UNDER THE JACARANDAS
Whoso hath not seen Cairo hath not seen the world.
The Arabian Nights. The Twenty-eighth Night.
IN Port Said we had to pass through the Customs, and I had several books and letters that had to be read, but a kind officer read them in very few seconds. And then a man with a motor found us and offered to take Mr. Harrison and us to Cairo. We were ordinary fares to him, but to us his car was a return to luxury, and we seemed to change as we entered it our status of refugee. Then the bargaining began, which is usual in Egypt, but as we were sharing the car with Austen Harrison, and had to consult each other, we were at a disadvantage in a contest with one master mind. We were soon agreed over the pounds and shillings, but the argument about the pence seemed to be without any promise of ending; and it was no use conceding one small point, because innumerable new ones appeared, to take its place. Then Austen Harrison asked me my opinion about a piastre or so and I said, “I am so angry, I am going to get out”: the driver took one careful look at me, decided that my wrath was indeed genuine, and off we started. At the other end of the journey the bargaining started again; but that did not matter; we were in Cairo then, in the luxury we had not known for eight days. We went along the canal all the way on our left, and here and there on our right were a few very small palm-trees: the rest was desert. Soon we saw a few British soldiers running. They ran from the right of the road to sandbagged shelters by the canal, where they stopped. A glance at their faces did not show what had alarmed them: it was nothing from the air, for they were not looking up: a ship was coming along the canal from the south, but it was a very pacific one and they were not looking at it, but were standing behind their sandbags, sheltered up to the waist, with head and eyes straight to the front. Presently we saw another group of soldiers in similar panic, who did the same thing. The third time it happened I realized that what had so alarmed them must have been our car, which was presumably large enough to have held a general, and the men who had been watching from the right side of the road in such shade as that part of Egypt provided, but unprotected by the sandbags, fled to the sandbags that ought to have been protecting them, as soon as a car was observed which might have concealed a general.
After parting from Austen Harrison my wife and I went first to the British Institute, where we were kindly given two memorable cups of tea late in the evening, and drove on to Mena House Hotel in the calm of the edge of the desert. There we dined and went to bed. I need not tell the reader what beds are like, for most of my readers will know that now; but five years ago it was very few that knew the comfort of a bed, for no one can know that who has not come to it in boots that he has worn for a week. Now we took off those boots, and we had a bath. And not only did we have baths, but we rang the bell and said, “This water is cold. Kindly have it heated up.” And this was soon done for us. It was only afterwards that we found out that the fires that heated all the baths in the hotel were let out every evening, and realized that the manager, with a generosity worthy of the Good Samaritan, must have allowed the whole of the bathwater in the hotel to be heated up to give a couple of hot baths to two tired travellers.
My wife records in her diary next day that we had a “blessed rest,” and the following day that we walked to the Pyramids, but were still feeling rather stiff. This I do not remember, nor do I know what made us stiff, but my wife suggests that it was the sleeping accommodation. On this day my wife was kindly given a lift into Cairo by Lady Needham, with whom we had previously travelled all the way from Glasgow to Cairo, and she records in her diary that she bought a few things. Of course we continually met fellow-refugees, now even more changed than the captain’s dog. Indeed the difference between a refugee (with or without a lifebelt) in the hollow of a tarpaulin over a heap of baggage rising from refuse-covered decks, and a lady fashionably dressed in Cairo, is something that should be seen to be believed. The next day was Sunday, and we went to the Cathedral, again in Lady Needham’s car, and on the way a lorry passed us with six soldiers in it, who waved to us, and we recognized the hussars with whose help we had come from Greece. Later Sir Robert Greg sent a car for us and took us to see the glory of the jacaranda, now in full bloom; and much other hospitality we enjoyed in Cairo, and yet it was not quite the Cairo that we had known, but a Cairo with a curse over it. The curse was the khamseen, which at this time of the year blows every now and then, like the irregular breath of some devil dwelling in the Sahara. Sometimes we had fairly cool days with the temperature not over a hundred, and we used to dine by little tables in the starlight beside the swimming-bath, but when the khamseen was blowing it was impossible to dine there, and we had to stay in the house. Opening the window then was like opening an oven door. We saw the Sedgwicks and the Coutroubises and Irvine and Lyell and Austen Harrison and others, and the Baileys arrived from Copais, having escaped in another ship; but, though they had £70,000 worth of cotton there, they got no longer warning than we did, and only just had time to put a match to the cotton and come away. And we had an interesting talk with Mr and Mrs. Delaney, who owned the Mena House Hotel, which off and on I had known for so long. And then one day among so many uniforms I saw a girl wearing a blue badge on her sleeve with a white springbok prancing upon it underneath Southern stars. So I greeted her, and we soon got in touch again with Miss Wardrop and Miss Niel, two of my old antagonists at chess on the Arundel Castle, who were living somewhere near in the desert, and later we had lunch with Mrs. Newell, who now had a flat in Cairo. We continually met people from Greece, and it was interesting to compare notes with some who had got away in other ships, some of which had been sunk, and we heard the terrible story of the Hellas, a hospital ship that had been sunk in the Piraeus either before or after we left it. And we tracked down our six hussars in their camp, quite close, in the desert. One curious thing I have noticed about the desert wherever I have met it, whether in Algeria in time of peace or in Egypt in time of war, is the way that roads run out into it, which the desert, with a vast tolerance, does nothing to harm, and yet they appear there as faintly as a lighted match held up to the sun, as though the Sahara had a huge quiet scorn for all the ways of man. We asked the six men to tea in the garden of the hotel; and one day they came, and all went to the swimming-bath afterwards. It was then, as I saw all six going into the water from the high plank like seals in the Zoo, that I knew for what qualification they had been chosen to come with us on our Mediterranean cruise.
One day as I was sitting in the shade outside the hotel, three soldiers came up, and one of them asked me with a very innocent expression if I could tell him the price of a glass of beer. I asked him where they came from; and they said Tobruk. As Tobruk was at that time besieged, and I had never before met soldiers on leave from a siege and did not think history recorded any, I said that in that case I thought beer cost nothing. So we had some glasses of iced beer and a certain amount of talk, and then some more glasses of beer. How Kipling would have rejoiced in such an opportunity, and what tales of Tobruk he would have passed on to us!
We began to hear rumours of our luggage, which had been taken to the legation, and which we believed had had that privileged journey with the legation staff once mentioned to me in London; but that ship had gone down. We were delighted about this time by the quaint journey of Hess and, curiously enough, also about this time I came across my friend Peter Fleming, who had written an account of that journey, being ahead of the fact, as art so often is, only he had made the mistake saying the Fuehrer instead of the Deputy Fuehrer, though correct in most other details.
We had a comfortable room, with a lovely eucalyptus tree outside, all in blossom, and beyond that the desert and the Great Pyramid. Round the electric lights the hornets arranged themselves decoratively inside the shades with all their heads turned inward. There was a barely discernible difference between the voice of the sirens in Greece and those of our own sirens; but in Egypt they had a different cry altogether, and the one outside our window, on the extremely rare occasions on which it was heard, sounded like a new species. And it cried in vain, for no bombs dropped within hearing.
One day we were delighted to see Colonel Blunt coming up the steps of the hotel. We had last seen him strolling by the seaside on the day we left the Piraeus, and had often wondered how he had fared.
Egypt was then a Golconda of golden stories: nobody got there at that time without some story of adventure, which many did not trouble to tell, because such tales were too common. And there were the ancient wonders of Egypt lying all round us, so that we could glance back over six thousand years of history, or watch the frantic course of the history of today. And yet those tales we heard, and what we ourselves saw, were not history; they were only the material of history, what bricks are to the architect: the architect has yet to come, and to see that all these things are gathered into their places, to make a strange and wonderful edifice, at which those of other ages will look, as travellers look at the pyramids, perhaps cursorily, with their interest mainly given to other things; but they will look.
Meanwhile the khamseen blew, and one’s own interest in anything was not so alert as it should have been to estimate the splendour either of present or past.