will be arrangements, accommodations, adjustments, till it is all the same as it used to be. It will be the concern of the Permanent Official–poor devil!–to pull it straight. It is always his concern. Meantime, prices will rise for all things.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the land is the chief security in Egypt. If a man cannot borrow on that security, the rates of interest will increase on whatever other security he offers. That will affect all work and wages and Government contracts.’
He put it so convincingly and with so many historical illustrations that I saw whole perspectives of the old energetic Pharaohs, masters of life and death along the River, checked in mid-career by cold-blooded accountants chanting that not even the Gods themselves can make two plus two more than four. And the vision ran down through the ages to one little earnest head on a Cook’s steamer, bent sideways over the vital problem of rearranging ‘our National Flag’ so that it should be ‘easier to count the stars.’
For the thousandth time: Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures!
V
DEAD KINGS
The Swiss are the only people who have taken the trouble to master the art of hotel-keeping. Consequently, in the things that really matter–beds, baths, and victuals–they control Egypt; and since every land always throws back to its aboriginal life (which is why the United States delight in telling aged stories), any ancient Egyptian would at once understand and join in with the life that roars through the nickel-plumbed tourist-barracks on the river, where all the world frolics in the sunshine. At first sight, the show lends itself to cheap moralising, till one recalls that one only sees busy folk when they are idle, and rich folk when they have made their money. A citizen of the United States–his first trip abroad–pointed out a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon who was relaxing after the manner of several school-boys.
‘There’s a sample!’ said the Son of Hustle scornfully. ‘Tell me, _he_ ever did anything in his life?’ Unluckily he had pitched upon one who, when he is in collar, reckons thirteen and a half hours a fairish day’s work.
Among this assembly were men and women burned to an even blue-black tint–civilised people with bleached hair and sparkling eyes. They explained themselves as ‘diggers’–just diggers–and opened me a new world. Granted that all Egypt is one big undertaker’s emporium, what could be more fascinating than to get Government leave to rummage in a corner of it, to form a little company and spend the cold weather trying to pay dividends in the shape of amethyst necklaces, lapis-lazuli scarabs, pots of pure gold, and priceless bits of statuary? Or, if one is rich, what better fun than to grub-stake an expedition on the supposed site of a dead city and see what turns up? There was a big-game hunter who had used most of the Continent, quite carried away by this sport.
‘I’m going to take shares in a city next year, and watch the digging myself,’ he said. ‘It beats elephants to pieces. In _this_ game you’re digging up dead things and making them alive. Aren’t you going to have a flutter?’
He showed me a seductive little prospectus. Myself, I would sooner not lay hands on a dead man’s kit or equipment, especially when he has gone to his grave in the belief that the trinkets guarantee salvation. Of course, there is the other argument, put forward by sceptics, that the Egyptian was a blatant self-advertiser, and that nothing would please him more than the thought that he was being looked at and admired after all these years. Still, one might rob some shrinking soul who didn’t see it in that light.
At the end of spring the diggers flock back out of the Desert and exchange chaff and flews in the gorgeous verandahs. For example, A’s company has made a find of priceless stuff, Heaven knows how old, and is–not too meek about it. Company B, less fortunate, hints that if only A knew to what extent their native diggers had been stealing and disposing of the thefts, under their very archaeological noses, they would not be so happy.
‘Nonsense,’ says Company A. ‘Our diggers are above suspicion. Besides, we watched ’em.’
‘_Are_ they?’ is the reply. ‘Well, next time you are in Berlin, go to the Museum and you’ll see what the Germans have got hold of. It must have come out of your ground. The Dynasty proves it.’ So A’s cup is poisoned–till next year.
No collector or curator of a museum should have any moral scruples whatever; and I have never met one who had; though I have been informed by deeply-shocked informants of four nationalities that the Germans are the most flagrant pirates of all.
The business of exploration is about as romantic as earth-work on Indian railways. There are the same narrow-gauge trams and donkeys, the same shining gangs in the borrow-pits and the same skirling dark-blue crowds of women and children with the little earth-baskets. But the hoes are not driven in, nor the clods jerked aside at random, and when the work fringes along the base of some mighty wall, men use their hands carefully. A white man–or he was white at breakfast-time–patrols through the continually renewed dust-haze. Weeks may pass without a single bead, but anything may turn up at any moment, and it is his to answer the shout of discovery.
We had the good fortune to stay a while at the Headquarters of the Metropolitan Museum (New York) in a valley riddled like a rabbit-warren with tombs. Their stables, store-houses, and servants’ quarters are old tombs; their talk is of tombs, and their dream (the diggers’ dream always) is to discover a virgin tomb where the untouched dead lie with their jewels upon them. Four miles away are the wide-winged, rampant hotels. Here is nothing whatever but the rubbish of death that died thousands of years ago, on whose grave no green thing has ever grown. Villages, expert in two hundred generations of grave-robbing, cower among the mounds of wastage, and whoop at the daily tourist. Paths made by bare feet run from one half-tomb, half-mud-heap to the next, not much more distinct than snail smears, but they have been used since….
Time is a dangerous thing to play with. That morning the concierge had toiled for us among steamer-sailings to see if we could save three days. That evening we sat with folk for whom Time had stood still since the Ptolemies. I wondered, at first, how it concerned them or any man if such and such a Pharaoh had used to his own glory the plinths and columns of such another Pharaoh before or after Melchizedek. Their whole background was too inconceivably remote for the mind to work on. But the next morning we were taken to the painted tomb of a noble–a Minister of Agriculture–who died four or five thousand years ago. He said to me, in so many words: ‘Observe I was very like your friend, the late Mr. Samuel Pepys, of your Admiralty. I took an enormous interest in life, which I most thoroughly enjoyed, on its human and on its spiritual side. I do not think you will find many departments of State better managed than mine, or a better-kept house, or a nicer set of young people … My daughters! The eldest, as you can see, takes after her mother. The youngest, my favourite, is supposed to favour me. Now I will show you all the things that I did, and delighted in, till it was time for me to present my accounts elsewhere.’ And he showed me, detail by detail, in colour and in drawing, his cattle, his horses, his crops, his tours in the district, his accountants presenting the revenue returns, and he himself, busiest of the busy, in the good day.
But when we left that broad, gay ante-room and came to the narrower passage where once his body had lain and where all his doom was portrayed, I could not follow him so well. I did not see how he, so experienced in life, could be cowed by friezes of brute-headed apparitions or satisfied by files of repeated figures. He explained, something to this effect:
‘We live on the River–a line without breadth or thickness. Behind us is the Desert, which nothing can affect; wither no man goes till he is dead, (One does not use good agricultural ground for cemeteries.) Practically, then, we only move in two dimensions–up stream or down. Take away the Desert, which we don’t consider any more than a healthy man considers death, and you will see that we have no background whatever. Our world is all one straight bar of brown or green earth, and, for some months, mere sky-reflecting water that wipes out everything You have only to look at the Colossi to realise how enormously and extravagantly man and his works must scale in such a country. Remember too, that our crops are sure, and our life is very, very easy. Above all, we have no neighbours That is to say, we must give out, for we cannot take in. Now, I put it to you, what is left for a priest with imagination, except to develop ritual and multiply gods on friezes? Unlimited leisure, limited space of two dimensions, divided by the hypnotising line of the River, and bounded by visible, unalterable death–must, _ipso facto_—-‘
‘Even so,’ I interrupted. ‘I do not comprehend your Gods–your direct worship of beasts, for instance?’
‘You prefer the indirect? The worship of Humanity with a capital H? My Gods, or what I saw in them, contented me.’
‘What did you see in your Gods as affecting belief and conduct?’
‘You know the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx?’
‘No,’ I murmured. ‘What is it?’
‘”All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells,”‘ he replied. With that I had to be content, for the passage ended in solid rock.
There were other tombs in the valley, but the owners were dumb, except one Pharaoh, who from the highest motives had broken with the creeds and instincts of his country, and so had all but wrecked it. One of his discoveries was an artist, who saw men not on one plane but modelled full or three-quarter face, with limbs suited to their loads and postures. His vividly realised stuff leaped to the eye out of the acreage of low-relief in the old convention, and I applauded as a properly brought-up tourist should.
‘Mine was a fatal mistake,’ Pharaoh Ahkenaton sighed in my ear,’ I mistook the conventions of life for the realities.’
‘Ah, those soul-crippling conventions!’ I cried.
‘You mistake _me_,’ he answered more stiffly. ‘I was so sure of their reality that I thought that they were really lies, whereas they were only invented to cover the raw facts of life.’
‘Ah, those raw facts of life!’ I cried, still louder; for it is not often that one has a chance of impressing a Pharaoh.’ We must face them with open eyes and an open mind! Did _you_?’
‘I had no opportunity of avoiding them,’ he replied. ‘I broke every convention in my land.’
‘Oh, noble! And what happened?’
‘What happens when you strip the cover off a hornet’s nest? The raw fact of life is that mankind is just a little lower than the angels, and the conventions are based on that fact in order that men may become angels. But if you begin, as I did, by the convention that men are angels they will assuredly become bigger beasts than ever.’
‘That,’ I said firmly, ‘is altogether out-of-date. You should have brought a larger mentality, a more vital uplift, and–er–all that sort of thing, to bear on–all that sort of thing, you know.’
‘I did,’ said Ahkenaton gloomily. ‘It broke me!’ And he, too, went dumb among the ruins.
There is a valley of rocks and stones in every shade of red and brown, called the Valley of the Kings, where a little oil-engine coughs behind its hand all day long, grinding electricity to light the faces of dead Pharaohs a hundred feet underground. All down the valley, during the tourist season, stand char-a-bancs and donkeys and sand-carts, with here and there exhausted couples who have dropped out of the processions and glisten and fan themselves in some scrap of shade. Along the sides of the valley are the tombs of the kings neatly numbered, as it might be mining adits with concrete steps leading up to them, and iron grilles that lock of nights, and doorkeepers of the Department of Antiquities demanding the proper tickets. One enters, and from deeps below deeps hears the voices of dragomans booming through the names and titles of the illustrious and thrice-puissant dead. Rock-cut steps go down into hot, still darkness, passages-twist and are led over blind pits which, men say, the wise builders childishly hoped would be taken for the real tombs by thieves to come. Up and down these alley-ways clatter all the races of Europe with a solid backing of the United States. Their footsteps are suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind. They peer up at the blazoned ceilings, stoop down to the minutely decorated walls, crane and follow the sombre splendours of a cornice, draw in their breaths and climb up again to the fierce sunshine to re-dive into the next adit on their programme. What they think proper to say, they say aloud–and some of it is very interesting. What they feel you can guess from a certain haste in their movements–something between the shrinking modesty of a man under fire and the Hadn’t-we-better-be-getting-on attitude of visitors to a mine. After all, it is not natural for man to go underground except for business or for the last time. He is conscious of the weight of mother-earth overhead, and when to her expectant bulk is added the whole beaked, horned, winged, and crowned hierarchy of a lost faith flaming at every turn of his eye, he naturally wishes to move away. Even the sight of a very great king indeed, sarcophagused under electric light in a hall full of most fortifying pictures, does not hold him too long.
Some men assert that the crypt of St. Peter’s, with only nineteen centuries bearing down on the groining, and the tombs of early popes and kings all about, is more impressive than the Valley of the Kings because it explains how and out of what an existing creed grew. But the Valley of the Kings explains nothing except that most terrible line in _Macbeth_:
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Earth opens her dry lips and says it.
In one of the tombs there is a little chamber whose ceiling, probably because of a fault in the rock, could not be smoothed off like the others. So the decorator, very cunningly, covered it with a closely designed cloth-pattern–just such a chintz-like piece of stuff as, in real life, one would use to underhang a rough roof with. He did it perfectly, down there in the dark, and went his way. Thousands of years later, there was born a man of my acquaintance who, for good and sufficient reason, had an almost insane horror of anything in the nature of a ceiling-cloth. He used to make excuses for not going into the dry goods shops at Christmas, when hastily enlarged annexes are hidden, roof and sides, with embroideries. Perhaps a snake or a lizard had dropped on his mother from the roof before he was born; perhaps it was the memory of some hideous fever-bout in a tent. At any rate, that man’s idea of The Torment was a hot, crowded underground room, underhung with patterned cloths. Once in his life at a city in the far north, where he had to make a speech, he met that perfect combination. They led him up and down narrow, crowded, steam-heated passages, till they planted him at last in a room without visible windows (by which he knew he was, underground), and directly beneath a warm-patterned ceiling-cloth–rather like a tent-lining. And there he had to say his say, while panic terror sat in his throat. The second time was in the Valley of the Kings, where very similar passages, crowded with people, led him into a room cut of rock, fathoms underground, with what looked like a sagging chintz cloth not three feet above his head. The man I’d like to catch,’ he said when he came outside again, ‘is that decorator-man. D’you suppose he meant to produce that effect?’
Every man has his private terrors, other than those of his own conscience. From what I saw in the Valley of the Kings, the Egyptians seem to have known this some time ago. They certainly have impressed it on most unexpected people. I heard two voices down a passage talking together as follows:
_She_. I guess we weren’t ever meant to see these old tombs from inside, anyway.
_He_. How so?
_She_. For one thing, they believe so hard in being dead. Of course, their outlook on spiritual things wasn’t as broad as ours.
_He_. Well, there’s no danger of _our_ being led away by it. Did you buy that alleged scarab off the dragoman this morning?
VI
THE FACE OF THE DESERT
Going up the Nile is like running the gauntlet before Eternity. Till one has seen it, one does not realise the amazing thinness of that little damp trickle of life that steals along undefeated through the jaws of established death. A rifle-shot would cover the widest limits of cultivation, a bow-shot would reach the narrower. Once beyond them a man may carry his next drink with him till he reaches Cape Blanco on the west (where he may signal for one from a passing Union Castle boat) or the Karachi Club on the east. Say four thousand dry miles to the left hand and three thousand to the right.
The weight of the Desert is on one, every day and every hour. At morning, when the cavalcade tramps along in the rear of the tulip-like dragoman, She says: ‘I am here—-just beyond that ridge of pink sand that you are admiring. Come along, pretty gentleman, and I’ll tell you your fortune.’ But the dragoman says very clearly: ‘Please, sar, do not separate yourself at _all_ from the main body,’ which, the Desert knows well, you had no thought of doing. At noon, when the stewards rummage out lunch-drinks from the dewy ice-chest, the Desert whines louder than the well-wheels on the bank: ‘I am here, only a quarter of a mile away. For mercy’s sake, pretty gentleman, spare a mouthful of that prickly whisky-and-soda you are lifting to your lips. There’s a white man a few hundred miles off, dying on my lap of thirst–thirst that you cure with a rag dipped in lukewarm water while you hold him down with the one hand, and he thinks he is cursing you aloud, but he isn’t, because his tongue is outside his mouth and he can’t get it back. Thank _you_, my noble captain!’ For naturally one tips half the drink over the rail with the ancient prayer: ‘May it reach him who needs it,’ and turns one’s back on the pulsing ridges and fluid horizons that are beginning their mid-day mirage-dance.
At evening the Desert obtrudes again–tricked out as a Nautch girl in veils of purple, saffron, gold-tinsel, and grass-green. She postures shamelessly before the delighted tourists with woven skeins of homeward-flying pelicans, fringes of wild duck, black spotted on crimson, and cheap jewellery of opal clouds. ‘Notice Me!’ She cries, like any other worthless woman. ‘Admire the play of My mobile features–the revelations of My multi-coloured soul! Observe My allurements and potentialities. Thrill while I stir you!’ So She floats through all Her changes and retires upstage into the arms of the dusk. But at midnight She drops all pretence and bears down in Her natural shape, which depends upon the conscience of the beholder and his distance from the next white man.
You will observe in the _Benedicite Omnia Opera_ that the Desert is the sole thing not enjoined to ‘bless the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever.’ This is because when our illustrious father, the Lord Adam, and his august consort, the Lady Eve, were expelled from Eden, Eblis the Accursed, fearful lest mankind should return ultimately to the favour of Allah, set himself to burn and lay waste all the lands east and west of Eden.
Oddly enough, the Garden of Eden is almost the exact centre of all the world’s deserts, counting from Gobi to Timbuctoo; and all that land _qua_ land is ‘dismissed from the mercy of God.’ Those who use it do so at their own risk. Consequently the Desert produces her own type of man exactly as the sea does. I was fortunate enough to meet one sample, aged perhaps twenty-five. His work took him along the edge of the Red Sea, where men on swift camels come to smuggle hashish, and sometimes guns, from dhows that put in to any convenient beach. These smugglers must be chased on still swifter camels, and since the wells are few and known, the game is to get ahead of them and occupy their drinking-places.
But they may skip a well or so, and do several days’ march in one. Then their pursuer must take e’en greater risks and make crueller marches that the Law may be upheld. The one thing in the Law’s favour is that _hashish_ smells abominably–worse than a heated camel–so, when they range alongside, no time is lost in listening to lies. It was not told to me how they navigate themselves across the broken wastes, or by what arts they keep alive in the dust-storms and heat. That was taken for granted, and the man who took it so considered himself the most commonplace of mortals. He was deeply moved by the account of a new aerial route which the French are laying out somewhere in the Sahara over a waterless stretch of four hundred miles, where if the aeroplane is disabled between stations the pilot will most likely die and dry up beside it. To do the Desert justice, she rarely bothers to wipe out evidence of a kill. There are places in the Desert, men say, where even now you come across the dead of old battles, all as light as last year’s wasps’ nests, laid down in swaths or strung out in flight, with, here and there, the little sparkling lines of the emptied cartridge-cases that dropped them.
There are valleys and ravines that the craziest smugglers do not care to refuge in at certain times of the year; as there are rest-houses where one’s native servants will not stay because they are challenged on their way to the kitchen by sentries of old Soudanese regiments which have long gone over to Paradise. And of voices and warnings and outcries behind rocks there is no end. These last arise from the fact that men very rarely live in a spot so utterly still that they can hear the murmuring race of the blood over their own ear-drums. Neither ship, prairie, nor forest gives that silence. I went out to find it once, when our steamer tied up and the rest of them had gone to see a sight, but I never dared venture more than a mile from our funnel-smoke. At that point I came upon a hill honey-combed with graves that held a multitude of paper-white skulls, all grinning cheerfully like ambassadors of the Desert. But I did not accept their invitation. They had told me that all the little devils learn to draw in the Desert, which explains the elaborate and purposeless detail that fills it. None but devils could think of etching every rock outcrop with wind-lines, or skinning it down to its glistening nerves with sand-blasts; of arranging hills in the likeness of pyramids and sphinxes and wrecked town-suburbs; of covering the space of half an English county with sepia studies of interlacing and recrossing ravines, dongas, and nullahs, each an exposition of much too clever perspective; and of wiping out the half-finished work with a wash of sand in three tints, only to pick it up again in silver-point on the horizon’s edge. This they do in order to make lost travellers think they can recognise landmarks and run about identifying them till the madness comes. The Desert is all devil-device–as you might say ‘blasted cleverness’–crammed with futile works, always promising something fresh round the next corner, always leading out through heaped decoration and over-insistent design into equal barrenness.
There was a morning of mornings when we lay opposite the rock-hewn Temple of Abu Simbel, where four great figures, each sixty feet high, sit with their hands on their knees waiting for Judgment Day. At their feet is a little breadth of blue-green crop; they seem to hold back all the weight of the Desert behind them, which, none the less, lips over at one side in a cataract of vividest orange sand. The tourist is recommended to see the sunrise here, either from within the temple where it falls on a certain altar erected by Rameses in his own honour, or from without where another Power takes charge.
The stars had paled when we began our watch; the river birds were just whispering over their toilettes in the uncertain purplish light. Then the river dimmered up like pewter; the line of the ridge behind the Temple showed itself against a milkiness in the sky; one felt rather than saw that there were four figures in the pit of gloom below it. These blocked themselves out, huge enough, but without any special terror, while the glorious ritual of the Eastern dawn went forward. Some reed of the bank revealed itself by reflection, black on silver; arched wings flapped and jarred the still water to splintered glass; the desert ridge turned to topaz, and the four figures stood clear, yet without shadowing, from their background. The stronger light flooded them red from head to foot, and they became alive–as horridly and tensely yet blindly alive as pinioned men in the death-chair before the current is switched on. One felt that if by any miracle the dawn could be delayed a second longer, they would tear themselves free, and leap forth to heaven knows what sort of vengeance. But that instant the full sun pinned them in their places–nothing more than statues slashed with light and shadow–and another day got to work.
A few yards to the left of the great images, close to the statue of an Egyptian princess, whose face was the very face of ‘She,’ there was a marble slab over the grave of an English officer killed in a fight against dervishes nearly a generation ago.
From Abu Simbel to Wady Halfa the river, escaped from the domination of the Pharaohs, begins to talk about dead white men. Thirty years ago, young English officers in India lied and intrigued furiously that they might be attached to expeditions whose bases were sometimes at Suakim, sometimes quite in the desert air, but all of whose deeds are now quite forgotten. Occasionally the dragoman, waving a smooth hand east or south-easterly, will speak of some fight. Then every one murmurs: ‘Oh yes. That was Gordon, of course,’ or ‘Was that before or after Omdurman?’ But the river is much more precise. As the boat quarters the falling stream like a puzzled hound, all the old names spurt up again under the paddle-wheels–‘Hicks’ army–Val Baker–El Teb–Tokar–Tamai–Tamanieb and Osman Digna!’ Her head swings round for another slant: ‘_We cannot land English or Indian troops: if consulted, recommend abandonment of the Soudan within certain limits._’ That was my Lord Granville chirruping to the advisers of His Highness the Khedive, and the sentence comes back as crisp as when it first shocked one in ’84. Next–here is a long reach between flooded palm trees–next, of course, comes Gordon–and a delightfully mad Irish war correspondent who was locked up with him in Khartoum. Gordon–Eighty-four–Eighty-five–the Suakim-Berber Railway really begun and quite as really abandoned. Korti–Abu Klea–the Desert Column–a steamer called the _Safieh_ not the _Condor_, which rescued two other steamers wrecked on their way back from a Khartoum in the red hands of the Mahdi of those days. Then–the smooth glide over deep water continues–another Suakim expedition with a great deal of Osman Digna and renewed attempts to build the Suakim-Berber Railway. ‘Hashin,’ say the paddle-wheels, slowing all of a sudden–‘MacNeill’s Zareba–the 15th Sikhs and another native regiment–Osman Digna in great pride and power, and Wady Halfa a frontier town. Tamai, once more; another siege of Suakim: Gemaiza; Handub; Trinkitat, and Tokar–1887.’
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. So we sat still and let the stars move, as men must do when they meet this kind of train.
Presently I asked: ‘What is the name of the next station out from here?’
‘Station Number One,’ said a ghost.
‘And the next?’
‘Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I think.’
‘And wasn’t it worth while to name even _one_ of these stations from some man, living or dead, who had something to do with making the line?’
‘Well, they didn’t, anyhow,’ said another ghost. ‘I suppose they didn’t think it worth while. Why? What do _you_ think?’
‘I think, I replied, ‘it is the sort of snobbery that nations go to Hades for.’
Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance off; the economic electrics were turned up, the ghosts vanished, the dragomans of the various steamers flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their passengers who had booked passages in the Cook boats, and the Khartoum train decanted a joyous collection of folk, all decorated with horns, hoofs, skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had been buying at Omdurman. And when the porters laid hold upon their bristling bundles, it was like MacNeill’s Zareba without the camels.
Two young men in tarboushes were the only people who had no part in the riot. Said one of them to the other:
‘Hullo?’
Said the other: ‘Hullo!’
They grunted together for a while. Then one pleasantly:
‘Oh, I’m sorry for _that_! I thought I was going to have you under me for a bit. Then you’ll use the rest-house there?’
‘I suppose so,’ said the other. ‘Do you happen to know if the roof’s on?’
Here a woman wailed aloud for her dervish spear which had gone adrift, and I shall never know, except from the back pages of the Soudan Almanack, what state that rest-house there is in.
The Soudan Administration, by the little I heard, is a queer service. It extends itself in silence from the edges of Abyssinia to the swamps of the Equator at an average pressure of one white man to several thousand square miles. It legislates according to the custom of the tribe where possible, and on the common sense of the moment when there is no precedent. It is recruited almost wholly from the army, armed chiefly with binoculars, and enjoys a death-rate a little lower than its own reputation. It is said to be the only service in which a man taking leave is explicitly recommended to get out of the country and rest himself that he may return the more fit to his job. A high standard of intelligence is required, and lapses are not overlooked. For instance, one man on leave in London took the wrong train from Boulogne, and instead of going to Paris, which, of course, he had intended, found himself at a station called Kirk Kilissie or Adrianople West, where he stayed for some weeks. It was a mistake that might have happened to any one on a dark night after a stormy passage, but the authorities would not believe it, and when I left Egypt were busily engaged in boiling him in hot oil. They are grossly respectable in the Soudan now.
Long and long ago, before even the Philippines were taken, a friend of mine was reprimanded by a British Member of Parliament, first for the sin of blood-guiltiness because he was by trade a soldier, next for murder because he had fought in great battles, and lastly, and most important, because he and his fellow-braves had saddled the British taxpayer with the expense of the Soudan. My friend explained that all the Soudan had ever cost the British taxpayer was the price of about one dozen of regulation Union Jacks–one for each province. ‘That,’ said the M.P. triumphantly, ‘is all it will ever be worth.’ He went on to justify himself, and the Soudan went on also. To-day it has taken its place as one of those accepted miracles which are worked without heat or headlines by men who do the job nearest their hand and seldom fuss about their reputations.
But less than sixteen years ago the length and breadth of it was one crazy hell of murder, torture, and lust, where every man who had a sword used it till he met a stronger and became a slave. It was–men say who remember it–a hysteria of blood and fanaticism; and precisely as an hysterical woman is called to her senses by a dash of cold water, so at the battle of Omdurman the land was reduced to sanity by applied death on such a scale as the murderers and the torturers at their most unbridled could scarcely have dreamed. In a day and a night all who had power and authority were wiped out and put under till, as the old song says, no chief remained to ask after any follower. They had all charged into Paradise. The people who were left looked for renewed massacres of the sort they had been accustomed to, and when these did not come, they said helplessly: ‘We have nothing. We are nothing. Will you sell us into slavery among the Egyptians?’ The men who remember the old days of the Reconstruction–which deserves an epic of its own–say that there was nothing left to build on, not even wreckage. Knowledge, decency, kinship, property, tide, sense of possession had all gone. The people were told they were to sit still and obey orders; and they stared and fumbled like dazed crowds after an explosion. Bit by bit, however, they were fed and watered and marshalled into some sort of order; set to tasks they never dreamed to see the end of; and, almost by physical force, pushed and hauled along the ways of mere life. They came to understand presently that they might reap what they had sown, and that man, even a woman, might walk for a day’s journey with two goats and a native bedstead and live undespoiled. But they had to be taught kindergarten-fashion.
And little by little, as they realised that the new order was sure and that their ancient oppressors were quite dead, there returned not only cultivators, craftsmen, and artisans, but outlandish men of war, scarred with old wounds and the generous dimples that the Martini-Henry bullet used to deal–fighting men on the lookout for new employ. They would hang about, first on one leg, then on the other, proud or uneasily friendly, till some white officer circulated near by. And at his fourth or fifth passing, brown and white having approved each other by eye, the talk–so men say–would run something like this:
OFFICER (_with air of sudden discovery_). Oh, you by the hut, there, what is your business?
WARRIOR (_at ‘attention’ complicated by attempt to salute_). I am So-and-So, son of So-and-So, from such and such a place.
OFFICER. I hear. And …?
WARRIOR (_repeating salute_). And a fighting man also.
OFFICER (_impersonally to horizon_). But they _all_ say that nowadays.
WARRIOR (_very loudly_). But there is a man in one of your battalions who can testify to it. He is the grandson of my father’s uncle.
OFFICER (_confidentially to his boots_). Hell is _quite_ full of such grandsons of just such father’s uncles; and how do I know if Private So-and-So speaks the truth about his family? (_Makes to go._)
WARRIOR (_swiftly removing necessary garments_). Perhaps. But _these_ don’t lie. Look! I got this ten, twelve years ago when I was quite a lad, close to the old Border, Yes, Halfa. It was a true Snider bullet. Feel it! This little one on the leg I got at the big fight that finished it all last year. But I am not lame (_violent leg-exercise_), not in the least lame. See! I run. I jump. I kick. Praised be Allah!
OFFICER. Praised be Allah! And then?
WARRIOR (_coquettishly_). Then, I shoot. I am not a common spear-man. (_Lapse into English._) Yeh, dam goo’ shot! (_pumps lever of imaginary Martini_).
OFFICER (_unmoved_). I see. And then?
WARRIOR (_indignantly_). _I_ am come here–after many days’ marching. (_Change to childlike wheedle_.) Are _all_ the regiments full?
At this point the relative, in uniform, generally discovered himself, and if the officer liked the cut of his jib, another ‘old Mahdi’s man’ would be added to the machine that made itself as it rolled along. They dealt with situations in those days by the unclouded light of reason and a certain high and holy audacity.
There is a tale of two Sheikhs shortly after the Reconstruction began. One of them, Abdullah of the River, prudent and the son of a slave-woman, professed loyalty to the English very early in the day, and used that loyalty as a cloak to lift camels from another Sheikh, Farid of the Desert, still at war with the English, but a perfect gentleman, which Abdullah was not. Naturally, Farid raided back on Abdullah’s kine, Abdullah complained to the authorities, and the Border fermented. To Farid in his desert camp with a clutch of Abdullah’s cattle round him, entered, alone and unarmed, the officer responsible for the peace of those parts. After compliments, for they had had dealings with each other before: ‘You’ve been driving Abdullah’s stock again,’ said the Englishman.
‘I should think I had!’ was the hot answer. ‘He lifts my camels and scuttles back into your territory, where he knows I can’t follow him for the life; and when I try to get a bit of my own back, he whines to you. He’s a cad–an utter cad.’
‘At any rate, he is loyal. If you’d only come in and be loyal too, you’d both be on the same footing, and then if he stole from you, he’d catch it!’
‘He’d never dare to steal except under your protection. Give him what he’d have got in the Mahdi’s time–a first-class flogging. _You_ know he deserves it!’
‘I’m afraid that isn’t allowed. You have to let me shift all those bullocks of his back again.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘Then, I shall have to ride back and collect all my men and begin war against you.’
‘But what prevents my cutting your throat where you sit?
‘For one thing, you aren’t Abdullah, and—-‘
‘There! You confess he’s a cad!’
‘And for another, the Government would only send another officer who didn’t understand your ways, and then there _would_ be war, and no one would score except Abdullah. He’d steal your camels and get credit for it.’
‘So he would, the scoundrel! This is a hard world for honest men. Now, you admit Abdullah is a cad. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you a few more things about him. He was, etc., etc. He is, etc., etc.’
‘You’re perfectly right, Sheikh, but don’t you see I can’t tell him what I think of him so long as he’s loyal and you’re out against us? Now, if _you_ come in I promise you that I’ll give Abdullah a telling-off–yes, in your presence–that will do you good to listen to.’
‘No! I won’t come in! But–I tell you what I will do. I’ll accompany you to-morrow as your guest, understand, to your camp. Then you send for Abdullah, and _if_ I judge that his fat face has been sufficiently blackened in my presence, I’ll think about coming in later.’
So it was arranged, and they slept out the rest of the night, side by side, and in the morning they gathered up and returned all Abdullah’s cattle, and in the evening, in Farid’s presence, Abdullah got the tongue-lashing of his wicked old life, and Farid of the Desert laughed and came in; and they all lived happy ever afterwards.
Somewhere or other in the nearer provinces the old heady game must be going on still, but the Soudan proper has settled to civilisation of the brick-bungalow and bougainvillea sort, and there is a huge technical college where the young men are trained to become fitters, surveyors, draftsmen, and telegraph employees at fabulous wages. In due time, they will forget how warily their fathers had to walk in the Mahdi’s time to secure even half a bellyful; then, as has happened elsewhere. They will honestly believe that they themselves originally created and since then have upheld the easy life into which they were bought at so heavy a price. Then the demand will go up for ‘extension of local government,’ ‘Soudan for the Soudanese,’ and so on till the whole cycle has to be retrodden. It is a hard law but an old one–Rome died learning it, as our western civilisation may die–that if you give any man anything that he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants your devoted enemies.
THE END