The towns of this route increase in size as we progress. Port Said spreads herself out to prodigal limits.... On a nearer approach you may see the wharves of the Arabian side lined with coal-tramps, backed in like so many vans and disgorging into barges. There is the flash of a grin, the white of an eye. The Port-side is the more interesting. The finest buildings of the city would seem to be standing along the water's edge. The business advertisements of the most cosmopolitan city in the world are emphatically English; the signs for Kodak, and Lipton's, and King George the Fourth Whisky, and the rest of them, look familiarly out.
The touch of war is to be seen at any interval along the Canal; here it is laid on with a trowel. Ghurkas are encamped in the suburb; reclining at the foot of the Admiralty steps is a submarine rusted and disfigured; ten minutes after, you pass the seaplane station; and before the ship is at rest a hydroplane has buzzed over our masthead and taken the water for a half-mile at the stern. Before dark three monoplanes and a biplane have swept in out of the southern distance and gone to roost after their scouting flight.
We were anchored within fifty yards of the heart of the city. One knew not whether to be galled by the proximity of our prison-house to the blandishments of such a city or grateful for a proximity which let us see so much of it from deck. Seen through a glass, Arab, Frenchmen, Italian, British, Yankee, Jap, and Jew justified the cosmopolitan reputation of a city mid-set on the trade-route between the East and West. The Canal here is gay as a Venetian highway and busy with flying official cutters and pleasure craft and native boats. These last swarmed to the side and drove a trade that was fierce; for the night was coming, when no man could work at that. This was the degenerate East indeed—not a cigar to be had, nothing to smoke but cheap and foul Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes, fit food for eunuchs and such effeminate rascals—for their vendors (for example) dressed in a most ambiguous skirt: you never know whether, beneath skirt and turban, you have a man or a woman!
The money-getters over the side included, here, a boat-load of serenaders and one of jugglers. The first rung the changes on their orchestra and their throats until we were as tired as they; and in consequence their gorgeous parasol, gaping for coin in the hands of the boy, gathered in some missiles whose purchasing power was not high. The jugglers were more deserving.
The same unhallowed load of black bargees as at Aden came alongside to coal and make night hideous. But they worked harder—time was short and the boss used a rope's-end, and actually "laid out" more than one who dared to stop for scraps thrown. They eked out their industry with an alleged chant, echoed in derision by the troops all over the ship. About midnight firing—or its equivalent—began to the south. At the sound of guns the Mohammedan bargees forgot their labours and the rope's-end—as did the boss, together with his authority—cast aside their baskets, and incontinently fell on their faces in the coal-dust and called in terror upon Allah.
Soon after dawn we stood out for Alexandria, and were there early the following morning. The sun rising behind the city cast into flat black Pompey's Pillar and the Port. It was hard to see, in the first blush, in this city—when the sun had risen above it—a centre of action of Pompey and of Alexander and of Cæsar. There is a curious blending of age and of what is intensely modern; and so it is more easy to conceive Sir Charles Beresford bombarding from the Condor, with Admiral Seymour pounding from behind; or Napoleon storming the citadel. From our anchorage it was with ease we saw the scene of bombardment and the converging-point from which the Egyptians fled helter-skelter to the hinterland.
Anchored in the harbour, we supposed by habit we should have to be content with externals and with conjecture as to what was to be seen in the midst of the city. But we loitered some days to disembark infantry, and leave was granted freely. One would have easily given a month's pay for a day ashore—apart from the month's pay he could spend there—had that been necessary.
Your first business after leaving the gangway is to stave-off the horde of beggars and gharry-drivers (an Australian cab-rank is put to shame here) and choose one of the latter's vehicles approximately respectable. It takes ten minutes' brisk driving to get you well out of the labyrinth of wharves, docks, and dhows. You emerge by one of seven dock-gates, vigilated by native police, into the Arab quarter, by which alone approach to the city proper is possible. Cook's tourists drive hurriedly through this region, and protect their eyes and noses with the daily newspaper. The wise man knows that if he is to see Alexandria he will dismiss the gharry and walk—and walk slowly—through the native-quarter. In fact, he will care not a damn whether he ever gets to imposing French and English residential quarters or not....
So, in your wonder at the utter strangeness of everything you overpay the driver some five piastres and begin to thread your way over the cobbles. All building is of stone, with a facing of cement, which once was bright-coloured, but has faded into faint blues and browns and greys; and if you look up and along the street of crumbling, flat-faced upper storeys broken by tiny balconies, you feel intensely the gentle irregularity and the mass of mellow colour. The one and the other is never seen in Australia, with our new shining-painted angularities of hardwood and bright nails and eaves and gables and sharp-sloping roofs. A gentle irregularity, in a street where boards thrust out and planks give way and vulgarly project themselves, where neither roofs nor fronts are flat, is unknown in our country.