Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/51

Rh merely as an arrangement in browns, the faces of a Cairene crowd are a study in themselves. Between the light café-au-lait colour of the half-Westernised Levantine and the blue-black negroid from Abyssinia or the Soudan, there are well-nigh half a dozen different shades distinguishable to the attentive eye. The café-au-lait changes to chocolate, the chocolate to a kind of café noir, the kind that you complain of on grounds of defective strength; and this, again, to the kind that you complain of on the strength of excessive grounds. Then comes the lustreless jet, as of the unpolished boot; and then—last and lowest note of the gamut, the lower C, so to speak, in the descending scale of colour—comes that deep glossy ebony which might drive all the blacking manufacturers in the world to the despairing confession that, whatever a certain fashionable paradoxist of the day may say to the contrary, Nature is, here, at any rate, superior to art. It is from this point, however, that