“No, I’m fixed all right,” I protested.
“Go ahead, man; take it,” he insisted, holding out a sovereign. “Many a one I’ve had shoved on me when I was down and out.”
“No, I’m all right,” I repeated.
“Well, here,” said the manager; “I’m going to make you out a check on my bank in Cairo for a couple of quid. I think you’ll need it. If you don’t, chuck it in the canal and no harm done. We chaps never want to see a man on the rocks, you know.”
He filled out the check as he talked, and, in spite of my protest, tucked it into one of my pockets. I acknowledged my thanks; but months afterward I scattered the pieces of that bit of paper on the highway of another clime.
Late that night I departed from Wady Halfa, reaching Assuan on Monday morning. On the following day I boarded the steamer Cleopatra, of the Cook Line, as a deck passenger, and drifted lazily down the Nile for five days, landing here and there with the tourists of the upper deck to visit a temple or a mud village. At the Asile Rudolph, Cap Stevenson welcomed me with open arms, but “the union” was wrapped in mourning. Pia, the erudite, had departed, no man knew when nor whither. The end of the Cairo season was at hand. All its social favorites were turning their faces towards other lands. I called on the superintendent of railways to remind him of his promise, and, armed with a pass to Port Saïd, bade the capital farewell.
CHAPTER XI
STEALING A MARCH ON THE FAR EAST
As the American “hobo” studies the folders of the railway lines, so the vagrant beyond seas scans the posters of the steamship companies. Few were the ships plying to the Far East whose movements I had not followed during that Cairene month of February. On the journey from Ismaïlia to the coast we passed four leviathans, gliding southward through the canal so close that we could read from the windows of the train the books in the hands of the passengers under the awnings. The names on every bow I knew well. Had I not, indeed, watched the departure of two of these same ships from the breakwater of Marseilles? Yet what a gulf intervened between me, crawling along the edge of the desert, and those fortunate mortals, already eastward bound! Gladly would I have exchanged places with the most begrimed stoker on board.
Had I been permitted to choose my next port, it should have been Bombay. He who is stranded at the mouth of the Suez Canal, however, talks not of choice. He clutches desperately at any chance of escape, and is content to be gone, be it east or west, on any craft that floats. Not that ships are lacking. They pass the canal in hundreds every week. But their crews are yellow men, or brown; and their anchorage well out in the stream, where plain Jack Tar may not come to plead his cause.
All this I recalled, and more, as I crawled through the African desert behind a wheezing locomotive. But one solemn oath I swore, ere the first hovel bobbed up across the sand—that, be it on coal barge or raft, I should escape from this canalside halting-place before her streets and alleys became such eyesores as had once those of Marseilles.