“Bah!” interrupted Dr. Henry, “Your idea! Why don’t you fellows ever have an idea until someone else gives you one? I’m glad. Dr. Bullock, that we’ve got a man at last who—”
“Yes,” I repeated, “I should put in two pumps, by all means.”
“I’ll send in the order to Cairo to-night,” said the doctor. “Bring your men in the morning, efendee, and set them to digging the reservoir. You don’t need another man to help you on that, I hope?”
“You will find little work in Assiut, just now,” he went on, as we entered the hospital. “By all means go to Assuan. There is employment for every class of mechanic on the barrage. I suppose two dollars will about cover your fee?” He dropped four ten-piastre pieces into my hand. “But you must stay to supper with us. We have one bed unoccupied, too; but three men have died in it in the past month, and if you are superstitious—”
“Not in the least,” I protested.
I rose long before daylight next morning, and groped my way to the station. A ticket to Luxor took barely half my fee as consulting engineer. At break of day, the railway crossed to the eastern bank, and at the next station the train stood motionless while driver, trainmen, and passengers executed their morning prayers in the desert sand. Beyond, the chimneys of great sugar refineries belched forth dense clouds of smoke, and at every halt shivering urchins offered for sale the crude product of the factories, cone-shaped lumps, dark-brown in color.
The voice of the south spoke more distinctly with every mile. We were approaching, now, the district where rain and dew are utterly unknown. The desert grew more arid, the whirling sand finer, more penetrating. The natives, already of darker hue than the cinnamon-colored Cairene, grew blacker and blacker. The chilling wind of two days past turned tepid, then piping hot, and, ere we drew into Luxor, Egypt lay, as of old, under her mantle of densest sunshine.
A water-carrier of Luxor. A goatskin full costs one cent
The tourist colony of Luxor, housed in two great faranchee hotels, would be incomplete without a rendezvous for “the comrades.” Close by the station squats a tumble-down shack, styled the “Hotel Economica,” wherein, dreaming away his old age over a cigarette, sits Pietro Saggharia. Pietro was a “comrade” once. His tales of “the road,” gleaned in forty years of errant residence in Africa, and couched in almost any tongue the listener may choose, are to be had for a kind word, even while the exiled Greek is serving the forbidden liquor to backsliding Mohammedans and the white wanderers who take shelter beneath his roof.