"Milk Diet."
A Camel Study on the road to Helouan.
"Lizzie"
Most of the soldiers' spare time was naturally spent in Cairo. Here everything seemed to be licensed except the drinking shops—the newsboy needed a license to sell his papers; the donkey boys and donkeys, who seemed numberless, were really carefully numbered; the futile red-tarbushed police spent much of their time chasing the bootblack who dared to ply without a permit. Owing to the war, the tourist season had failed—the rich Americans had stayed at home—but in the well-paid Australians and New Zealanders the astute merchants found suitable substitutes, whom they proceeded to bleed most unmercifully. Out into the streets they came with their wares. In the natural course of affairs men hawked sugar-cane, vegetables, live poultry, sweetmeats and cakes; the clang of the liquorice-water sellers' gongs clashed with those of the lemonade man; round the cafes, where the patron sits at a little table on a footpath, men tendered their little trays of shrimps and dusty plates of strawberries—all these now supplemented by an army of boys and men trading walking-sticks and swagger canes by the thousand; antiques made out of Nile mud; ancient Dervish weapons with the dust of Birmingham still upon them; foreign postage stamps on sheets; scenic postcards and questionable pictures; dainty little fly-whisks and "pieces of the true Cross."
Watching from the balconies of the fashionable hotels (every soldier is fashionable while the money lasts) the procession filling the street below was always interesting. The Rolls-Royce of the Egyptian Pasha slowing down behind a string of heavily-laden camels; a man with a performing monkey protesting against the intrusion of a flock of turkeys shepherded ahead and astern by old women—solemnly down the main street of Cairo go the old ladies with the birds; a wedding procession with a raucous band meanders past; and jostling one another on the road, shouting arbagis with their two-horse cabs, scurrying motor cyclists of the Army of Occupation, and the quaint one-horsed lorries perambulating the closely-veiled collection of ladies that go to make the modest modern harem.
Like the schoolboy, the soldier dearly loves a tuck shop. Army fare is very monotonous. The soldier on trek and in the trenches constantly talks of his likes and dislikes in the matter of eating and drinking. So it was that the hotels were always crowded—a hot bath and a meal were always welcome—and the girls of Cairo were never treated more liberally and often to the daintiness of Sault's and Groppi's.
The Egyptian, like the Babu, is fond of bursting into print. The comedian in the colonial forces discovered a rich new field. Eating houses purveying the fried steak and eggs and tomatoes, together with imitation Scotch whisky and Greek beer, came forth in all their glory of calico signs inscribed "The Balclutha Bar," this with a fine disregard for the prohibition tendencies of the Southern town; "The Waipukurau Reading Rooms," and the "Wellington Hotel—very cheap and breezy." Every township in Australia and New Zealand was similarly honoured!
