16th Aust. Battalion.
ANZAC IN EGYPT
1. MAHOMED—AND AUSTRALIA
Mahomed was Mahomed. He was also a guide. The combination meant that he knew everything, and what he didn’t know he made up, and what he made up he told so often that at last he believed it.
We were on the usual Nile excursion—made by nearly the whole Australasian force at one time or another—to Memphis and Sakkara.
A boat had been arranged, and Mahomed tried to entertain us on the boat. He did. Knowing our absence from home and wives, he gave us a full account of his three wives; also some obscure, but not uninteresting, details of their feelings towards each other. Each was “a pearl,” and he didn’t know which was the pearliest. The idyllic peace of Mrs. Mahomed in triplicate was enough to make one a follower of the Prophet.
His next dissertation was on the Koran. But theology doesn’t appeal much to soldiers. Padres have reduced their services to a maximum of twenty minutes. Before long our astute guide recognised a necessity of a change of subject. He gave us riddles—the riddle of the Sphinx: How one could divide equally between two men a ten-gallon flask of water with only three- and seven-gallon flasks to do it with. The best of us took nine moves to do it in; Mahomed did it in five—and looked humble. Then he gave us another: Four men and their wives are on one side of the Nile, and have to pass over to the other; but their jealousy will not allow any man to be alone with a lady not his wife. Mahomed threw this problem at us with an air of triumph. There was the boat, there were the four men, there were the four wives, there was the Nile.
The Nile was certainly there, and our puffing, stodgy steamer had gone two or three miles before we gave it up. We did give it up. Mahomed manipulated the ladies and their spouses with ease, landed each on the other side, all conventions being strictly observed.
Then the Pyramids came into view. We were rather tired of the Pyramids. But the guide wasn’t. What would a guide be without Pyramids—or the Pyramids without guides? So we heard again all their history. Each new Mahomed throws in a thousand years or two more or less. But what is a thousand years in Egypt?