people I sympathize with.
Rising in the unsteady boat, I raise my umbrella and tell the ungrateful devil, “Get me to shore!”
3
Safely ensconced in an open carriage with my companions as the sun’s oppressive heat beats down on us, we make our way along a narrow, unpaved Port Said roadway alive with people and animals, the swirl of dust, and noise from every quarter—a street symphony punctuated with the bray of donkeys, the shouts of street vendors, and the glee of children.
Two- and three-story buildings, with large enclosed balconies that project out far enough to shade the crowded passages below, shoulder both sides of the street. The balcony windows, made of wood tarnished by time, are latticed with lovely Eastern motifs.
The uncommon sights, sounds, and smells wrinkle Lady Warton’s nose but are a feast for the eyes of a young woman from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.
My companions busy themselves talking about the strategic importance of the Suez Canal while I smile in wonder as a cloud of pigeons on a terrace above take wing as a black-veiled woman walks among them like a magician releasing an entire flock.
We pass a train of camels carrying firewood, kicking up dust on an old man with hard years etched on his face sitting cross-legged on the curb, loaves of flat bread for sale lined up on newspapers beside him; a fat merchant wearing a red Turkish fez and straddling a small donkey clutches a metal box tightly to his chest as a fierce Saracen with a wicked-looking curved sword clears the way in front of him.
The streets are alive and the people have a strange flavor to me: servants— slaves , Von Reich says, despite the pretense of slavery being illegal—get up from sleeping on the ground outside of houses and go inside to work; men and women are clothed from head to foot in long, loose-fitting cloaklike garments. Girls without veils and women with their faces hidden go to a nearby well to draw water and carry it back in clay pots balanced on their heads; a little boy leads a cow with a rope from house to house, milking the cow into jars brought out by householders. The milk boy carries a stuffed toy calf to fool the cow into giving milk.
“Would a cow really believe a stuffed toy is her child?” I ask Von Reich, our expert on everything Egyptian. He had spent a year advising the government on an engineering matter.
“Perhaps not in America, but in Egypt, who knows? In this strange land, where it is said that the sphinx rises on moonless nights and runs across the desert like a jackal, and mummies dead thousands of years rise from their tombs, the unexplainable is not always unimaginable.”
We rumble by a line of men balancing bulging goatskin bags on wood poles across their shoulders.
“Public water carriers,” Von Reich says.
Their bodies are skeletal, as if the hot desert sun had melted away all their flesh except for a layer of skin as rough as papyrus. Though they’re not in shackles, they remind me of a chain gang. “How do they survive such hard work in this brutal heat?”
“Necessity.”
My companions for the day appear to be strange bedfellows not only to me, but to each other. The Viennese inventor is relaxed and amiable, even a bit of a bonhomie , while the British peer and his wife appear aloof, standoffish to the point of snobbishness, but I suppose they have a common ground in business. Von Reich has told me he is traveling with the Wartons to Hong Kong and on to Washington, D.C., on a business matter concerning an explosive he has patented.
The Austrian introduced himself to me while I was walking on the deck the first morning at sea after we left Italy.
A dapper gentleman with well-cut clothes and a starched mannerism, Von Reich is built broad with a closely shaven head and a gold monocle custom manufactured to fit comfortably and securely in his right eye; a flamboyant mustache with long curved ends that resemble the handlebars of a
Rising in the unsteady boat, I raise my umbrella and tell the ungrateful devil, “Get me to shore!”
3
Safely ensconced in an open carriage with my companions as the sun’s oppressive heat beats down on us, we make our way along a narrow, unpaved Port Said roadway alive with people and animals, the swirl of dust, and noise from every quarter—a street symphony punctuated with the bray of donkeys, the shouts of street vendors, and the glee of children.
Two- and three-story buildings, with large enclosed balconies that project out far enough to shade the crowded passages below, shoulder both sides of the street. The balcony windows, made of wood tarnished by time, are latticed with lovely Eastern motifs.
The uncommon sights, sounds, and smells wrinkle Lady Warton’s nose but are a feast for the eyes of a young woman from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.
My companions busy themselves talking about the strategic importance of the Suez Canal while I smile in wonder as a cloud of pigeons on a terrace above take wing as a black-veiled woman walks among them like a magician releasing an entire flock.
We pass a train of camels carrying firewood, kicking up dust on an old man with hard years etched on his face sitting cross-legged on the curb, loaves of flat bread for sale lined up on newspapers beside him; a fat merchant wearing a red Turkish fez and straddling a small donkey clutches a metal box tightly to his chest as a fierce Saracen with a wicked-looking curved sword clears the way in front of him.
The streets are alive and the people have a strange flavor to me: servants— slaves , Von Reich says, despite the pretense of slavery being illegal—get up from sleeping on the ground outside of houses and go inside to work; men and women are clothed from head to foot in long, loose-fitting cloaklike garments. Girls without veils and women with their faces hidden go to a nearby well to draw water and carry it back in clay pots balanced on their heads; a little boy leads a cow with a rope from house to house, milking the cow into jars brought out by householders. The milk boy carries a stuffed toy calf to fool the cow into giving milk.
“Would a cow really believe a stuffed toy is her child?” I ask Von Reich, our expert on everything Egyptian. He had spent a year advising the government on an engineering matter.
“Perhaps not in America, but in Egypt, who knows? In this strange land, where it is said that the sphinx rises on moonless nights and runs across the desert like a jackal, and mummies dead thousands of years rise from their tombs, the unexplainable is not always unimaginable.”
We rumble by a line of men balancing bulging goatskin bags on wood poles across their shoulders.
“Public water carriers,” Von Reich says.
Their bodies are skeletal, as if the hot desert sun had melted away all their flesh except for a layer of skin as rough as papyrus. Though they’re not in shackles, they remind me of a chain gang. “How do they survive such hard work in this brutal heat?”
“Necessity.”
My companions for the day appear to be strange bedfellows not only to me, but to each other. The Viennese inventor is relaxed and amiable, even a bit of a bonhomie , while the British peer and his wife appear aloof, standoffish to the point of snobbishness, but I suppose they have a common ground in business. Von Reich has told me he is traveling with the Wartons to Hong Kong and on to Washington, D.C., on a business matter concerning an explosive he has patented.
The Austrian introduced himself to me while I was walking on the deck the first morning at sea after we left Italy.
A dapper gentleman with well-cut clothes and a starched mannerism, Von Reich is built broad with a closely shaven head and a gold monocle custom manufactured to fit comfortably and securely in his right eye; a flamboyant mustache with long curved ends that resemble the handlebars of a
Similar Books
What The Heart Desires
Erica Storm
Now You See Me
Emma Haughton
Personal Pleasures
Rose Macaulay
Stan Musial
George Vecsey
The Box
Unknown
Outrage
John Sandford
Man-Eaters
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Hope Rekindled
Tracie Peterson
The Bards of Bone Plain
Patricia A. McKillip
Tales of Aradia The Last Witch Volume 1
L.A. Jones