He half turned. "Shall I take your things?"
"Oh, no. Besides, you've got your own. Coming?"
"Five minutes," he said. "I haven't been painting, you know."
Left alone, he looked away again over the town. In the middle distance, a minaret rose into the hot air. His gaze rested on it, and the train of thought he had had running through his mind more or less consciously all the morning since he had passed beneath its shadow in the street and stared in through the little entrance to the vestibule that was not screened from view, re-occurred to him. It concerned their whole journey. They had come overland to Marseilles, and had stopped twelve hours in Paris as Muriel wanted to do some shopping. Leaving the girls, then, he had gone up to Montmartre with the old ecclesiastical interest still keen in his mind, and thereafter had come down to Notre Dame. And in the two churches, a beginning to the lesson that the voyage seemed to be reading him, had been made.
The great modern church, with its flaunting colour and electric light and garish decorations, had been offered first. Herein the religious half of twentieth-century France placated God. At the door, great lists of names, business-like, methodical, were a perpetual prayer for the dead, the sick, specially needy souls, children, neophytes of the priesthood and all the other classes of that Catholic world. Under the blown bubble of the dome, worshippers came and went with eager faith. Without, the great carven figure of the Sacred Heart looked out across the city that this new temple was to save. Beneath, Paris laughed, and shopped, and went about its business in the more hidden streets and houses with French alacrity.
Notre Dame seemed to him an already half-deserted backwater. All the pageantry of the Middle Ages—bishop and cardinal, noble and king, peasant and soldier—had flowed in and out again through its great sombre austere doors, here, where massive pillars and narrow windows shut out the sun. The ancient stone effigy of the Mother of God was blackened and a little disreputable. She still had her candles, yes; but official France no more bowed before her, and modern France was trying a new supplication up on the hill. Ten thousand thousand prayers had been prayed here. As many broken hearts had wept here. Cui bono? For without, the Seine still slipped lazily by, and over her bridges passed the crowd that laughed and shopped and went about its business.
Naples had shown him Pompeii. It had been an unforgettable day when the three of them trod upon the old chariot-ruts in the gate of the ancient city. The roofless houses, the winding ways, the shops and baths and theatres, had been alive and peopled again in Paul's imagination. Neither the dust nor the tireless sun could daunt him as he toiled with his ultimately protesting companions in and out and up and down. He had seen the patrician roll by in his chariot, the gladiator boast and drink in the tavern, the slave girl laugh with her friends at the street corner, the Greek merchant jostle his way through the crowd with perspiring porters bearing his merchandise behind him. And then, in the temple of Apollo, he had seen the swaying crowd, the sacrosanct priest, the incense, the offering, the smiling god. A place of prayer again; older now; more ruined; an ancient outworn faith, but still the eternal place of prayer from which men had cried to the heavens above for the Kingdom of God on earth. Well, and in the streets of Pompeii, Americans laughed, and Cook's tourists bought spurious curiosities, and Neapolitan guides went about their business.
Here, in Port Said, at the door of the immemorial East, he had seen Jewish synagogue, Mohammedan mosque, Koptic chapel, Catholic cathedral and Anglican church. A thousand tongues of prayer, and all about them Port Said: courtesan, merchant, material, tawdry Port Said. British and French and Egyptian; Levantine and Syrian and Greek; American and Jew and cosmopolite, how they went about their business! They all wooed their gods one way and another, thought Paul, all but perhaps Ursula's nigger boys whose job was the hardest and dirtiest of all, and who laughed in the sun.
And then Paul laughed, and went below to luncheon.
They left at sunset, and after dinner, as in duty bound, the three of them drew chairs forrard the wind-screen and watched the steady blaze of the white searchlights as the ship's great eyes stared ahead at the narrow waterway, the steep engineered banks and the flat endless sands. Here and there dahabeeyahs, moored for the night, stood out for a few minutes with their thin spars black and graceful against that infinite white glare, and then slipped into the shadows behind. Dredging barges loomed monstrous and distorted, and dropped silently behind. Once a lonely Arab on a camel stood revealed in every detail, motionless, on the bank above, and once a long string of mules passed, padding through the night. And always there were the stars, and low down the Cross that Paul saw for the first time. The majority of their fellow-passengers stood and chatted for a few minutes and then went below for music or cards. But Ursula, Muriel and Paul sat on.