At one of the tables—next to that where the pretty girl from Cincinnati was sipping her tea—sat three men of different ages. Mr Nathaniel Brookes, a man of some sixty years and rather distinguished appearance, was discussing total prohibitions with Dr Henson-Blake. The doctor was a man of wiry build, with the face of a hawk, and that indescribable look which comes only of strength and experience. The third man listened and fidgeted. From babyhood he had been precocious and preferred to associate with those who were older than he was. In consequence he sometimes had to sit, as now, rather on the outside of the association. He smoked endless cigarettes and drank something which was cold and not good for him out of a long glass in which the ice tinkled pleasantly. He was a fair-haired young man whom the sun had merely freckled. He wore a single eye-glass, but did not always dare to use it. When you had got to the bottom of his failings you found fundamentally by no means a bad sort of man, by name Percival Lake. This was his first year in Egypt. Both Brookes and the doctor had known Egypt for many years.
It was Brookes who was speaking. "The Fellaheen should be allowed to dig," he said, "and it should be made well worth their while to dig."
"But they do," said the doctor. "They all of them do it in the summer, and they always have done."
"Yes," said Brookes. "Prohibitions which are too strict are always evaded. It's the same thing with hasheesh. But what I mean is that if we succeed in stopping the Fellaheen from digging, the working European Egyptologist will find very little. The native will take care of that, and this is a case where the native has knowledge that the European can get only from him."
"That's possible," the doctor agreed.
"What's that about hasheesh?" the young man asked. "I thought it was the kind of drug that one came across frequently in stories, and rarely in chemist's shops, and nowhere else."
"Nominally," said Brookes, "there is no hasheesh in Egypt. It is not allowed. It is contraband. I forget how many tons of it were seized last year, and I should be sorry to say how much managed to get through."
"Then the natives really use it?"
"Of course they do. There is a common type in all races which requires a nerve alterative and will have it. If religion or sentiment or custom shuts out alcohol, then it will be opium or hasheesh. Egypt goes for hasheesh."
"And the prohibition is of no use?" asked Lake.