That was a Sunday morning. The Anglican parson at matins later tried lamely to reassure a sparse congregation by preaching futilely from the text: "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." The latter end of his discourse was drowned in the pitiful Zaghareet raised by the Egyptian women next door: they had lost a man in the night. Their shrill, ear-splitting wail submerged the sermon. There was an end of reassurance—even supposing it had ever begun.
The raid had come close on the heels of the Casino dance. The Casino is the best hotel in Port Said, which is to say a good deal. Every Saturday night the Casino "gives" a dance to the quality of the Port. There you will see the best. It's always worth going to. Quite half the European population of the town is composed of the British Government officials and their wives and daughters, English visitors from the mail-boat en route, the French Canal Company's officials and their families, and the wives of British naval and military officers stationed here. There is probably as pure a quality of European beauty, well-breeding, and accomplishment as you'll meet outside Britain and France. The women and the naval officers know how to dance. So much cannot be said of the Army's representatives. They consist chiefly in stout Colonels and somewhat young and frisky Subalterns. But apart from that, they may not carry with them the ballroom gear that a naval officer can stow in his quasi-permanent home. A valise or a kit-bag is another thing from a sea-chest, nor is a moving tent a snug and cupboarded cabin. Especially the French flappers, with their delicate transparent beauty, dance with an exquisite grace, and the French dowager-chaperons sit at an end of the room far less sedately than British duennas. The English Subalterns who can speak French find the flappers rising easily to the level of their spirits in the intervals on the dimly-lit piazza; and they probably are not ungrateful that the fear of a nocturnal bombardment from the sea has extorted from the authorities an order obliging the proprietor to subdue his sea-front lights.
They're great nights. There's no such stuff in anybody's thoughts as Taubes. Yet on that Sunday morning many a girl and many a dowager could hardly have put head to pillow before the first bomb crashed. A little earlier timing on the part of Fritz, and the sound of revelry by night would have been far more rudely hushed than was that of Brussels long ago by the distant gun on the eve of Waterloo. The period of this war is surcharged with dramatic situations more intense than were held by Belgium's capital then. But there is no Byron to limn them.
The Casino denizens you will find in the surf before the hotel any morning after eleven. The girl who was so charming last night is no less charming now, as she moves across the sand. She wears almost as much this morning. All that this means (whatever it may seem to imply) is that her bathing-dress is ultra-elaborate. There is a great deal of it; and it includes stockings; and is so fine in texture and harmonious in colour that you wonder she has the heart to wet it. But there—she's in. You wait till she comes out, and marvel that she hardly has suffered a sea-change.
The surf between eleven and one any day; the Eastern Exchange open-café from eleven to five on Sunday; and the de Lesseps Mole from three to six on a Sunday afternoon: it is there and then you will see Port Said representatively taking the air—or the waters. The Eastern is the heart of the City; to sit sipping there during a pleasant Sabbath afternoon is the equivalent of doing the "Block" in Melbourne. The de Lesseps Pier will reveal the utterly cosmopolitan character of the populace: all classes promenade it. And the great bronze engineer towers over them and points his scroll down the mouth of his handiwork; and embossed boldly on the pedestal is his own boast: Aperire terram centibus. The gigantic de Lesseps is a landmark of the whole sea-front. He faces, and points the way to, every East-bound ship that enters his Canal. There is a sort of pride in his bearing.
The streets are tree-lined and over-arched, and the tables are set out beneath the boughs; and there is singing and dancing in the open air at every café. There is a finely fashioned and adorned Greek church. Nothing expresses the cosmopolitan nature of the floating populace better than the extraordinary notice on the inner wall of the Roman Catholic Cathedral: Proibito di sputare in terram.
There are two cabarets—Maxime's and the Kursaal—where wine and fornication is the business, driven unblushingly, as one has come to expect in any part of Egypt. As these things go in the land, Port Said is amazingly clean. It was not ever so. A deliberate campaign was lately organised to purge. The segregation of the Arab quarter did much to effect that. Five years ago the Port was the carnal sink of Egypt. Now Cairo is.
We were hurried back to Serapœum for the move. This had been pending any time the last two months: the Turkish feints beyond railhead had delayed it. But it had come now. We were in the desert a bare thirty-six hours. We entrained in the scorching afternoon. The khamseen was whispering potentially, but not menacingly. We moved out in the cool of the afternoon. Nefisha was passed, with its hordes of bints and wales hawking chocolate, fruits, and fizzy drinks—and hawking successfully ... on through Ismailia cooling off under her fir-groves beside the delicious lake ... up through Mahsamah, where the flights to the Canal had made their first footsore halt ... on and on, taking our last look on the soft evening desert, and keeping the placid sweet-water Canal. We felt we were seeing it all for the last time. And we hoped we were, though now it looked inviting enough. But it was not the desert normal, and well we knew it; we had seen too often this seductive evening gentleness turn to relentless blistering heat in the morning.... On through Kassassin, always—since reading the Tel-el-Kebir epitaphs—the scene of that "midnight charge" ... up to Tel-el-Kebir itself, its miles of tents darkening beside the hanging dhow-sails ... through Zagazig in the late dusk, with its close-packed houses and its semi-nudes in the upper stories ... and so on into the night, with snatches of sleep, until we were wakened at 2 a.m. by the sudden stop and the bustle at the Alexandrian quays.... The three hours' embarking of men and baggage, and so to bunk, and white sheets and yielding mattress and the feeling of a room about one—and to sleep.
There were a few hours' leave next day, when we took a last affectionate perambulation about the well-loved, well-bred city. And as we breakfasted next morning we were moving out of the inner harbour. By ten we could look back at the brown towers, and see the place as a whole from the low strip of Mex, away to the eastern sand-dunes at Ramleh. Alexandria had been good to us, and it was hard to leave her, whatever the exaltation of anticipating the new field. Egypt as a whole, despite its stinks, its filth, its crude lasciviousness, its desert sand and flies, heat and fiery, dusty blasts, had charmed and amazed and compensated in a thousand ways. It was our introduction to foreign-ness, and, as such, had made an arresting impression that could never be deleted. France may cause us less discomfort, and may hold a glamour and a brilliance of which Egypt knows nothing; but the impression left by France can hardly be more vivid than that of Egypt, our first-love in the world at large.