My journey took me viâ Venice, where the P.& O. boat Hydaspes was waiting. Can any journey to Egypt be more charming than this one, right across Italy?
Oh! you who do not think a journey a mere means of getting to your destination as quickly as possible, say, if you have taken the Milan-Verona-Padua line, is there anything in all Italy to surpass that burst on the view of the Lago di Garda after you emerge from the Lonato tunnel? On a blue day, say in spring? If you have not gone that way yet, I beg you to be on the look-out on your left when you do go. This wonderful surprise is suddenly revealed, and almost as quickly lost. Waste not a second. I put up at the “Angleterre” at Venice, on the Riva, because from there one sees the lagunes and glimpses of the open sea beyond, and the air is open and fresh.
“March 28th.—Took gondola for the big P. & O. S.S. which is to be my home for the next six days. I at once saw the ship was one of their smartest boats, and all looked very festive on board. Luncheon was served immediately after my arrival, and I found a bright company thereat assembled, with Sir Henry and Lady Layard at their head; some come to see friends off and others to go on. We amalgamated very pleasantly, and great was the waving of handkerchiefs as we slowly steamed past the Dogana and the Riva, our returning friends having gone on shore in gondolas whose sable sides were hidden in brilliant draperies. The sashes of the gondoliers’ liveries flashed in coloured silks and gold fringes; the sea sparkled. I rejoiced. The Montalba girls gave us a salvo of pocket handkerchiefs from their balcony on the Giudecca. What a gay scene! Lady Layard, on leaving, introduced Mrs. H. M., who was to join her husband at Brindisi for a long trip in the big liner from England, and I was very happy at the prospect of her pleasant and intellectual companionship thus far.”
And so we passed out into the early night on the dim Adriatic, after a sunset farewell to Venice, which remains to me as one of the tenderest visions of the past. That voyage to Alexandria is more enjoyable, given fair weather, than most voyages, because one is hardly ever out of sight of land, and such classic land, too! The Ionian Islands, “Morea’s Hills,” Candia. But what a pleasure it is to see on the day before the arrival the signs that the landing is near at hand. The General in Command will be waiting at sunrise on the landing stage, perhaps the light catching the gold lace on his cap, appearing above the turbans of the native crowd. Of course every one who has been to Egypt knows the feeling of disappointment at the first sight of its shores, low-lying and fringed with those incongruous windmills which the Great Napoleon vainly planted there to teach the natives how better to make flour. In vain. And so were his wheelbarrows. The natives preferred carrying the mud in their hands. And the city, how it fails to give you the Oriental impression you are longing for, with its pseudo-Italian architecture, its hard paved streets, and dusty boulevards and squares. Government House on the Boulevard de Ramleh was comfortable, roomy and airy, but I missed the imagined garden and palm trees of the Cairo official residence.
“April 3rd.—We have a view of Cleopatra’s Tomb (so called) to the right, jutting out into the intensely blue sea, but the other arm of the bay (the old Roman harbour) to our left, covered with native houses and minarets, is partly hidden by an abomination which hurts me to exasperation, one of those amorphous buildings of tenth-rate Italian vulgarity and dreariness which are being run up here in such quantities, and rears its gaunt expanse close behind this house. To cap this erection it has received the title of ‘Bombay Castle.’ Never mind, I shall soon, in my happy way, cease to notice what I don’t like to see, and shall enjoy all that is left here of the original East and its fascinating barbaric beauty. Will took me for a most interesting drive, first to Ras-el-Tin, during which we threaded a conglomeration of East and West which was bewildering. There were nightmarish Italian ‘palazzi’ loaded with cheap, bluntly-moulded stucco; glaring streets, cafés, dusty gardens, over-dressed Jewish and Levantine women driving about in exaggerated hats, frocks and figures; and there also appeared the dark narrow bazaars and original streets, the latticed windows, the finely-coloured robes of the natives, the weird goats, the wolfish dogs, straying about in all directions. Mounds of rubbish everywhere; some only the leavings of newly-built houses, some the remains of the bombardment’s havoc, others the dust of a once beautiful city whose loveliness in old Roman times must have been supreme.
“Only here and there was I reminded of the charm of Cairo—a tree by a yellow wall, a group of natives eating sugar cane, a water-seller with his tinkling brass cups and a rose behind his ear, and so on. We then had a really enjoyable drive along the Mahmoudieh Canal, which was balm to my mind and eyes. All along the placid water on the opposite bank ran Arab villages with their accompaniments of palms, buffaloes, goats, water jars, native men and women in scriptural robes; water wheels; square-shaped, almost window-less mud dwellings, so appropriate under that intense light. On our bank were the remnants of Pashadom in the shape of gimcrack palaces closed and let go to ruin, on account of fashion having betaken itself to the suburb of Ramleh. These dwellings were, however, so hidden in deep tropical gardens of great and rich beauty that they did not offend.
“Beyond the Arab villages on the other bank appeared Lake Mareotis, and there was a poetical feeling about all that region. It was so strange to have on one side of a narrow band of water old Egypt and the life of the East going on just as it has been for ages past, and on the other the ephemeral tokens of the sham and fleeting life of to-day, and this all the way along a drive of some two miles. This is the fashionable drive, and to see young Egypt on horseback, and old Jewry in carriages, passing and repassing up and down this cosmopolitan Rotten Row is decidedly trying. My admired friends, the running syces, though, redeem the thing to me. Their dress is one of the most perfect in shape, colour and material ever devised. The air was rich with the scent of strange flowers, some of which billowed over entrance gates in magnificent purple masses.”
I must be excused for having shown irritation in my Diary at starting. I soon adapted myself to the entourage, and I hope I “did my manners” as became my official responsibilities. I liked the Greeks best of all—nay, I got very fond of these handsome, sunny people.
It was a curiously cosmopolitan society, and I, who am never good at remembering the little feuds that are always simmering in this kind of mixed company, must have sometimes made mistakes. I heard a Greek woman, who had dined with us the previous evening, informing her friends in a voice fraught with meaning, ”Imaginez, hier au soir chez le Général Monsieur Gariopulo a donné le bras à Madame Buzzato!” The recipients of this information were filled with mirth. What had I done in pairing off these two for the procession to dinner?
The British were entrenched at Ramleh. The little stations on the railway there gave me quite a turn at first sight. One was “Bulkley,” the next “Fleming,” then “Sydney O. Schutz,” and finally San Stefano at railhead, and a casino with a corrugated iron roof under that scorching sun. Oh, that I should see such a thing in Egypt! Cheek by jowl with the little villas one saw weird Bedouin tents and wild Arabs and their animals, carrying on their existence as if the Briton had never come there.