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UP THE CANAL

We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo. They came in the early morning, handed us a heavy home-mail, and by sundown we were all in motion, steaming up into the heat of the Red Sea. If this is the Red Sea in midwinter, the Lord deliver us from its summer! The heat is beguiled by heavy betting as to the port of disembarkation. But as we get up towards Suez the hand of the war-lords begins to show itself in cryptic paragraphs of troop-ship orders—and the like. Marseilles is our desired haven, and next to that Southampton. But—

It sounds like stories from the land of spirits

If any man get that which he desires,

Or any merit that which he obtains.

Before lunch on the —th the African coast loomed up on the port-bow. About mid-day we were steaming over the traditionally located Israelitish crossing. Curious! the entirely unquestioning attitude of the most blasphemous trooper afloat towards the literal authenticity of Old Testament history. The Higher Criticism has, at any rate, no part with the devil-may-care soldier full of strange oaths. Apparently to a man the troops speak in quite an accepted fashion of the miraculous Israelitish triumph over the Egyptian army: the inference from which is, perhaps, that blasphemy is rather an habitual mannerism in such men than anything deliberate. But after a month's living in their midst it requires no such occasion as this discussion of Mosaic geography to tell you that.

After lunch the Arabian coast also was to be seen. The contrast between the coasts is memorable. It was a warm, grey day, and Arabia showed more delicate than we had yet seen it. The immense mountains were almost beyond sight. All the foreground was opalescent sand shot with tiny cones and ridges of rock, themselves streaked with colour as though sprinkled with the same sand. The effect of opalescence must be purely atmospheric—but it is very beautiful.

But the African coast is rugged to the water's edge. The mountains tower out of the sea; and the grey day, which drew out the iridescence of Arabia, only blackened deeper the gigantic mountains of Africa. The one is delicate pearl and amber, the other is ebony. Well justified by sight and feeling were the judgments of books upon the perfumes and delicate-bred steeds and philosophy of Arabia as over against the grimness of "Darkest Africa."

All gazing was distracted by a death on board at sunset. The body was buried under the moon at eight o'clock. Every soldier stands to attention; the engines are stopped; in the sudden silence the solemn service is read; the body is slid from the plank; the massed buglers sound the Last Post.... The engines begin again to throb and grind, and the routine, broken rudely but momentarily, resumes.

Next morning we wakened in the harbour of Suez. We lay here a day. There appeared to have been some guerilla sniping from the banks of the Canal. The troop-ship bridges were barricaded with sandbags, and all ranks warned against exposing themselves unnecessarily. A shot in the back out of the desert would be a more or less ignominious beginning, and, as an ending, unutterable!

At ten in the morning we started into the Canal. Much valuable Egyptian shore was missed by our being obliged to cross to starboard and salute a French cruiser lying in the mouth. But before we had well passed her the Arabian bank became thick with Ghurkas. War—or the rumour of war—was brought home to our bosoms by their deep and elaborate entrenchments, barbed-wire entanglements, and outworks. The Ghurkas justify, seen in the flesh, all that has been said of their physique: short, deep-chested fellows, with a grin that suggests war is their sport indeed.

On the Egyptian side the Suez suburbs stretched away in a thin strip of fertile country bearing crops and palm-groves and following the rail to Cairo—easily visible, running neck-and-neck with a half-dozen telegraph-lines. Later on, the line draws still nearer to the Canal, making a halt at each of the Canal stations. The stations, with their neat courtyards and neat French offices, and the neat and handsome red-roofed villa, break the monotony of sand-ridge. And the monotony of ejaculation from the deck is broken by a robust French voice shouting a greeting through the megaphone from the station pontoon.

The Egyptian bank is still more strongly fortified; for in addition to the entrenchments and entanglements of the other shore, the place bristles with masked-batteries. The troops here were chiefly Australian, with a sprinkling of Ghurka and of Sikh cavalry. Here and there an Indian trooper would indicate by pantomime that firing and bayoneting were in progress in the interior. But how much was histrionic fervour and how much the truth remains to be known.

The Canal is embanked with limestone as far as the Bitter Lakes, and at intervals thereafter. The Egyptian shore from the Lakes almost to Ismailia is planted with a graceful grove of fir. The controllers of the Canal evidently intend it shall be more than a commercial channel—in some sense, a place to be seen. This is essentially French.

It was evident that trouble from the Turk was expected. The strongest fortifications yet seen had been erected on the Arabian bank: much artillery, thousands of men, searchlight, and frequent outpost. Our own stern-chasers were unmasked and charged, ready in the event of game showing. Almost every hour the troops were called to attention to pass a British or French gunboat. All the warships had their guns run out and their sandbags piled.

We steamed steadily to Port Said, at a pace which, if made habitual by shipping here, would prove bad for the Canal shore and channel.

The towns of this route increase in size as we progress. Port Said spreads herself out to prodigal limits.... On a nearer approach you may see the wharves of the Arabian side lined with coal-tramps, backed in like so many vans and disgorging into barges. There is the flash of a grin, the white of an eye. The Port-side is the more interesting. The finest buildings of the city would seem to be standing along the water's edge. The business advertisements of the most cosmopolitan city in the world are emphatically English; the signs for Kodak, and Lipton's, and King George the Fourth Whisky, and the rest of them, look familiarly out.

The touch of war is to be seen at any interval along the Canal; here it is laid on with a trowel. Ghurkas are encamped in the suburb; reclining at the foot of the Admiralty steps is a submarine rusted and disfigured; ten minutes after, you pass the seaplane station; and before the ship is at rest a hydroplane has buzzed over our masthead and taken the water for a half-mile at the stern. Before dark three monoplanes and a biplane have swept in out of the southern distance and gone to roost after their scouting flight.

We were anchored within fifty yards of the heart of the city. One knew not whether to be galled by the proximity of our prison-house to the blandishments of such a city or grateful for a proximity which let us see so much of it from deck. Seen through a glass, Arab, Frenchmen, Italian, British, Yankee, Jap, and Jew justified the cosmopolitan reputation of a city mid-set on the trade-route between the East and West. The Canal here is gay as a Venetian highway and busy with flying official cutters and pleasure craft and native boats. These last swarmed to the side and drove a trade that was fierce; for the night was coming, when no man could work at that. This was the degenerate East indeed—not a cigar to be had, nothing to smoke but cheap and foul Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes, fit food for eunuchs and such effeminate rascals—for their vendors (for example) dressed in a most ambiguous skirt: you never know whether, beneath skirt and turban, you have a man or a woman!

The money-getters over the side included, here, a boat-load of serenaders and one of jugglers. The first rung the changes on their orchestra and their throats until we were as tired as they; and in consequence their gorgeous parasol, gaping for coin in the hands of the boy, gathered in some missiles whose purchasing power was not high. The jugglers were more deserving.

The same unhallowed load of black bargees as at Aden came alongside to coal and make night hideous. But they worked harder—time was short and the boss used a rope's-end, and actually "laid out" more than one who dared to stop for scraps thrown. They eked out their industry with an alleged chant, echoed in derision by the troops all over the ship. About midnight firing—or its equivalent—began to the south. At the sound of guns the Mohammedan bargees forgot their labours and the rope's-end—as did the boss, together with his authority—cast aside their baskets, and incontinently fell on their faces in the coal-dust and called in terror upon Allah.

Soon after dawn we stood out for Alexandria, and were there early the following morning. The sun rising behind the city cast into flat black Pompey's Pillar and the Port. It was hard to see, in the first blush, in this city—when the sun had risen above it—a centre of action of Pompey and of Alexander and of Cæsar. There is a curious blending of age and of what is intensely modern; and so it is more easy to conceive Sir Charles Beresford bombarding from the Condor, with Admiral Seymour pounding from behind; or Napoleon storming the citadel. From our anchorage it was with ease we saw the scene of bombardment and the converging-point from which the Egyptians fled helter-skelter to the hinterland.

Anchored in the harbour, we supposed by habit we should have to be content with externals and with conjecture as to what was to be seen in the midst of the city. But we loitered some days to disembark infantry, and leave was granted freely. One would have easily given a month's pay for a day ashore—apart from the month's pay he could spend there—had that been necessary.

Your first business after leaving the gangway is to stave-off the horde of beggars and gharry-drivers (an Australian cab-rank is put to shame here) and choose one of the latter's vehicles approximately respectable. It takes ten minutes' brisk driving to get you well out of the labyrinth of wharves, docks, and dhows. You emerge by one of seven dock-gates, vigilated by native police, into the Arab quarter, by which alone approach to the city proper is possible. Cook's tourists drive hurriedly through this region, and protect their eyes and noses with the daily newspaper. The wise man knows that if he is to see Alexandria he will dismiss the gharry and walk—and walk slowly—through the native-quarter. In fact, he will care not a damn whether he ever gets to imposing French and English residential quarters or not....

So, in your wonder at the utter strangeness of everything you overpay the driver some five piastres and begin to thread your way over the cobbles. All building is of stone, with a facing of cement, which once was bright-coloured, but has faded into faint blues and browns and greys; and if you look up and along the street of crumbling, flat-faced upper storeys broken by tiny balconies, you feel intensely the gentle irregularity and the mass of mellow colour. The one and the other is never seen in Australia, with our new shining-painted angularities of hardwood and bright nails and eaves and gables and sharp-sloping roofs. A gentle irregularity, in a street where boards thrust out and planks give way and vulgarly project themselves, where neither roofs nor fronts are flat, is unknown in our country.

What Mr. Wells calls "the inundating flood of babies" ebbs and flows in the streets. The Arab women, bare-legged, slovenly of gait, broad of person, with swaying, unstable bust, move up and down or sit in the doorways, or lounge and haggle over a purchase. Every hovel in the bazaars, with its low door and dark recesses, sells or makes something, and the Arab quarter is a succession of bazaars. The artificers squat at their work in brass or clay or fabric or gold; the greybeards sit at the doors with hubble-bubble and dream through the day in a state of coma. Fruits and dates, sweets and pastry, and Eastern culinary products that defy nomenclature by the Australian, are piled in an Eastern profusion. Sweets and pastry abound in excess and are curiously cheap. Toffee is sold from stands at every street-corner, and the quantity you might carry off for sixpence would be embarrassing. Pastry is made here of a flavour and lightness unexcelled by any English housewife. Sit at an open restaurant, call for a light lunch, and you will have a plate heaped with the most delicious meat and spice pastry and sugared fruits, for something less than the price of a street-stall pie in Australia, and with a glass of sherbet thrown in. The fineness of the fabrics sold (amongst bales of Manchester rubbish) will draw the better class of Egyptian woman into the bazaars of this east-end; they are beautiful in rich black silk from head to toe, with a delicate white yashmak; they have a regularity of feature and a complexion and a beauty of eye and of gait to make you look again. Nothing is lost to them by the setting through which they glide: the ragged bargainers, the sluttishness of the women, the unmitigated dirt of earth and asses and children and tethered goats, and water-carriers with their greasy swine-skins filled and shining. They offer an analogy to the stately mosque and minaret which lifts its graceful head above the squalid erections of the poor. And as futilely might the stranger pry into those features with his free curiosity as attempt an entrance to the Mosque unattended.

Progress is slow towards the Square. Not the interest of the scene alone invites you to linger: the whole atmosphere is one of lounge. Everyone moves at a lounging pace; those not in motion lounge; there are periodical cafés where the men lounge in the fumes of smoke and native spirits by the half-day together. No one hurries. Business seems rather a hobby and an incident than the earnest, insistent thing it is in England. The advantage surely lies with the Arab; he finds time to live and contemplate and get to know something of himself. God help the American! Better, perhaps, to spend the evening of your life with your chin on your knees and your hubble-bubble adjacent, looking out on the life before you, and within upon your own, than boast yourself still keen in the steel trade; that your features are "mobile and alert," though your head is grey, whereas your contemporaries are "failing." ...

At the end of a half-day you'll know your proximity to the Centre by the uprising of "respectable" cafés and imposing cigarette-manufactories and of hotels. And you come into the Square overlooked by the noble statue of the noble Mahomet Aly—every ounce a soldier.

Wide and well-built streets lead away into the regions of high-class trade and residence. You had best take a gharry here. There are two extreme classes amongst tourists—the thoroughgoing Cook's sight-seer who works exclusively by the vehicle and the book, and the tourist who steadily refuses to "do" the stock places. Each is at fault if he is inflexible: the former in the Arab quarter, the latter when he emerges from it. For in a city such as Alexandria the visitor who declines to see the spots relict of the ancient history of this world is clearly an obdurate fool with a strange topsy-turvey-dom of values. Let him take a gharry and a book in his hand when the time is ripe; let him be free with his piastres when Pompey's Pillar stands over the catacombs of the city. The Forts of Cæsar and of Napoleon watch over the sea. He may stand upon the ground where was the library of Alexandria and where Euclid reasoned over his geometrical figures in the sand. Here Hypatia suffered martyrdom and Cleopatra held her court and died in her palace. On the northern horn of the harbour stood the great Beacon of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders.

So you get your vehicle and a chattering guide....

On the way back to ship the Park and the Nouzha Gardens are a delicious sight after the aridity of the desert.... The gharry is dismissed on re-entering the Arab quarter; it would be a sad waste of opportunity to drive....

We climbed the gangway bearing much fruit and dirt, and very much late for dinner. And after mess the boat-deck and the pipes and our purchases in tobacco and our ventures in cigars—and the day all over again.