Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/134

124] we have seen Coptic brides carried in torchlight procession, and together have watched the snake-charmer twine the hissing snakes round his bare arms; together we have seen the dervishes howl and sway, and now together we sit in divan, smoking and waiting for news of the arrival of the mail.

The ink is yet scarcely dry (and it doesn’t take long drying in Cario, I can tell you), on the notice stuck up over the letter-box in the hall,

“The homeward-bound passengers arrived at Suez last night. They will sleep to-night in Cairo, and go on to-morrow evening to Alexandria. The outward-bound passengers must therefore be ready to start to-morrow morning by the 7 train to Suez—A. Zech.”

The silence of Cairo at four o’clock in the day is intense; it may be busy in the bazaars where the ebb and flow is always as if for life and death, but here the stillness is death-like. The waiters sleep about on benches. The dragomans are all up the Nile, I suppose, fleecing and worrying travellers. There is nothing doing at the bar. No one ascends or descends the great stone staircase. The papers in the reading-room are not being read, and every sofa has an outward-bound dreaming and snoring of home upon it. The donkey-boys rest under the sycamore trees in gipsy-like groups, sleeping or gambling. Our own special boys are gone, I suppose, to their cafés to spend their earnings. Only now and then a poor Arab woman, clad in her lank dark-blue garment, passes, carrying a flapping bundle of long damp sugar-canes upon her head, or a sturdy Nubian groom, arrayed in robes white as sea-froth, struts by on his way to some pacha’s stables. Suddenly a long intense steam-whistle sounds faintly from the direction of the railway-station. Instantly the donkey-boys leap on their donkeys and disappear in a whirl of dust. Then four or five waiters, looking like indigent and rather disreputable curates, regardless of expense, rush into open carriages and tear off also to the station.

The mail has arrived. At once the hotel wakes to life; it swarms suddenly with dragomen—dragomen in shining sable shoes, dazzling scarves and gay turbans; dragomen with turquoise rings for sale on their chapped dirty fingers; dragomen with heavy pocket-books, of greasy testimonials and brass-headed staves; dragomen bowing, chattering, smirking, hopeful, shy and abject.

Presently a cloud of dust flies up the road, and scattering a throng of Arabs, out burst our Indian chivalry. Six homeward-bound appear on gallopping donkeys, the donkey-boys shouting and running for their lives, and calling out:

“This very good donkey, master; this Billy Barlow, master, very good. A-oorah, English donkey!”

And after them tear three open carriages, full of nankeen-coloured, and rather lack-lustre ladies, and after them more donkeys, and more open carriages, and pyramids of luggage, and more dragomen, and then ayahs and children, and Hindoo servants, in a rabble host.

All Hindostan is let loose upon us. English men, Indianised as timber is kyanised, come pouring in with wives, and daughters, and children, all tawny yellow, burnt, pale, dry, lean, or shrivelled. They have all an invalid, exhausted look, and are languid in their movements, and thin as to their voice. They wear wonderful expedients to guard their heads from the sun, and always the smaller the man, the bigger is the hat. There are washing bowls, and firemen’s helmets, and other hideous devices, some of which have tubes like the tubes of a cigar-case, or some horrible musical instrument inside the brim and all round the head, and heavy quilted capes. Other men have brown scarfs, called “puckerees,” or some such name, wound round their wideawakes, and the ends dangling down their backs. They all wear loose paletôts of nankeen-coloured, thin, gauzy stuff, and generally of a neutral, summery, and gossamer character. Surely those yellow men, with the sickly smile and low voices, taking a languid interest in the new place as being a relief after shipboard, and, at all events, one step nearer England, cannot be kinsmen of us outward-bound men, with the strong limbs, pleasant red and white faces, and roaring laugh—men who could actually pinch a Bengalee to death between their arms and their sides.

Yes, they are brothers, and sons, and nephews, and officers of the same regiment—only these are bound to India and those to England.

Observe the three distinct classes among the outward and homeward—the yellow men, who are all in a state of languid pleasure, for though very ill, they are all going home for a holiday, a long furlough.

The glum, yellow men: these are men whose holiday is over, and who are returning to their different presidencies, and fancy themselves ill again, and smell the hot air of the Bed Sea already with morbid anticipation.

Thirdly the rosy bluff men, generally young and noisy. These are cadets, going out for the first time; that colour on their young cheeks is called by some couleur de rose—a colour generally found to be a fugitive one, and one that will not stand much washing, not being a fast colour. They derive no moral from those yellow shadows, but go on their roadway, drinking their four-and-twenty glasses of brandy-and-water daily, and getting into scrapes at mosques, and pulling off the turbans of old Mohammedans, and generally affecting that grand conquering manner that makes this sort of Englishman so popular all over the world; another month and these youths will be scattered never to meet again, some on the hills, some round the Persian Gulf, some in the Punjab, and some among the furthest fortresses towards the Affghan.

By this time the confusion of the new arrival is at its height. The open carriages come dashing in from the station more like war chariots than decent hack vehicles. The bowing and grinning dragomen, who take you in a corner and show you letters drawn from greasy pocket-books, form quite an oriental regiment in the corridors and in the hall of Shepherds. The seedy clerical waiters run and cry “coming” and do not come, and “yes, sir,” when they mean “no, sir,” and are greeted by old friends, who are glad to see even a waiter who reminds them of England. There is