“I’m perfectly serious,” said Peer, lifting his glass towards the other. “Come. Here’s to our old days together!”
“Aye—thanks, a thousand thanks—to our old days together!—Ah, delicious! Well, then, I suppose you’ve fallen in love away down there in the land of the barbarians? Haven’t you? Ha-ha-ha!”
“Do you call Egypt a land of barbarians?”
“Well, don’t the fellahs still yoke their wives to their ploughs?”
“A fellah will sit all night long outside his hut and gaze up at the stars and give himself time to dream. And a merchant prince in Vienna will dictate business letters in his automobile as he’s driving to the theatre, and write telegrams as he sits in the stalls. One fine day he’ll be sitting in his private box with a telephone at one ear and listening to the opera with the other. That’s what the miracles of science are doing for us. Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?”
“And you talk like that—a man that’s helped to harness the Nile, and has built railways through the desert?”
Peer shrugged his shoulders, and offered the other a cigar from his case. A waiter appeared with coffee.
“To help mankind to make quicker progress—is that nothing?”
“Lord! What I’d like to know is, where mankind are making for, that they’re in such a hurry.”
“That the Nile Barrage has doubled the production of corn in Egypt—created the possibilities of life for millions of human beings—is that nothing?”