Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/489

Rh an atmosphere of "silent, voluptuous sadness." Major Pendennis reads the satirical expositions of knavish dragomen and travelling Cockaigne, and swears the Howadji is a fellow after his own (Major P.'s) heart (!), and that there's no nonsense about the man, no bosh in him, sir.

Knavish dragomen and their knight-errant victims are sketched amusingly enough among these Nile Notables. So are the crew of the Ibis; its old grey Egyptian captain, who crouched all day long over the tiller with a pipe in his mouth, and looked like a heap of blankets, smouldering away internally, and emitting smoke at a chance orifice; brawny, one-eyed Seyd, a clumsy being in the ape stage of development—slightly sensual, and with ulterior views upon the kitchen drippings—and alas, developing backwards, becoming more baboonish and less human every day; Saleh or Satan, a cross between the porcupine and the wild cat; together with a little old-maidish Bedouin, "who told wonderful stories to the crew, and prayed endlessly," and other grisly mariners, all bad workers, and lazy exceedingly—familiarity with whom bred decided contempt, and convinced the Howadji, in spite of his prepossessions to the contrary, that there is fallacy in the fashion which lauds the Orient, and prophesies a renewed grandeur ("as if the East could ever again be as bright as at sunrise")—and that if you would enjoy Egypt, you must be a poet, not a philosopher (the Howadji is a cross of both)—must be a pilgrim of beauty, not of morals or politics, if you would realise your dream. "The spent summer re-blooms no more," he says; "the Indian summer is but a memory and a delusion. The sole hope of the East is Western inoculation. The child must suckle the age of the parent, and even 'Medea's wondrous alchemy' will not restore its peculiar prime. If the East awakens, it will be no longer in the turban and red slippers, but in hat and boots. The West is the sea that advances for ever upon the shore—the shore cannot stay it, but becomes the bottom of the ocean. … Cairo is an English station to India, and the Howadji does not drink sherbet upon the Pyramids, but champagne." And thus he anticipates a speedy advent of the day when, under the sway of England or of Russia (after the lion and the polar bear have "shivered the desert silence with the roar of their struggle"), Father Ishmael shall be a sheikh of honour, but of dominion no longer, and sit turbaned in the chimney comer, while his hatted heirs rule the house—and the children cluster around him, fascinated with his beautiful