APPROACH TO ISMAÏLIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL
The force of habit is very strong on many people, and if they approach the land of the Pharaohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from their usual habits on that account. When you consider how many hours there are for slumber, and how many are given to dances, you would think one hour of sleep might be spared out of a lifetime in order that you could see Port Said at night. There was a long line of lamps on the shore, like a gigantic row of footlights or a prairie fire along the horizon, and we passed towards this through buoys with red and green lights, with a long sea-wall reaching out on one side, and the natural reef of jagged rocks rising black out of the sea in the path of the moon on the other. Then black boats shot out from the shore and assailed us with strange cries, and men in turbans and long robes, and negroes in what looked like sacking, and which probably was sacking, but which could not hide the suppleness and strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high sides. These were the coal-trimmers making way for the black islands, filled with black coal and blacker men, who made fast to the side and began feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like an open fireplace in her iron side. Four braziers filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red flame from the corners of the barges, and in this light from out of the depths half-naked negroes ran shrieking and crying with baskets of coal on their shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and stood there for a second in the full glare of the opening until one could see the whites of their eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. Then they pitched the coal forward into the lighted opening, as though they were feeding a fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into the pit of blackness. The coal dust rose in great curtains of mist, through which the figures of the men and the red light showed dimly and with wavering outline, like shadows in an iron-mill, and through it all came their cries and shouts, and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled down into the hold.
Port Said occupies the same position to the waters of the world as Dodge City once did to the Western States of America—it is the meeting-place of vessels from every land over every water, just as Dodge City was the meeting-place of the great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy reached Dodge City after six months of constant riding by day and of sleeping under the stars by night, and with wild steers for company, he wanted wickedness in its worst form—such being the perversity of man. And you are told that Port Said offers to travellers and crew the same attractive features after a month or weeks of rough voyaging that Dodge City once offered to the trailsmen. In The Light that Failed we are told that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, that it is a sink of iniquity and a hole of vice, and a wild night in Port Said is described there with pitiless detail. Almost every young man who leaves home for the East is instructed by his friends to reproduce that night, or never return to civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller or ex-member of the Army of Occupation in Egypt that I met on this visit to the East either smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised his eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things—that it was the home of the most beautiful woman on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious place that man had created and God forgotten. One would naturally buy pocket-knives at Sheffield, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay in a stock of cigars if going to Havana; and so when guides in Continental cities and in the East have invited me to see and to buy strange things which caused me to doubt the morals of those who had gone before, I have always put them off, because I knew that some day I should visit Port Said. I did not want second-best and imitation wickedness, but the most awful wickedness of the entire world sounded as though it might prove most amusing. I expected a place blazing with lights, and with gambling-houses and cafés chantants open to the air, and sailors fighting with bare knives, and guides who cheated and robbed you, or led you to dives where you could be drugged and robbed by others.
STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAL
So I went on shore and gathered the guides together, and told them for the time being to sink their rivalry and to join with loyal local pride in showing me the worst Port Said could do. They consulted for some time, and then said that they were sorry, but the only gambling-house in the place closed at twelve, and so did the only café chantant; and as it was now nearly half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. I expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and said that Egypt was a great country, and that after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told them I had not meant to offend their pride of country, and that I was going to Cairo in order to see things almost as old as wickedness, and much more worth while, and that all I asked of Port Said was that it should live up to its name. I told them to hire a house, and wake the people in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, lowest, wickedest, and most vicious sights of which their city boasted; that I would give them four hours in which to do it, and what money they needed. I should like to print what, after long consultation, the five guides of Port Said—which is a place a half-mile across, and with which they were naturally acquainted—offered me as the acme of riotous dissipation. I do not do so, not because it would bring the blush to the cheek of the reader, but to the inhabitants of Port Said, who have enjoyed a notoriety they do not deserve, and who are like those desperadoes in the West who would rather be considered "bad" than the nonentities that they are. I bought photographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered a night of wild dissipation. Port Said may have been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling was last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling station. I would hate to be called a coaling station if I were Port Said, even by me.
When I awoke after my night of riot at Port Said the Sutlej was steaming slowly down the Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish and mud. On either side stretched long levels of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an occasional camel, bending and rocking, and scorning the rival ship at its side. You have heard so much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat that you rather expect, in your ignorance, to find the banks upheld by walls of masonry, and to pass through intricate locks from one level to another, or at least to see a well-beaten towpath at its side. But with the exception of dikes here and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, which show less of the hand of man than does a mill-dam at home, and you begin to think that Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick through the sand from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and twenty thousand negroes followed him and dug a ditch. On either side of this ditch you see reproduced in real life the big colored prints which hung on the walls of the Sunday-School. There are the buffaloes drawing the ploughs of wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked clay, and the ditches and water-works of two cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, and the strings of camels, and the veiled women carrying earthen jars on the left shoulder. And beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white and heavy, like our own, but dun-colored and fine, like dust, and over it amethyst skies bare of clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops again at Ismaïlia to let you off for Cairo, and the brave captains returning from leave, and the braver young women who are going out to work in hospitals, and the young wives with babies whom their fathers have not seen, and the commissioners returning to rule and bully a native prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted by donkey-boys who want you to ride "Mark Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or "Two-Pair-of-Black-Eyes-Oh-What-a-Surprise-Grand-Ole-Man." A jerky, rumbling train carries you from Ismaïlia past Tel-el-Kebir station, where the British army surprised the enemy by a night march and took a train back to Cairo in three hours. And then, after a five hours' ride, you stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends.