Malcolm Skene had been three weeks among 'the flesh-pots of Egypt,' as he wrote to Roland Lindsay, since he landed from a great white 'trooper' at Alexandria.
It was now nearly the close of what is called the first season in that part of the world—that of the inundation of the Nile—which extends from the first of July to the winter solstice, and when, till the month preceding Skene's arrival, the whole country appears like one vast sea, in which the towns and villages rise like so many islands, and when the air is consequently moist, the mornings and evenings foggy; and Malcolm thought of what brown October was at home in his native land, where new vistas of hamlet and valley are seen through the half-stripped groves, a few hardy apples yet hang in the orchards, and nests are seen in the hedges where none were seen before; where the flocks are driven to fold as the dim sunset comes and the landscape assumes its sober hue, while the call of the partridge and of the few remaining birds on the low sighing wind, fall sadly on the ear. He thought of all this, and of the thick old woods that sheltered his ancestral home, where Dunnimarle looks down on the northern shore of the Forth.
He often thought of Hester Maule too, and why she had refused him, after all—after all he had been half led to hope.
'So—so,' he reflected, 'we shall live out the rest of our lives each without the other—forgetting and perhaps in time forgot.'
Thought was not dead nor memory faint yet, and he seemed, just then, to have no object to live for, save to kill both, if possible, amid any excitement that came to hand, and such was not wanting at that crisis both in Alexandria and Grand Cairo.
No fighting—though such was expected daily—was going on in the Upper Province or on its frontier; and to kill time, Skene more than once resorted to the gambling booths of the Greeks and Italians, as most of our officers did occasionally—a perilous resource at times, as the reader will admit, when we describe some of the events connected with them; and, curious to say, it was amid such scenes that Malcolm Skene was to hear some startling news of his friends at Earlshaugh.
Long before this he had 'done' Cairo, and seen all that was to been seen in that wonderful city, which, though less purely Oriental than Damascus, yet displays a more lively and varied kind of Oriental life than Constantinople itself; for there are still to be found the picturesque scenes and most of the dramatis personæ of the 'Arabian Nights'—and found side by side with the latest results of nineteenth century civilization. 'The short quarter of an hour's drive from the railway station,' says M'Coan, 'transports you into the very world of the Caliphs—the same as when Noureddin, Abou Shamma, Bedredden Hassan, Ali Cogia, the Jew Physician, and the rest of them played their parts any time since or before Saladin.'
A labyrinth of dark and tortuous lanes and alleys is the old city still—places where two donkeys cannot pass abreast, and the toppling stories and outshoots shut out the narrowest streak of sky; while the apparently masquerading crowd below seems unchanged from what it was when Elliot Warburton wrote of it a quarter of a century ago; 'Ladies wrapped closely in white veils; women of the lower classes carrying water on their heads, and only with a long blue garment that reveals too plainly the exquisite symmetry of the young, and the hideous deformity of the old; here are camels perched upon by black slaves, magpied with white napkins round their heads and loins; there are portly merchants, with turbans and long pipes, smoking on their knowing-looking donkeys; here an Arab dashes through the crowd at almost full gallop; or a European, still more haughtily, shoves aside the pompous-looking bearded throng; now a bridal or circumcising procession squeezes along, with music; now the running footmen of some Bey or Pacha endeavour to jostle you to the wall, till they recognise you as an Englishmen—one of that race whom they think the devil can't frighten or teach manners to.'
Now the streets and the Esbekeyeh Square are dotted by redcoats; the trumpets of our Hussars ring out in the Abbassiyeh Barracks; the drums of our infantry are heard at those of Kasr-el-Nil; and the pipes of the Highlanders ever and anon waken the echoes of El Kaleh, or the wondrous citadel of Saladin, with the 'March o' Lochiel,' or the pibroch of 'Donuill Dhu.'
Skene and his brother-officers enjoyed many a cigar on the low terrace in front of Shepheard's now historical hotel, under the shade of the acacia trees, watching the changing crowds in the modern street, which, with all its splendour, cannot compare with the picturesqueness of older Cairo; but the dresses are strangely beautiful, and the whole panorama seems part of a stage, rather than real life; while among the veiled women, the swarthy men in turban and tarboosh, the British orderly dragoon clanks past, or groups of heedless, thoughtless, and happy young officers set forth in open cabs to have a day at the Pyramids—an institution among our troops at Cairo—especially early in the day, when the air has that purity and freshness peculiar to a winter morning in Egypt, and towering skyward are seen those marvels in stone, of which it has been said, that 'Time mocks all things, but the Pyramids mock time!' and where the mighty Sphinx at their base, 'the Father of Terrors,' has its stony eyes for ever fixed on the desert—the gate of that other world, where the work of men's hands ends, and Eternity seems to begin.