Читать книгу Belford's Magazine, Vol 2, December 1888 - Various - Страница 10

Or it ought to. But when a Christian finds himself, on that most sacred of all the Christian holidays, in a Moslem country, say in Egypt, the procuring of the wherewithal to make the prescribed good cheer becomes a matter of no small difficulty.

If the Christian be an English one, the difficulties are apt to be increased by the fact that an Englishman is nothing if not conservative.

To the average Englishman the correct celebration of Christmas means attendance at divine service, perhaps!– the regulation Christmas dinner, certainly.

Christmas means a crisp, cold day, the home bright with glowing fires – a yule-log, maybe – and flashing with the brilliant green of ivy and the crimson of holly-berries; a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding; and, to wind up with, a bowl of steaming wassail and a kiss under the mistletoe.

When an Englishman finds himself in a country where he can sit in the open air, under a blazing sun, on Christmas Day, and where neither roast-beef nor plum-pudding has any place in the domestic economy, and where the "wassail" is always drunk iced, and called by another name, and where mistletoe does not grow, the possibility presents itself that he would be obliged to accommodate himself to the situation and do without these particular features.

Not at all!

He immediately sets to work to obtain them, crying aloud, meantime, against the barbarity of a land that does not offer, at this particular season, the things that are peculiar to his own tight little island.

To the casual observer this may seem a light task that he has set himself. But it is by no means so. On every hand he is met by an almost impenetrable wall of difficulties.

The fire he cannot have, for the very simple reason that there is no chimney in the house.

The beef he can get by sending for it to England, where it has been purchased from either Northern Europe or America. But where is the great fire before which it ought to be roasted, by the aid of a "jack," and with frequent bastings at the hands of a comfortable, rosy-cheeked, red-armed woman cook, in "Merry England"?

Here, in Egypt, the only fire to be procured will be a tiny one of charcoal, one of a dozen, but each separate, like the squares on a chess-board, and not much larger. And the cook will, in all likelihood, be a wizened, yellow little man, smelling of "arrack," and much given to peculation.

He may succeed in procuring his Christmas pudding, if he, early in November, orders the ingredients for it from England, through his English grocer, and if the ladies of his household agree to compound it.

Then the dreadful question presents itself, how is it to be cooked? A Christmas pudding of fair proportions needs to be boiled from four to six hours, and during those hours it wants to be kept steadily and continuously boiling, or it becomes what the English cook calls "sad." And so do its consumers.

Now a charcoal fire is a good deal like Miss Juliet's description of lightning, "it doth cease to be, ere one can say it lightens." And no power on earth less than a file of the Khedive's soldiers would keep an Egyptian cook in his kitchen, feeding a fire, four or five hours.

Aside from the fact that he hates and despises, as a good Mussulman should, his Christian employer, and regards with horror and disgust the pudding around which cluster the hopes of this Christian family, he has a great number of little habits and customs that demand his frequent absence from the scene of his distinguished labors.

He has a "call" to the little shed at the corner of the street where "arrack" is illicitly sold by a cyclopean Arab. No sooner is this accomplished, and he slinks back to his kitchen, furtively watching the windows and wiping his treacherous mouth with the back of his dirty yellow hand, than he feels himself obliged to again rush out and indulge in a war of words with the old man who has brought the daily supply of water to the household.

This is a very dirty old man, bare as to his legs and feet, and without any toes to speak of. He is clothed in a goat-skin, as is also the water, for he carries that blessed commodity on his back, in a goat-skin that is distended like an over-fed beast, with its legs "foreshortened" and all in the air, like a "shipwrecked tea-table."

The greatly overtasked cook has scarcely had time to recover from this sally, when he feels himself called upon to again issue forth and attack the donkey-boy, a small and inoffensive child who brings him vegetables, which the patient little donkey carries in two panniers slung over his back.

After invoking upon the head of this child a string of polyglot curses, one of which is that his progeny, to the sixth generation, maybe born with their faces upside-down, he again retreats to his kitchen, gives the pudding a vicious punch and the fire a morsel of charcoal.

Soon he must go and squat in the sand at the back of the house, safe from all fear of observation, and play a game of dominoes with "Nicolo," the cook of the neighboring house.

Then he must smoke two or three cigarettes, which he deftly rolls with his dirty yellow fingers.

Is it surprising that after these manifold exertions his exhausted nature demands repose? He stretches himself in the warm white sand, and, indifferent to the sun and oblivious of the fleas, he falls into a sweet sleep.

For the pudding? Let us draw the mantle of silence over that heavy, stately ruin. When he wakes to find the ruin he has wrought, he will weep and wail and beat his breast, and call upon Allah to witness that never – not for an instant – has he left the kitchen.

And in his heart he will secretly rejoice.

The Moslem servant always secretly rejoices in the annoyances and discomfitures of his Christian employer. If that Christian employer is met by annoyance and discomfiture while attempting to keep up any custom associated with his religion, or to celebrate any Christian holiday, the Moslem servant is especially and particularly pleased.

And in this he obeys one of the laws of Mohammed, which forbids friendship or good-feeling between Moslems and either Christians or Jews.

The Moslems have a great number of holidays in their calendar, but these are nearly all fast-days.

The Arabs are a temperate, abstemious race, a race of light feeders; naturally, they have a contempt for gluttony. In the matter of food, an Egyptian would feast luxuriously for a week on the amount that an American or Englishman would consume at a single meal.

Thus the very abundance of the preparations which the Englishman makes for his Christmas dinner repels good Mussulmen.

Then, they do not celebrate the birthday of their own prophet; and the celebration, in their own country, of the day which to us is invested with so much love and reverence they consider an insult to them and to their faith, and they submit to it with an ill grace and in sullen silence.

All these things make a combination of opposing forces against which the Englishman, endeavoring to enjoy his Christmas in Egypt, struggles in vain.

So he eats his roast-beef, which is braized, and his boiled plum-pudding, which is fried; takes his kiss – if he has any sense – without mistletoe; winds up an unsatisfactory day by drinking, instead of the time-honored "wassail," a jorum of champagne punch, cooled with artificial ice; and goes grumbling to bed, with the conviction that a Christmas in Egypt is a very "brummagem" sort of Christmas.

Rose Eytinge.