“The ticket game is always best. If you get three or four men in each town to give you the price to Assiut or Assuan, you can make the trip in a month and pick up good money. When you get a lot of silver, change it at any of Cook’s offices into gold sovereigns and sew them up in your clothes. Be sure not to let any money rattle when you’re spinning a hard-luck yarn. And don’t be a fool, like some of the comrades who have gone up for one trip. They pump a town dry, and, not satisfied to wait until they hit Cairo again, go on a blow-out and lie around drunk for a week where those who gave them ticket money can see them. That queers the burg for the next six months. Of course you know enough to be of the same church, and very pious, when you hit a missionary, and to be from the same state when you touch an American? Above all never let a boat load of tourists go by without touching them. Always go down to the dock and make enough noise so that they all hear you. Some of the boys who are good at it throw a fit when they get in a crowd of rich ones. But as you talk English, a good tale of woe will do as well. When you get well up the river, and a good tan, and a couple of weeks’ beard, spring the old yarn of ‘lost my job and must get down to Cairo.’ And always wait for a train. You’ll miss the whole game if you walk; and you’ll die of sunstroke, besides.”
In the face of Pia’s warning, I left Cairo on foot the next morning, and, crossing the Nile, turned southward along a ridge of shifting sand beyond the village of Gizeh. Along an irrigating ditch, that flanked the ridge, scores of shadufs, those human paradigms of perpetual motion, were ceaselessly dipping, dipping, the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt. Between the canal and the sparkling Nile, groups of fellahs, deaf to the blatant sunshine, set out sugar cane or clawed the soil of the arid plain. On the desert wind rode the never-ceasing squawk of the sakka, or Egyptian water-wheel.
Beyond the pyramids of Sakkara, I sought shelter in the palm groves that cover the site of ancient Memphis, and took my siesta on the recumbent statue of Rameses. A backsheesh-thirsty village rose up to cut off my return to the sandy road, and forced me to run a gauntlet of out-stretched hands. ’Tis the national anthem of Egypt, this cry of backsheesh. Workmen at their labor, women bound for market, children rooting in the streets, drop all else to surge after the faranchee who may be induced to “sprinkle iron” among them. Even the unclothed infant astride a mother’s shoulder thrusts forth a dimpled hand to the passing white man with a gurgle of “sheesh.”
As darkness came on I reached the railway station of Mazgoona, some thirty miles from Cairo. The village lay far off to the eastward; but the station master invited me to supper and spread a quilt bed in the telegraph office.
A biting wind blew from the north when I set out again in the morning. A hundred yards from the station, a cry of “monsoor” was borne to my ears, and a servant summoned me back to his master’s office.
“I have just received a wire,” said the latter, “from the division superintendent. He is coming on the next train. Wait and ask him for a job.”
A half-hour later there stepped from the north-bound express, not the grey-haired man I had expected, but a beardless English youth who could not have been a day over twenty. It was a new experience to apply for work to a man younger than myself, but I respectfully stated my case.
“I haven’t a vacancy on my division just at present,” said the boy. “There is plenty of work in Assiut, though. Want to go that far south?”
“Along the way shadoofs were ceaselessly dipping up the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt”