A brougham on the road as we returned: Europe is at one side. But within sat a woman golden haired, with her veil pushed back and a cigarette between her teeth. That one passing, demure and dignified, with an attendant wrinkled and stately, is a Princess walking for her health. Here two in a victoria, with transparent veils and Paris bonnets, show Turkish emancipation; and the shut and blinded brougham with a Sudanese on the box gives sign of Arab propriety.
And now as the town is reached we begin to see the meaning of this modern city; those high walls are not merely meant to hide a garden of flowers, nor does the lattice serve only to keep the sunlight from fading Eastern fabrics. But behind the pierced work of that window peers some Scheherazade at her story-weaving, wondering what life means, “half sick of shadows.” There is the Pasha’s house, and the whisper goes that these are slaves.
A strange, pathetic figure trod this road daily, a man of aquiline face, brown skin, and pointed beard, dressed in a fine embroidered garment of scarlet with white cloth falling on his shoulders.
Evening by evening he left the town, and squatting by one of the sulphur streams looked out with level eyes towards the farthest horizon of the south, his beads held idly in his hands. That man, we learned, was the Pasha’s gatekeeper and came from the Sudan.
One day a crowd ran and digged by the side of this stream. “What are they doing?” we asked, and the answer was that they were making a garden. It will surely blossom like the rose—but not on those flowers will the gatekeeper gaze.
In the evening when the moon has risen, and a great star close to her tip hangs the banner of the Moslems in heaven, the magic is most potent. Then the flat-roofed houses become palaces of marble, and among the dark figures stealing through the street you look for Mesrour on his secret errands, that he may show you the mysteries of life and death behind veil and wall and lattice. Then one may well believe that over at Sakkara under the sand-hills the dead are sitting in their carven chambers, to play their games and cast their spells and eat and drink.
And yet in Europe they talk of freeing Egypt, and speak of the “patriot” dervish; and at Gordon’s death-place, where the gatekeeper was born and from which he was stolen, they entertain the Pasha with the honours of a burgess.
Who wakes? who dreams? Surely the Western eye sees clear, which looks on the place in the searching noonday light; for it is the hand of the Western that planted Villa Mon Bijou and raised the gas lamps.
Leave it then with its neat realities and its fancied magic; draw away over the sand towards the Great River and the dwellings of the dead; and as one might see across the great ocean a line of reef built up by tiny busy insects, so look back once to see over “immeasurable sand,” “the city sparkle like a grain of salt.”