She did it with leisure and comfort this time, to find the Arab's great white steam yacht waiting to race her to Ismailiah.
She had looked round for the man she loved, but had seen him only when, with great pomp and circumstance, she landed on the other side.
The whole of the town had turned out, so that the white car in which she made the short trajet between the landing-place and the station passed between a lane lined with male faces, dusky, dark brown, and light tan, thousands of soft eyes sparkling over the all-hiding, all-attractive yashmak, and a dotted line, well in the forefront of the leather-brown, European physiognomies, of those who nudged and pointed, exclaiming aloud, so that their words carried even into the interior of the closed car, upon their luck of seeing a real native show.
With grave obeisance to the woman, Hahmed the Arab had entered his special train, which preceded Jill's by ten minutes, so that when she arrived at Cairo Central Station, surrounded by her armed guard, and with her duenna rocking painfully by her side in a pair of over small shoes, a little scared at the sea of faces, and the echo of the voices of those who stood outside, kept in order by the swash-buckling native police of fez ornamented heads, she had stood transfixed, wondering what on earth she should do next.
Verily, the Eastern can carry off a situation which would undoubtedly fill the Western with consternation.
Perhaps the clothing has as much to do with it as any national traits, for surely no man in stove-pipe trousers, and all that goes to the well-looking of these garments, could have so composedly traversed the broad flower-strewn carpet, laid with the consent of the authorities and no little distribution of backsheesh upon the dusty station, and making deep obeisance, have so serenely led the little cloaked and veiled figure to the gorgeously caparisoned (if one may apply that term to the ship of the desert's rigging) camel, which sprawled its neck upon the ground for the benefit of the motley crowd without.
Anyway, it was an unbelievable thing to happen in Egypt, the land of veiled and secluded women. It was wonderful enough to know that the great Hahmed was taking unto himself a wife, but that that wife should suddenly appear from out of the desert unknown, unseen—well, it took one's breath away, indeed it did, but well again—seeing the wealth and power of the man, it was wiser to rejoice than to quibble and gossip upon such doings.
So all along the Sharia Clot Bey, which is the electrically lit, motor filled, modern shop-lined road leading from the station, Jill peeped between the curtains at the throngs of jubilant natives, and the surrounding Western looking buildings.
She felt hurt to the soul by the modernity of the latter, just as she had been hurt on arriving in Rome and Venice, until later on she had found balm in the old stones and streets and buildings of both places hidden behind the twentieth century.
Jill knew that she was being taken to the palace of the old Sheikh, uncle of the man she was about to wed, but where it was she had no idea, nor of the names of the streets, the mosques or the palaces and the mansions she could spy upon, from between her satin curtains, on her way to the Bab-es-Shweyla gate. The route they had taken in the glow of the setting sun, once they had left European Cairo behind, lay through the El Katai quarter, having chosen the road leading from the mosque of Sultan Hassan, through the Bazaar of the Amourers to reach the great gate, the very heart of old Cairo.