By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal

by Hector Dinning

The Rue Rosette in the morning, or the Quai Promenade Abbas II., fronting the lovely Crescent of Port Est: this is the place to laze away a morning, hanging over the broad stone wall on the water's edge, or lounging in the open cafés behind the smooth road. There is that generous expanse of glittering sea heaving gently between the horns of the bay. The Fort Kait Bey lies brown on the western lip and Fort Sel Sileh on the east, half embracing the blue. A rich mellow colour they have, and a richer blue it is for that. And the white piles of Alexandria thrust up all about the bay's brink, fringing the clear basin with a sort of stately splendour. It's fine, too, the comfortable laziness of the red-tarbushed fishermen on the wall, smoking and fooling away the morning in the soft landbreeze blowing sweet off the city. The only movement is with the Arab boys racing along the parapet or the quiet motion of the fishing-smacks lying off. An old Russian aristocrat is taking the air in a gharry; the nursemaids are out with the babes; the well-dressed unemployed Egyptians (they throng the city) are sipping their morning coffee in the glass-walled cafés. Alexandria often gives the impression—except in the Square—that there are no livings to be made. There is a luxurious spirit of idleness abroad in the place, which appears on the balconies of the houses, in the cafés, in the carriages of the suburbs. The idle rich—who are largely not the vulgar rich—are here, whole battalions of them. There is nothing like the studied idleness of Edinburgh Town or of Naples—nor of Cairo. There are plutocrats who know how to dress and how to take their ease without boredom, and to pursue pleasure without apparent ennui. All these things (you feel) have they observed from their youth up; they practise none of them crudely. They are well schooled in a placid and luxurious enjoyment of life.

The Alexandrian night begins about 9.30. It is for that hour the opera overture is timed; then cafés and music-halls begin to be thronged. At one in the morning it is at its height. The opera may conclude at two; and after that is the supper, and after that the drive. Far the best way to see it all is to sit up in the diggings of your friend overlooking the brilliant Rue Ramleh from twelve on toward the dawn. There are sacred pipes and Alexandrian fruits, and other things; they include the conversation of the man who has lived in Alexandria a year and looked about him not casually, and who realises the import of all he sees in the pulsing street below.

This is the fine side of Alexandrian night life. There is the sordid aspect, not good—i.e., pleasant—to look on nor to relate. Alexandria cannot compare with Cairo in lasciviousness. Perhaps no place on earth can, nor any under earth. For crude carnality you are to be commended to the Wazzia of Cairo; there the flesh-pots of Egypt are seething and steaming. Apart from the temperately-conducted biological friendships of the leisured French and Russians and Italians, the carnal traffic of Alexandria is limited very closely. It does not clog the alleys, as in Cairo, on every hand. Indeed, it is rather the pot-house and the tavern, where the sole business of the waitresses is to bring traffic in beer, that is the scourge of Alexandria. Their blandishments mostly are content with coquettish inducements to "fill 'em up again"; to achieve that they will perch on the knees of the soldiers and stroke their visages in a fashion not just maidenly, but effective in the eyes of the beer-boss. These taverns are at close intervals in all the poorer streets. There is always a piano, at least, and an employed performer; sometimes there is an embryonic orchestra—harp and fiddle—whose répertoire is Tipperary and another—or perhaps two others. There is a continuous fierce roaring, which subsides only when a Tommy rises to sing. The pianist ramps out an improvised accompaniment. No pianist has ever been known to decline to make an attempt. Everybody joins in the chorus. By the time the chorus of the fifth stanza is under way, there is a rare drunken hullabaloo, and spilt beer and broken glasses. Ogling girls and flushed, embracing Tommies, yells for more beer, and drunken miscalculations of the score and feebly thundering band—all are checked with a parade-ground suddenness when the red-caps appear with their roars of Nine o'clock! And the pot-house, so to speak, closes with a slam.

The picquets are irresistibly strong and numerous. They parade in squads in half-sections, each under an officer. The Provost-Marshal, with a scrape o' the pen, has placed out of bounds most of the danger-zones which a year ago were open territory to the soldier.

The Arab quarters are at their best at midnight. They have their music-halls, blatant and raucous and evil-smelling. The star performers are usually confined to one bloated, painted woman who screams an Arab rhythm at intervals under the influence of hasheesh, to the accompaniment of an orchestra of pipes and drums whose performers are elated by the same familiar spirit. Arab music is strident to a degree that sears the nerves. No drunkenness in the audience ever drowns that. It soars like a siren above the frantic mirth of the drinkers. Applause breaks forth at unprovoked intervals. The lady is never perturbed. She is reinforced occasionally by the brazen-throated orchestra, which is chorus too. The din is unimaginable when they are working in concert. The Arab sense of rhythm is unerring. Their rhythms are irregular and without consecutiveness in their habits, to the European ear that is not closely attentive; drawn out, as it were, into irregular strands—totally unsystematised, it seems—with the intervals at cross-purposes. They despise the Western mathematical rhythmical "groups" and the regular Western recurrence of stresses and intervals. English rhythm is as much unlike it as the characters of a London morning sheet differ from the gracefully irregular type of the native Egyptian press; the difference is as striking as between the tortuous Eastern mind and the British downrightness; as between an English tweed suit and the Arab flowing robe. Yet in this rhythmical maze no member of the orchestral chorus ever loses his way. There is perfect agreement in the disclosing of the scheme, which, after half an hour's turbulent listening, begins to show its shape through the rhythmical murk. And you know before you leave that though English music may make a sweeter sound than this, the Arab mastery of rhythm is mastery indeed. And that knowledge is, of course, deepened if you'll stop any day and listen to a group of Arab workmen chanting at their job.

So long as you withstand the glad-eye of the serpent of Old Nile (who descends now and then from the boards and collects baksheesh piastres) and keep to coffee, you will find these Egyptian music-halls absorbing enough. There are never women in the audience. The Egyptian woman—at any rate in the lower and middle classes—is never a "theatre-goer," as far as can be judged. She earns most of the living. All the feloose would seem to go into her lord's mighty hand, which does the spending—mostly on himself. Night after night he comes there in his red tarbush and sees the evening out with liquor and vociferous talk. Somewhere in the small-hours a gharry comes for the lady, and the hall noisily gets emptied. And as you climb up to your room in the hotel opposite, you can hear the dispersing throng in argument and criticism far along the emptying street. Standing at your balcony door, it merges imperceptibly into the subdued murmur of the city, broken by a belated wailing, street-cry.

In the morning you wake at some hour later than réveille, and gloat for a time that is indefinite over the luxury of a spring-mattress and of a day's time-table that is of your own framing—that shall be when you summon up energy sufficient to begin upon it. The city wakens almost as late as you. By the time you have bathed and dressed at exaggerated ease and meandered round to the Italian restaurant it is ten o'clock. Exotic Italian dishes are good for all their strangeness.... Across the peopling Square you get a car to Pompey's Pillar, towering above the Arab cemetery. The green mound bearing that granite column is an oasis in the desert of squalor about it. From the crest of the hillock you see Lake Mareotis spread out like a cloud in the morning mist—those shores now waste that grew the wine beloved of Horace.

The old municipal guide totters up the slope and offers you below, through the Catacombs. You have seen the other Catacombs, beside the Lake, which alone are really worth seeing. He shows you the Roman mortuary-chapel in sandstone at the entrance to the galleries, lights up his candle-lamp, and you traipse after him through the labyrinth. The niches in the wall are robbed of their mummies; all epitaphs are long since gone—assuming there ever were any; there is hardly anything to be seen that is even symbolic. The old fellow mutters continually in a lingo quite unintelligible, except in short and isolated fragments. The linguistic accomplishments of many of the official attendants on the ancient monuments of Egypt are deplorably shallow. You notice it far more at places that are of far more historical importance than the Catacombs. The tombs of the Sacred Bulls at Sakkhara afford the most striking instance. A relic so bound up with the ancient religion as is the Serapœum ought to be in charge of an attendant who not only can speak English fluently, but is beside alive to the import of his subject. The old dotard at the Serapœum has no further English (obviously) than: Sacra' Bool! Sacra' Bool! and Bakshish and T'ank you, Sair!

The Catacombs par excellence, lie along the Rue Bab-el-Melouk south of Pompey's Pillar; but since we've been there before rather more often than once, they must be passed over.