“The cadenced throbbing of a drum,
Now softly distant, now more near,
And in an almost human fashion
It, plaintive, wistful, seems to come
Laden with sighs of fitful passion.”
30th.
The mosquitoes last night were a reminder that we are no longer up on the high desert; they were maddening, in spite of a net. This morning everybody bathed and shaved and generally polished up. We rode across to the town in great style; past the palm-shaded gardens with fences of yellow “gerida”—palm branches; past the white rest house, on the terraced side of a curious conical hill called “The Hill of the Dead,” honeycombed with rock tombs; past the long low “Markaz,” where the mamur and the police guard turned out to see us; across the wide market square, and through the narrow streets between tall houses of sunbaked clay below the enormous high walls of the old town. The heat was already great, and the streets were almost deserted, except for a few recumbent figures in a shady corner of the market-place, who scrambled up as we rode by and then hurried off to tell their friends that the “Hagana”—Camel Corps—had arrived.
The Camel Corps barracks and the District Officer’s house are out on the sand about half a mile south of the town. They occupy two isolated rocks about a quarter of a mile apart, which were formerly the strongholds of two Siwan sheikhs. The District Officer’s house stands on a limestone rock about 50 feet high. It is a high house built of mud and palm log beams. To reach it one goes up a steep path in the rock with roughly cut steps on to a little terrace with a sort of loggia that opens through the building into the large courtyard behind, which is surrounded by a high loopholed wall. There are two rooms on the ground floor, both high and long, about 30 by 15 feet, and two more rooms above with a roofed loggia and an open roof. The rooms have three windows in each, with glass in them, the only glass in Siwa, facing north and looking across the grove of palm trees below the house to the strange-looking town on its two rocks. The house was built by the former District Officer, who added to the old Siwan fortress which existed there; it has a wonderful position and is high enough to be free from mosquitoes.
I spent a busy day settling down and fixing up things with S——, who starts with his section for the coast in two days. S——is heartily sick of Siwa and longing to see the last of it. We dined on the terrace outside—to the accompaniment of throbbing tom-toms over in the town—on soup, chicken, caramel pudding and a dish of every sort of fruit, which was a pleasant change after months on the coast without any. Caramel pudding is the “pièce de résistance” of every cook in Egypt; unless one orders the meal it always appears on the menu. S——’s cook is an indifferent one. Out here I have noticed a universal habit of considering, or pretending to consider, one’s own servants absolute paragons of virtue, honesty, cleanliness and skill, and invariably running down everybody else’s. I have heard men hold forth for hours on the excellent qualities of their Mohammed, or Abdel, knowing myself that Mohammed—or Abdel—or whatever his name may be, was a double-dyed villain and swindling his master right and left—but now I am doing it myself!
I think what impressed me most on arriving at Siwa was the intense heat, the excellent bathing, the enormous height and strange appearance of the town, and the incessant sound of tom-toms from sunset onwards. One misses “the slow shrill creak of the water wheels, a mournful cry, half groan, half wail,” which is such a feature of Egypt and the Sudan. The average temperature in the summer was about 108 degrees in the shade, or on warmer days 110 degrees or 112 degrees, but the nights were cool, and every evening regularly at about eight o’clock a little breeze blew across from the east and freshened things up. The only way to keep the house cool was by leaving the doors and windows open all night, and keeping them closed and tightly shuttered during the day. It resulted in dark rooms, but at least they were fairly cool and free from flies. I soon made the house very comfortable with some rough home-made furniture and a few carpets and mats.