“Is it as long as that since you left Egypt?”
“Yes; longer. I’ve been in Abyssinia since then.”
“Oh, of course, I remember now. It was in the papers. Building a railway for King Menelik, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. But the last eighteen months or so I’ve been idling—running about to theatres and museums and so forth. I began at Athens and finished up with London. I remember one day sitting on the steps of the Parthenon declaiming the Antigone—and a moment with some meaning in it seemed to have come at last.”
“But, dash it, man, you’re surely not comparing such trifles with a thing like the great Nile Barrage? You were on that for some years, weren’t you? Do let’s hear something about that. Up by the first cataract, wasn’t it? And hadn’t you enormous quarries there on the spot? You see, even sitting at home here, I haven’t quite lost touch. But you—good Lord! what things you must have seen! Fancy living at—what was the name of the town again?”
“Assuan,” answered Peer indifferently, looking out over the gardens, where more and more visitors kept arriving.
“They say the barrage is as great a miracle as the Pyramids. How many sluice-gates are there again—a hundred and . . . ?”
“Two hundred and sixteen,” said Peer. “Look!” he broke off. “Do you know those girls over there?” He nodded towards a party of girls in light dresses who were sitting down at a table close by.
Langberg shook his head. He was greedy for news from the great world without, which he had never had the luck to see.
“I’ve often wondered,” he went on, “how you managed to come to the front so in that sort of work—railways and barrages, and so forth—when, your original line was mechanical engineering. Of course you did do an extra year on the roads and railway side; but . . .”