Accidents of an antiquary's life

by D. G. Hogarth

A dislocated omnibus train put me down at a shed in the marsh-land, whence a path led westward through cultivated lands, and among hamlets, standing high on their proper ruin. After a halt at noon beneath a stunted palm, we passed into a region where man still fought a drawn battle with sand and water. Here he has won a long stretch, embanked it, washed it, and raised clover and cotton in triumph; but there the salt flood has slopped into his canal, and ridge and furrow are once more barren sand.

After a while, flakes of mud began to appear among the green. The ditches, fringed with salt growths and clogged with weed, spread themselves out more frequently in muddy sloughs, and at last the main canal died away in a chain of rank reedy hollows. Fellahin yielded place to rare Bedawi goat-herds, and mud hovels to their black tents, pitched sparsely on sand-spits or dusty tells. The Frenchmen’s house soon loomed in sight, set high above the vast level on one of these mounds; but not far short of it the path broke off at a black and unbridged drain, and when we had found a crossing, and floundered through the slime to the gate of the compound, it wanted but two hours to sunset. My friend’s mares, mules, and camels were evidently out at pasture, for through the frequent gaps in the mud wall I could see no more than a rotting cart, some hens standing forlorn on greasy islets, and a few ducks more at their ease. The farm-house cried aloud for repair. Its roof gaped; in the windows was more paper than glass; and the balcony would not have borne up a dog. The gate of a shaggy garden swung wide on one hinge, and we clattered in unremarked by so much as a cat. No human being was visible, and as none answered to knock or call, I pushed the door, and found myself in a room of all work. The table showed that here, as in Wonderland, there was no time to wash teacups between meals; nor, apparently, had a figure, sitting somnolent beside it, with bandaged head and eye, and a torn shirt and ragged breeches for all its clothing, had more time to wash itself. The strange being blinked a single bloodshot eye, staggered to its feet, and regarded me unsteadily. Then intelligence dawned, and yelling, “Jules! Jules!” it seized me by hand and waist, and asked with affectionate solicitude what I would take—wine, beer, cognac, or champagne? A glance at the bottle on the table suggested a more local liquor. My host was hurt. Why not beer or champagne? Well, if it must be mastica, there it was of Scio, the best. And in his own cloudy glass he presented me with sheer unabashed potato spirit, which, taken unwarily, grips the gullet and deprives one of speech or breath.

A clatter of loose heels on the stairs heralded Jules. It was my little friend of Alexandria, evidently just out of bed. As I shook his hand I heard a gurgling sound behind, and was conscious that the common glass had been filled and emptied again. Jules placed his bed at my disposal, sheets and all, as they were, and apparently as they had been for many nights. Victor passed the raki repeatedly, and drank a glass for every one I refused. Both upbraided me in chorus for having brought horses, where those animals were as the sand of the sea in multitude. But none the less, on visiting the compound at sundown to seek a standing for my animals, I found a single weedy mare in the one shed, and various windy proposals resulted in my stallion being tethered to the decadent cart in the open. Presently he freed himself, and, being foiled in a gallant effort to reach the mare through the roof of her shed, took incontinently to the marsh, and amused four Bedawi catchers until the moon rose. Two days later, when I wanted an extra baggage animal, I moved heaven and earth, and hardly obtained one mangy camel.

In the meanwhile, if only to stem the tide of alcohol, I had proposed to Jules that he should show me the tell, which rose hard by the farm. He replied that it stretched as far as the eye could see, and that to enumerate the marvellous things upon it would take the night; but, if I wished it, we might go as far as the foot. The path led through a group of Bedawi hovels, backed against the wall of the compound. There, said Jules, dwelt his men; but the manner of the retainers’ salute did not savour of feudal respect. A hurried step sounded behind us, and I turned to see a third European. He offered a cordial but hasty hand, and passed on ahead, shouldering a heavy staff. Halting as we halted, and moving when we moved, he kept his distance; and ever and anon tufts of herbage caught his eye, and, with curses in French, Italian, or Arabic, or all three tongues at once, he battered them furiously with the staff. I turned wondering towards Jules, who whispered, “Serpents!” Few tufts escaped, and while I walked about the Mound, this Patrick was accounting for reptiles innumerable; but alas! they lived again hydra-like as fast as he slew.

The whole tell was seen in half an hour. It was quite featureless, rotten with salt and of no promise to a digger. Granite blocks crumbled to shingle, and brick walls to powder at a touch. The aspect of the site was as melancholy as all the landscape about it—as the sour grey herbage, the brackish flood-waters, and the plough-lands relapsed to waste. No creak of water-wheels or plash of sluices broke the evening silence; but rotting frames stood gaunt against the sky, adding surcease of sadness to the desolation of nature.

The sun was down when we returned to the farm, but no food was set out, nor to all appearance was any being made ready. But there was more than enough raki. Victor made merriment for the party. He had cost in his time 30,000 francs to the Egyptian Government—moneys paid for his higher education at Paris in the glorious days of Ismail. “There you are!” cried Jules. “There’s 30,000 francs—a bargain!” and the failure seemed to enjoy the inexhaustible jest as much as anyone else. I began to glean something of the past of the queer crew. The four—for yet another lurked in the house, invisible and suffering, they said, from coup de soleil—seemed to have held posts of profit, if not honour, on Khedivial backstairs. The farm had come to Jules from his father; but there was a long tale of water-wars with neighbouring owners and trouble with the Bedawis, of mortgages, encroachments, domiciliary visits from irrigation officials, and difficulties with tax-gatherers—all these being main incidents in the history of the surrender of three parts of the land to water and salt. The fourth part was let out to Bedawis, on whose camels or buffaloes violent hands had to be laid whenever any rent was due. The dykes and bridges had gone the way of the farmhouse, and the day seemed near when barbarism would resume an undisputed sway.

Rakí is, if anything, an appetiser, and always a most unsatisfactory substitute for supper; but as the latter was not forthcoming, I was obliged to ask when and by what the pangs of hunger were to be stayed. Jules was astonished that he had not thought of supper earlier, but what could he do? Victor was cook, and Victor, it was not to be denied, was drunk. I called up my own servant, and told him to cook what he could find. Jules pronounced the idea original and admirable, and sup we did at last on potatoes and milk and bread and a tin or so of conserves from my saddle-bags. Vague associations of the past made Victor clutch now and then at my fork and spoon, only to forget them again and return to nature’s tools. With raki once more on the board, I waived ceremony, and sought upstairs the sleep in which two of the party were sunk already where they sat. But it was long in coming. Like a traveller in an eighteenth century inn, I had better say I ‘lay’ that night with myriads of companions as sleepless as myself. But at some late hour I did lose consciousness only to regain it as the level beams of the sun shot through the open window. The first object of my waking vision was the unkempt Victor, whose lying down and uprising evidently were carried out with as little ceremony as his dog’s. He sat with an eye to a battered telescope, and in reply to my salutation murmured an apology for being in the room, but did not avert his gaze.

Little loth to leave the bed, I stood behind him and tried to discover what he spied; but nothing did my field-glass show, except swamp and sand. Begging a sight at his spyhole, I saw more clearly the same sand and swamp, with here and there a ditch—land, once drained and probably cultivated, now glistening salt and wet in the early sun—but no stock, not even a grazing camel, and no human life. Evidently Victor had watched his labourers from afar in better days, and now could not pass his fuddled hours otherwise than by gazing where the labourers had been. It was a cheerless spectacle in the first glory of morning—that ragged figure in an unswept room with cobwebbed walls, spying phantom harvests on a salt-marsh, and the ghosts of departed hinds.

The succeeding day proved less irksome, for I spent it mostly in the sun and air, riding to various mounds, large and small. Returning at sunset, I found all as the night before, and I suppose, day in and day out, Victor sits still at his spyglass, or sleeps off raki upstairs; the Serpent-slayer fights his elusive foes; and the Invisible Man remains invisible. At the dawn of the third day Jules embraced me: the man with the staff went before, beating the bushes to the boundary of the farm: and Victor, who had pledged himself, as one granting a dying man’s request, to keep the telescope trained upon us, till we should dip below the horizon, no doubt kept his word.

We rode back to Alexandria in one long day by a rarely travelled track round the western end of the Mariut lagoon. It is the road by which Napoleon’s legions, marching on Damanhur, nearly perished of thirst; but we were to fall into no such peril, for, as the afternoon wore on, rain came up from the sea and soaked the very bones of us. Through the mist of driving storm I could see little of the desolate land, which used to be set so thick with the Mareotic vines, and nothing of the lake, except turbid wavelets chasing each other to the shallow marge. The dour Arabs of the district, who have often given trouble, had all gone to ground, and we hardly passed a house, except one or two outposts of the Slavery Prevention Service. Slithering and stumbling, the horses climbed at sunset on to the Mariut causeway, and it was the third hour of night before we sighted the flares in the noisome bazars of Gabbári.