We had had no word of news for weeks. So we eagerly searched for the newspapers, and demanded news of the outer world. The war was still on. The Allies were more than holding their own. Here was news indeed!—news such as The Transport Trumpeter (published aboard the Suevic) had never heard of. Yet we loved that little paper of ours on the transport—"a little thing, but our own." If it lacked news it did not lack reporters whose imagination made up for the deficiency. We were all reporters for The Transport Trumpeter. Even I. And I am wondering to this day about a certain curious coincidence connected with one of my painstaking efforts. I wrote on December 28, 1914, a skit on Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate," and Arthur Adam's reply to it—"My Friend, Remember." A month later I got the Sydney Bulletin, and there I saw almost exactly the same article with the same excerpts from each poem. They were probably written on the same day, a thousand miles or so apart. You who delve into the mysterious, will you explain?
Egypt! What memories! What life here! What a quest we have set out upon! What Alexanders are we!
I feel the blood coursing through my veins as I have never felt it before. I live in the present, but the past stands up before me. Dead kings and emperors pass in endless succession. Libyans and Ethiopians pass by, Assyrians and Macedonians, Babylonians and Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks and Mamelukes—and French and British. Great names are sprinkled over the pages of Egypt, from Menes, the first king, and Rameses the Second, down to the present day. Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great, Constantine, Saladin and Napoleon, Mohammed Ali and Kitchener have all left their mark on the Nile Delta. What history! and here are we—soldiers of King George V, from Australia—treading this historic ground, making new history. Nebuchadnezzar knew us not. Constantine never dreamed—and they used to dream dreams in those days—that from a land he knew not of would one day come armed men marching on the wonderful city he built.
Nor did I, nor did any of us, know it—well, not yet.
I know what it means to see the blush clouds beating the night shades back in the van of a golden morning, but there is a quality of richness about the sunrises of Egypt that Australia lacks. Egypt has the glint of gold, the cloud ridges of rosy red, the blaze of amethyst and opal. So also has the Australian sky. But Australia has no pyramids. The first beams of the sun in this land tip the cones of the age-old pyramids, and soon these drab giants shine like molten copper. Then the sky turns all gold, and the scene is duplicated in the placid bosom of the ancient Nile, which skirts our camp. In the murky distance the desert is shrouded in a misty haze which has the same blue that one sees in the distance on the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, but once the sun is fairly above the horizon, the brilliant transformation scene dissolves itself into a glaring white light that lasts till sunset. Then the morning's glory is reenacted with softer tones and a riot of colour that I can never describe.
Then, as the Pyramids of Gizeh were due west from Ma'adi, we always saw these giant triangles sharply silhouetted against the red horizon. They looked like little toy tents, yet when alongside them their magnitude staggered us.
The day was so hot that helmets were necessary. Some "went down" under the fierce rays of the sun, but there were some with us who said it was not hot at all. They spoke of the sun-baked Western Plains. They spoke of Bourke. They spoke of Northern Queensland. But they wore helmets, nevertheless.
Yet was Ma'adi, for all its heat, a joy to the senses. If we had the everlasting desert wilderness on one side, we also had the oasis of Ma'adi on the other. The irrigationist has caused the desert hereabout to blossom as the rose, and Ma'adi is like an English village, with gracious gardens and green, luscious fields and rippling canals.
I have spoken of the blue of the desert haze that is like that of the Blue Mountains. And here and there one finds other touches of old Australia. I went out one day to Sir Alexander Baird's beautiful mansion near Zeitoun, and there I saw some fine old gums and wattles; and it just felt like home.