Egypt had come to consider itself a European nation, but at the same time attempted to supplant Turkey as the leading power of Islam. This led to many anomalies. On the same day that my students staged their protest against the Professor of Arabic’s irreligious views, the students of El Azhar, the great Cairo theological college, refused to wear the prescribed Arab dress of kaftan and silk head-dress and appeared in European clothes and tarbouche. The tarbouche was the national hat which even British officials wore. I myself owned one. It would have been difficult to find a hat more unsuitable for the climate. Being red, it attracted the heat of the sun, got very stuffy inside, and had no brim to protect the neck against sunstroke.
My brother Dick behaved beautifully to me, as he has always done; and so did my romantic sister Mollie, who is a water-diviner and, by my advice, always wears a beauty-patch on her right cheek-bone. Her adoring husband. Judge Preston of the Mixed Courts, found himself greatly embarrassed at the Turf Club – which I refused to join for fear of involving Nancy in social calls from the wives of British officials – when she claimed that her son Martin (who closely resembled him in features) was a parthenogenous birth. One day, Mollie asked me about my confirmation; I told her that the Bishop of Zululand performed the ceremony, and she gave me a rapturous hug. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I knew we had lots in common! I was confirmed by the Bishop of Zanzibar!’
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I DID two useful pieces of educational work in Egypt. I ordered a consignment of standard text-books of English Literature for the Faculty Library at the University, and I acted as examiner to the diploma class of the Higher Training College which provided English teachers for the primary and secondary schools. I have kept three diploma essays as a memento – the first by one Mahmoud Mohammed Mahmoud:
Environment as a Factor in Evolution
This is the story of evolutions. Once it was thought that the earth’s crust was caused by catastrophes, but when Darwin came into the world and had a good deal of philosophy, he said: ‘All different kinds of species differ gradually as we go backwards and there is no catastrophes, and if we apply the fact upon previous predecessors we reach simpler and simpler predecessors, until we reach the Nature.’ Man, also, is under the evolutions. None can deny this if he could deny the sun in daylight. A child from the beginning of his birthday possesses instincts like to suckle his food from the mamel of his mother and many others. But he is free of habits and he is weak as anything. Then he is introduced into a house and usually finds himself among parents, and his body is either cleansed or left to the dirts. This shows his environment. Superficial thinkers are apt to look on environment as (at best) a trifle motive in bringing up, but learned men believe that a child born in the presence of some women who say a bad word, this word, as believed by them, remains in the brain of the child until it ejects.
Environment quickly supplies modification. The life of mountainous goats leads them to train themselves on jumping. The camel is flat-footed with hoofs for the sand. Some kind of cattle were wild in the past but lived in plain lands and changed into gentle sheep. The frog when young has her tail and nostrils like a fish, suitable for life at sea, but changing her environment, the tail decreased. The sea is broad and changeable, so those who live at sea are changeable and mysterious. Put a cow in a dirty damp place and she will become more and more slender until she die. Also horses; horse had five fingers on his legs but now one only from running for water in the draught. Climate also affects bodily habits of the dear Europeans who live in Egypt. They who were smart and patient and strong with a skin worth the name of weather-proof became also fatigable and fond of leisure… From the theory we learn that human beings should be improved like the beasts by creating healthy youngs and by good Freubel education.
The next essay is one written by Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammed:
The Character of Lady Macbeth
Sir, to write shortly, Lady Macbeth was brave and venturesome; but she had no tact. She says to Macbeth: ‘Now the opportunity creates itself, lose it not. Where is your manlihood in these suitable circumstances? I have children and I know the love of a mother’s heart. But you must know I would dash the child’s head and drive away the boneless teeth which are milking me rather than to give a promise and then leave it.’
Macbeth says: ‘But we may fail.’
‘Fail?’ says L.M. ‘But stick to the point and we will not fail. Leave the rest to me. I shall put drugs in the grooms’ drink and we shall ascuse them.’
Macbeth says: ‘You are fit to lay men-children only.’
The impression on the reader becomes very great and feels with anger.
The last essay is by one Mahmoud Mahmoud Mohammed:
The Best Use of Leisure Time
Leisure time is a variety to tireful affairs. God Almighty created the Universe in six days and took a rest in the seventh. He wished to teach us the necessity of leisure time. Man soon discovered by experience that ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’. But this leisure time may be dangerous and ill-used if the mind will not take its handle and move it wisely to different directions. Many people love idleness. It is a great prodigality which leads to ruin. Many Egyptians spend their times in cafés longing for women and tracking them with their eyes, which corrupts and pollutes manners. They are perplexed and annoyed by the length of daytime. Others try to rest through gumbling, which is the scourge of society and individual. But let us rather enjoy external nature, the beautiful leavy trees, the flourishing fields, and the vast lawns of green grass starred with myriad of flowers of greater or small size. There the birds sing and build their nests, the meandering canals flow with fresh water, and the happy peasants, toiling afar from the multitude of town life, purify the human wishes from personal stain. Also museums are instructive. It is quite wrong to keep to usual work and fatigable studies, but quite right to free our minds from the web of worldly affairs in which they are entangled.
Yes, let us with the lark leave our beds to enjoy the cool breeze before sunrise. Let us when the lasy or luxurious are snoring or sunk in their debaucheries sit under the shady trees and meditate. We can think of God, the river and the moon, and enjoy the reading of Gray’s Elegy to perfection. We shall brush the dues on the lawn at sunrise, for,
A country life is sweat
In moderate cold and heat.
Or we may read the Best Companions, books full of honourable passions, wise moral and good pathos; reading maketh a full man, nobody will deny Bacon. Or we may easily get a musical instrument at little price, ‘Every schoolboy knows’ that music is a moral law which gives a soul to the universe. Criminals can be cured by the sweet power of music. The whale came up from the dark depths of the sea to carry the Greek musician because it was affected by the sweet harmonies which hold a mirror up to nature. Are we not better than the whale? Also gymnastic clubs are spread everywhere. Why do a youth not pass his leisure time in widdening his chest? Because a sound mind is in a sound body. Yet it is a physiological fact that the blacksmith cannot spend his leisure time in striking iron or the soldier in military exercises. The blacksmith may go to see the Egyptian Exhibition and the soldier may go to the sea to practise swimming or to the mountains to know its caves in order that he may take shelter from a fierce enemy in time of war.
Milton knew the best uses of leisure time. He used to sit to his books reading, and to his music playing, and so put his name among the immortals. That was the case of Byron, Napoleon, Addison, and Palmerstone. And if a man is unhappy, says an ancient philosopher, it is his own fault. He can be happy if his leisure time brings profit and not disgrace.
I decided to resign. So did the Professor of Latin, my only English colleague. And the one-legged Professor of French Literature, who was an honest man. The others stayed on.
The Egyptians treated me hospitably. I attended one heavy banquet at the Semiramis Hotel, given by the Ministry of Education. Tall Sudanese waiters dressed in red robes served a succession of the most magnifice
nt dishes I had seen anywhere, even on the films. They included a great model of the Cairo Citadel in ice, its doors and windows filled with caviare – we used a golden Moorish spoon to scoop this out. Someone told me recently that this banquet, which must have cost thousands, has not yet been paid for. I found little to do in Egypt (not having Lawrence’s appetite for desert travel) but eat coffee-ices at Groppi’s, visit the open-air cinemas, and sit at home in our flat at Heliopolis and get on with writing. Mollie, who lived near, continued sisterly. During the season of the Khamsin, a hot wind that sent the temperature up on one occasion to 113 degrees in the shade, I put the finishing touches to a small book called Lars Porsena, or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language.
The best thing I saw in Egypt was the noble face of old Pharaoh Seti the Good, unwrapped of its mummy-cloths at the Cairo Museum. The funniest thing was a French bedroom-farce at a native theatre played in Arabic by Syrian actors. The men and women of the cast had, for religious reasons, to keep on opposite sides of the stage; they sang French songs (in translation), varying the tunes with the quarter-tones and shrieks and trills of their own music. The audience talked all the time and ate peanuts, oranges, sunflower-seeds, and heads of lettuces.
I went to call on Lord Lloyd at the end of May, just before the close of the academic year. Soon after, he invited me to dine at the Residency. I won twenty piastres off him at bridge and was told: ‘Collect it from my A.D.C.’; but felt that a loser should decently dip into his own trouser pocket to pay card-debts, so let the money go. Lloyd believed in his job more than I did in mine. When he asked me how I found Egypt, I answered: ‘All right,’ with an intonation that made him catch me up quickly. ‘Only all right?’ Nothing more passed between us. He used to drive through Cairo, at about sixty miles an hour, in a powerful car with a Union Jack flying from it, and motor-cyclist outriders to clear the way; for Sir Lee Stack, the Sirdar, had been killed in the previous year while driving through the city, and a traffic jam had materially helped his assassins. One day a student showed me the spot near the Ministry of Education where it happened. At first I took the crowd gathered there for a party of political sight-seers, but the attraction proved to be a stark naked woman lying on the pavement, laughing wildly and waving her arms – one of the hashish dope-cases then very common in Egypt. The crowd was jeering at her; a policeman standing a few yards off paid no heed.
I attended a levée at the Abdin Palace, King Fuad’s Cairo residence. It began at nine o’clock in the morning. The King gave honourable precedence to the University staff; we came in soon after the diplomatic corps and the Ministers of the Crown and some time before the army. While still in England, I had bought suitable clothes – a morning coat and trousers – for this occasion. To be really correct, my coat should have been faced with green silk, the national colour of Egypt, but I was told that this would not be insisted upon. Opinions differed greatly as to what constituted correct Court-dress. Most of the French professors arrived in full evening dress, with swallowtail coats, white waistcoats, and opera hats; a few, ordinary dinner jackets. All wore decorations around their necks. They looked like stragglers from an all-night fancy-dress ball.
After signing my name in the two large hotel-registers, one belonging to the King and the other to the Queen, I drank a refreshing and horribly sweet rice-drink, by courtesy of the Queen, and mounted the noble marble staircase. On every second step stood an enormous Nubian soldier, royally uniformed, with a lance in his hand. My soldier’s eye admired their physique, but deprecated their somewhat listless attitudes; still, no doubt, they pulled themselves smartly to attention as the Egyptian Army General Staff went past. My brother had warned me that, on meeting King Fuad, I must not be surprised at anything extraordinary I heard; a curious wheezing cry was apt to burst from his throat occasionally when he felt nervous. During his childhood, the family had been shot up by an assassin in the employ of interested relatives; but little Fuad took cover under a table and, though wounded, survived. We moved from room to room. At last, a quiet Turkish-looking gentleman of middle age, wearing regulation Court-dress, greeted us deferentially in French; I took him for the Grand Chamberlain. I bowed, said the same thing in French as the professor in front of me, and expected to be led along to the Throne Room. However, the next stage was the exit. I had already met King Fuad.
A few days later I attended a royal soirée – an Italian variety show. King Fuad had been educated in Italy, where he attained the rank of cavalry captain and learned a great regard for Italian culture. The performance belonged to the 1870s. A discreet blonde shepherdess did a hopping dance in ankle-length skirts, and a discreet tenor confined his passion to the top notes; and a well-behaved comedian made nice little jokes for the Queen. I clapped him, for having done his unsuccessful best to raise a laugh; but everybody glared round. An official whispered to me that, this being a command performance, the actors were entitled to no applause. Unless His Majesty professed himself amused, the turns must be greeted in silence. I wore Courtdress again but, not to be outdone by the Frenchmen, had put on my three campaigning medals – and regretted that I lost St Anne of the Third Class with the Crossed Swords. And those refreshments! I shall not attempt to describe the Arabian Nights buffet, so splendid that it has remained a mere blur in my memory. I pocketed some quite fantastic confections to bring home.
Our children had to drink boiled milk and boiled water, and be constantly watched in case they took off their solar topees and blue veils. Then they all got measles, so were carried off to an isolation hospital and fed on the things that we had been particular since their birth never to give them; and the native nurses stole their toys. They returned thin and wretched-looking – Sam, the baby, with permanently scarred ear-drums – and we wondered if we should ever get them safely home to England. We booked our passages some time at the end of May, but even after selling the car had only just enough money left to go third-class on a small Italian boat with a cargo of onions. We disembarked at Venice and stopped a day. After Egypt, Venice seemed like Heaven. We ate European eggs there for breakfast. Egyptian eggs were about the size of a pigeon’s egg and always tasted strongly of the garlic which seemed to form a large part of the Egyptian fowl’s diet.
Egypt gave me plenty of caricature scenes to look back on. For instance: myself wearing a smart yellow gabardine suit and seated at a long, baize-covered table in the Faculty Conference Room. Before me a cup of Turkish coffee, a solar topee, and a badly typed French record of the minutes of the last meeting. I am talking angry bad French at my Belgian and French colleagues in support of the young Professor of Latin, who has just leaped to his feet, pale with hatred. He is declaring in worse French that he positively refuses to make a forced contribution of fifty piastres to a memorial wreath for one of the Frenchmen (who had just died), since he was never consulted. I am declaring that neither will I, and that, since the Dean has made a point of excluding us from the previous meetings where he took decisions affecting our lectures, all dead French Professors can go bury themselves at their own expense. It is a lofty, elegant room, once a harem boudoir. A portrait of the Khedive, with a large rent in it, hangs crookedly at one end; at the other stands a large glass show-case, full of Egypto-Roman bronze coins, muddled together, their labels loose, and the glass cracked. Through the window, market-gardens, buffaloes, camels loaded with green fodder, country-women in black. Around the table my horrified, shrugging colleagues, turning to one another and saying: ‘Inoui… Inoui…’ And outside the rebellious shouts of our students, working themselves up for another strike.
The rest makes no more than conversation – of the Government clerk who was so doubly unfortunate as to be run over by a racing-car, and then recognize the driver as the eldest son of the Minister of Justice; and of the rich girl in search of a husband, who went as paying guest at fifteen guineas a week to a senior British official’s wife, agreeing to pay for all wines and cigars and extras when society came to dine but who, meeting only senior Go
vernment officials and their wives, complained that she did not get her money’s worth; and of my night visit to the temple of a headless monkey-god, full of bats; and of the English cotton-manufacturer who defended conditions in his factory on the ground that the population of Egypt had been increasing far too rapidly under British rule, and that pulmonary consumption remained one of the few checks on it; and of the lame student’s mother who, at the sports, said how much she regretted having put him on the mantelpiece when a baby and run off (being only twelve years old), to play with her dolls; and of ‘The Limit’, so named by Australian soldiers, who told my fortune accurately in moonlight, under the long shadow of the Cheops pyramid; and of my visit to Chawki Bey, the national poet of Egypt, in his Moorish mansion by the Nile, who was so like Thomas Hardy, and in whose presence his sons, like good Turks, sat dutifully silent; and of the beggar in the bazaar with too many toes; and of the British colonel who, during the war, on a dream of dearth, had played Joseph, dumping half the wheat of Australia in Egypt, where it found no buyers and was at last eaten by donkeys and camels; and of a visit to ancient dead Heliopolis, with its lovely landscape of green fields, its crooked palm trees, its water-wheels turned by oxen, and its single obelisk; and of our life in the other Heliopolis, a brand-new dead town on the desert’s edge, built by a Belgian company, complete with race-course and Luna Park, where the R.A.F. planes flew low at night among the houses, and where the bored wives of resentful officials wrote novels which they never finished, and painted a little in water colours; and of the little garden of our flat, where I went walking on the first day, among the fruit trees and flowering shrubs, but came upon no less than eight lean and mangy cats dozing in the beds, and never walked there again…