A favourite walk at sundown was the canal-bank. The reed-shot lagoon on the east, traversed by sporadic, crying duck; the gentle wind, blowing warm off the Libyan Desert, drifting the silent dhow; a solitary fellaheen on his ambling beast; an Arab doing his devotions in the tiny praying-crib on the water's brink; the west darkening behind the palm-tufts over the illimitable sand. There was a peace here little known in our other halting-places in the Delta.
CHAPTER III
CANAL ZONE
At Serapœum, sprawled upon the Canal-banks just above the Bitter Lakes, you are sufficiently far from Cairo to be delivered from the hankering after the city such as gnaws you intermittently at such a place as Tel el Kebir. From the old battle-ground you may run up in a couple of hours; from the Canal the length of the journey is trebled, and encroaches seriously upon your feloose, and that is a consideration which ought not to—which will not—be despised on service. And beside the fact that the rail journey is trebled from the desert camp, there are some miles of dismal sand-plodding between you and the railway-station, and the desert has inspired you with the Sahara lassitude and an unfevered frame. You feel, in this waste of brown sand, the incipiency of the mood of the contemplative Arab, to whom the whirl of the metropolis is anathæma; but only its incipiency, because there is still in your blood the subconscious resentment of eight months' enforced inactivity on Anzac. Compulsory monotony, whatever its form, raises a temperamental hostility: whether the monotony of geographical confinement, limited vision, shell-scream, innutritious food, inescapable dirt and vermin, or that of wide and sand-billowed outlook, delicate messing, tranquil sleeping, luxurious Canal-bathing, heat, and flies. Cairo is Cairo. The Peninsula, as comfortable as this, would have been far less intolerable. But so long as it is something less than the trackless Ægean that divides from the glamour of Egyptian cities, you clamour for leave.
This is unintelligible—this blasé, surfeited mind of the Australian soldier, in Cairo. "Never want to see it again! I'm fed up with Cairo!" is a judgment strangely prevalent in the army of occupation. How any land and people so utterly strange to the Australian can become indifferent to him is incomprehensible. Every Cairene alley is a haunt of stinks and filth—but a haunt of wonder, too. Cairene habits that are annoying and repulsive are at the same time intensely interesting. To get behind the mind of this people and hazard an estimate and a comparison of its attitude towards life is an occupation endlessly amusing.
But you may clamour for leave here with little effect. Divisional orders have minimised it to men going to Cairo on duty. Duty-leave is a time-honoured slogan that has been accustomed to cover a multitude of one's own ends. But the added stringency of leave regulations which preface a projected move of the division scrutinise very closely all that is connoted by the term "Duty-leave," and lop away a good many of its excrescences. So that, on the whole, you end by settling down in the great sand and feigning a lively response to the call of the desert.
You do respond. You must. Anyone would; but not ardently.
We are on the Sinai side of the Blue Trough which colours richly between its shores of light sand. We also are colouring richly. It's far too hot for representative uniform clothing. Yet the clothing is uniform—uniform in respect of a discardment of tunic and cap and a ubiquity of shirt. The broad-brimmed hat and the gauze shirt and the half-bared thigh for us; and the daily bathe.