AMONG THE BEETLES
ONE story comes back now to my memory, which one of the three soldiers told me over their iced beer. I don’t know if it is true, but it had a very genuine ring about it. The Gurkhas, he said, when they got within twenty yards of the Germans, used to throw away their rifles. Then, he said, the Germans thought they had got them. But there still remained the kukris, and it was evidently with those that the Gurkhas preferred to do their work, which according to my informant they did very effectively.
One night, to return to our own small doings, we dined with Prince George Lutfallah and his brother and sister at the Gezira Palace; and I remember his kindness in saying that the whole party would dine in day clothes, for he must have found out that our luggage consisted of what, besides my two hats, we had been able to carry in our hands, and so the whole party dressed down to us, which looked inappropriate in those fine rooms, and yet was a great hospitality. And later I was introduced to Dr. Reisner and had tea in his house, which was another delightful experience. His house was built of mud, and a certain amount of reed to make it stick together, and stood on the sand looking straight across it at its immediate neighbour, the third pyramid. There was a great charm about Dr. Reisner which made all his friends devoted to him, and wherever there is a central attraction like that, no parties are ever dull. There he and his secretary, Miss Perkins, who presided over the tea-table, entertained all kinds of people. And some charm that was over that mud house so blended them that I never saw anybody who felt out of it there, or who did not greatly enjoy those tea-parties. If I say Dr. Reisner was probably the greatest authority on Egyptology then living in Egypt and that several of his guests were private soldiers, and that he was paralysed and unable to speak, I shall hardly be believed. But his learning was no barrier to our less instructed minds, and somehow his charm shone through his affliction and the impending shadow of death; and the deep interest he took in the section of life he had chosen, six thousand years of it, that is to say, in the valley of the Nile, and the great interest that all his friends took in him, still haunted that house that stood before the doorway of the last home of Menkara. To the left like a mountain rose the second pyramid, and one day while I was there some young mountaineer in khaki went to the top of it, a very considerable feat.
We went again, with Austen Harrison and others, to the Bayt el Kredlia, the lovely house of Major Gayer Anderson, and sat there for a while, waiting for the moon to rise; and when it rose we went to the Mosque of Ibn Toulun and walked round it in the light that is always magical, the glow of the full moon. Through narrow streets enchanted by that light we returned to the Bayt el Kredlia and had supper at a low table of alabaster with old Turkish silver upon it. In Indian palaces I had never seen the pure East, for there amongst Oriental treasures one might meet with yule-logs of iron and an electric fire; but at the Bayt el Kredlia Sheharazade would have found nothing strange, though of course her talk there might have been a little flat, without the stimulant of impending death in the morning.
On June 16th we left this land of ancient wonders, which was so full now of tales of modern adventure. I remember the curving shape of white waves seen from the train, and their thin delicate crests about to fall in thunder; but they never did fall, for they were all of sand, but spun by the wind as delicately as it spins water. My wife recalls that we had breakfast at a quarter past six and got on board our transport at a quarter to four and that, though we had some green figs with us, we were rather hungry and thirsty when we asked for lunch, but a Chinese steward said there could be no lunch, because we were late for it. Curious that we should have noticed things like this on board the big transport, while nobody would have dreamed of complaining in our dear Warzawa. It had been planned that I should go to Turkey, and my wife had had the excellent idea that winter in South Africa would be better to wait in than midsummer in Egypt, and had had the energy to make the suggestion, and energy is not very abundant in Egypt in June. And so we were going southwards in the transport, with the idea of getting to Turkey in November. But Dis aliter visum, as the Romans used to say, though it seemed at this time that much of the world was more controlled by the Devil, especially before his influence was so much weakened by Stalingrad. Any way I never got back to Turkey.
There were two kinds of beetle in our beds, and my wife at first seemed to take some dislike to them, but I asked her what harm the beetles did, whereas the Chinese stewards...! The head-stewards were English and were charming, but there were very few of them; we heard that nobody is more pleasant than a Chinese steward, but that the old regular stewards had not put to sea in these difficult times, and we had an idle theory that the stewards now on board were Shanghai-men who had been themselves Shanghaied to take the places of the excellent stewards that the Company always had in times of peace. At Suez we did what was done by every ship in which I had sailed during this war, that is to say we waited two days in harbour. This was a sporting thing to do, because it gave the enemy’s bombers a chance of finding us: other reasons I cannot give, because one is not told them in time of war. I asked one of the ship’s officers if we had not some Italian prisoners on board, but he became embarrassed and silent. As a matter of fact we had twelve hundred of them. They were all grand-opera singers and they entertained us very well for an evening or two, until the heat made singing impossible.
Curious to think that if one attempted on land to stay in a Turkish bath for a week one would be forcibly restrained, and yet our transport in the Red Sea in June was a perfect Turkish bath and we were in the Red Sea for twelve days. Whenever the captain saw any coal he stopped and collected it, and Bishareens carried it on board in baskets. The immediate effect of drinking a cup of tea, so far as one’s shirt was concerned, was as though one had poured it externally over one’s shirt. Anybody contemplating a holiday of a fortnight at mid-summer in the Red Sea should have at least a hundred shirts. The Italian prisoners wore no shirts, and, as far as I could see, some of them escaped prickly heat. All the rest of us had it. One day as the prisoners came by for their hour on our deck, and I had got some limes from a steward and was drinking a lime-juice and water, the heat was so frightful that I was moved to offer half of my drink to an Italian. But he did not like the rather dirty look that lime-juice gives to water, or else he thought I was trying to poison him: anyway, he looked at it and refused it. We shared a table with three people from Athens, Mr and Mrs. Denn; and Mr. Noel Paton, who ran the British Institute in Athens and who told me how he had put all the books of the library of the Institute where the Germans will not find them. We had good food, but roast beef and sausages in the Red Sea made me wonder if the Company had been allowed to know that their ship had slipped away from cold Northern waters. One could not sleep on deck, as it was too crowded with extra life-boats, with which it was evidently intended to save all on board in case of trouble, in preparation for which we had boat-drills now and then. We missed the freedom of the Warzawa, where the life-boats were too few for it to be worth bothering about boat-drills.
We had gone on board on June 16th; on June 20th we arrived at Port Sudan, and there we stopped till June 22nd. I have described the haze of sand that hung over the desert in a book called A Journey, but that book will not get in the way of the publishers of this book, for it is only poetry, and things I say of Port Sudan here will not interfere with A Journey, for they are only facts. The sun, then, shone silver through a haze of sand, and you could look at it as you can look at the full moon. The main town of Port Sudan is laid out with good wide streets, and the suburbs are built of thorn and petrol tins. A salty desert lies round it, and beyond the desert lies a ring of mountains. There coal was picked up in sugar-tongs and put into baskets, which Bishareens carried on board. I did not actually see the sugar-tongs, and I only deduce them from the time that it took to coal. Our grand-opera company lay on its deck in dead silence.
In the afternoon of June 22nd we steamed away through the silvery air, over the green sea, and in two days more we came to Aden; there there had evidently been a shower within the last few weeks, for there was a stain of green on the rocks, like verdigris on a neglected salt-cellar. The purple crags of the fortress rose grimly up from pure-golden sand. There we stayed two more days. I remember once in the Sahara coming to an old camping-ground, for the Arabs never camp on fresh ground, and seeing the ticks run out to meet the camels: somewhat in that spirit are travellers welcomed by taxi-drivers and others at Aden.
On June 27th we went on at evening, and steamed through the Gulf of Aden for two days, which was still hot. And then one day we met the monsoon, blowing from India, and there was white on the crests of the waves, and air to breathe. It was as though a curse were lifted, and I wrote in one of my letters that “the Wolves of Tuscany yapped for joy.”
But one Italian officer had been driven mad by the heat, and we seemed to have some of the plagues of Egypt on board, and prickly heat with many of us turned to boils, of which the doctor told me we had sixty-eight bad cases, of which I was one. One night, deciding that it would be impossible to sleep, I got up and walked about the ship, and I came to a room next to the prisoners’ hospital where two men with revolvers were drinking coffee, on watch in case the prisoners should try to come aft. I joined them for a while, and then found the Chinese hospital-orderly, a young man who took a great deal of trouble to give me some relief; and of course the doctor did what he could, but he was a pretty busy man. There is a strange hush over the night-life of a ship, which grows still more intense in time of war, a thing too subtle for clear description, yet slightly enriching one’s memories. This midsummer in the Red Sea was not quite like other midsummers there, for the black-out gave to the cabins at night a new and oven-like feature. After a while I took to my bed, and stayed there with the beetles. We were steaming into winter, and we came to Durban in a week from the time when we met the monsoon. The ship did not berth for four more days, but the doctor got a few of the sickest of us let off, and I went ashore with the unfortunate Italian officer, who was quite still and silent and all strapped up.