“But if I go up, I’ll spend considerable time sight-seeing—”
“Sights? There’s something I never could understand. All the tourists go up to see sights! Thank the Lord they do; what would the business be without them? But what the devil do they see? Hundreds of miles of dry, choking sand, with nothing but dirty Nile water to wash it off your face and out of your throat! A lot of smashed-up rocks, covered with pictures of hens and roosters, all red hot under the cursed sun that never stops blazing. And besides that, niggers—millions of dirty niggers, blind niggers, and half-blind niggers who do nothing but crawl around after decent white men and beg. That’s all there is in Egypt, if you go up the Nile, till you come to the sudd-fields of Uganda.”
“Well what do you go up for?” I asked. Even this brief acquaintance with Heinrich convinced me that he would die the death of a martyr rather than disgrace die Kamaraden by working.
“What for? Why so I won’t starve, to be sure. If I could wiggle the feather and paint like Otto there, I’d see hell freeze over before I’d move a mile south of Cairo. But I can’t, so I must go over the soft-hearted ones again. I’ve worked ’em pretty hard the last two years, but the game’s good yet. I’ve grown this beard since the last trip, and got a new story all bolstered up. I’m a civil engineer this time, with a wife and three children here in Cairo. Going up, I’ll be making for the Berber-Suakim line, after spending all I had on the kid’s doctor bills. Coming down, it’s the fever story—that’s always good—or my wife is dying and, if we can get her back to Hamburg before she croaks, she’ll get an inheritance her uncle just left her. Pretty neat that, eh?” grinned Heinrich, turning to his admiring mates. “Thought that out one night when I couldn’t sleep. Brand new, isn’t it? Aber, Gott, mein lieber,” he addressed me once more, “if you’ll only come along! I can’t speak English, and most of the soft ones know my face. But I’ll point out everyone of them from here to Assuan. I’ll lay low and we’ll share even.”
A woman of Alexandria, Egypt, carrying two bushels of oranges. Even barefooted market-women wear the veil required by the Koran
On the top of the largest pyramid. From the ground it looks as sharply pointed as the others
I declined to enter into an offensive alliance against the “soft ones,” however, and turned to Pia for the information which he had once promised to give me. While he talked, every other lounger in the room added his voice from time to time; and from deep wells of experience I gleaned a long list of names, flanked by biographical details, as we journeyed mentally up the river. This vagabond’s edition of “Who’s Who in Egypt” completed, Pia laid down several rules of the road.
“I don’t see why you go up,” he began. “You can make a fortune right here. If you are determined to go, get a good story and always stick to it, changing it enough to fit different cases. Some, it will pay you to ask for work—you know the breed; others, just ask for money. Take anything they give you. You can sell it if you don’t want it. Always see the big men long before train time. They will often offer to buy you a ticket to wherever you want to go; and, if the train is soon due, they may go to the station and buy it. But if you touch them long before train time, they may give you the money and go back to business. Then you can spend a couple of piastres to the next station and work that the same way. The sugar factories are all good—they’ll even give you work, perhaps, if you are fool enough to take it. Always hit the young Englishmen. They’re almost all of them adventurers with nothing much to do with their money. When you catch a missionary, make him take up a collection for you among the native Christians. He must do it, by the rules of the Board of Missions.