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The dealer vowed and protested that he never paid commissions to anyone. Mahmoud, not at all ruffled by the attack on his character, said that his only ambition in life was to serve the noble gentleman from the famous country known as Iowa. So Mr. Peasley bought his assortment of antiques, and Mahmoud looked on and then carried the parcel back to the hotel, walking respectfully behind the "noble gentleman."
"Well, I blew myself," reported Mr. Peasley. "And I'll bet a thousand dollars that Mahmoud gets his ten per cent."
Whereupon Mahmoud smiled – the pensive, patronising smile of a civilisation five thousand years old looking down on the aboriginal product of the Western prairies.
On the morning of our departure from Luxor Mahmoud came around for his letter of recommendation. I had worked for an hour to write something evasive which would satisfy him and not perjure me too deeply. When he came to the hotel I gave him the following: —
To Whom It May Concern: – The bearer, Mahmoud, has been our dragoman for four days and has attended us faithfully at all hours; also, he has shown us as many temples as we wished to see.
He looked at the paper blankly and said, "I do not read English." At that Mr. Peasley brightened up. He read the testimonial aloud to Mahmoud and declared that it was incomplete and unworthy of the subject matter. In ten minutes he completed the following and the dragoman took it away with him, highly pleased: —
To Whom It May Concern – Greeting: – The bearer, Mahmoud, is a dragoman of monumental mendacity and commercial Machiavellism. His simulated efforts to faithfully serve us and protect our interests have had an altogether negative effect. Anyone employing him will find him possessed of moral turpitude and a superlative consciousness of his own worth. His knowledge of Egyptian history is enormously inconsequential, while his English vocabulary is amazing in its variety of verbal catastrophes. We commend him to travellers desirous of studying the native characteristics of the most geological stratum of society.
"He has made a lot of trouble for us, and now we've got even by ruining him," said Mr. Peasley.
It seemed a joke at the time, but later on, when we thought it over, we felt sorry for Mahmoud and wished we had not taken such a mean advantage of him. After all is said and done, a man must make a living.
On our way back to Cairo from Assouan we stopped over at Luxor. Mahmoud, by intuition or through telepathy, knew that we were coming and met us at the station. He was overjoyed to see us again.
"I showed your letter to a gentleman from the Kingdom of Ohio," said he, "and it procured for me one of the best jobs I ever had."
IN CAIRO
CHAPTER XX
MR. PEASLEY AND HIS FINAL SIZE-UP OF EGYPT
On the morning of our hurried pack up and get away from Luxor we lost Mr. Peasley. It was a half-hour before the sailing of the boat, and we were attempting to lock trunks, call in the porters, give directions as to forwarding mail, and tip everybody except the proprietor all at the same time.
This excruciating crisis comes with every departure. The fear of missing the boat, the lurking suspicion that several articles have been left in lower drawers or under the sofa, the dread of overlooking some worthy menial who is entitled to baksheesh, the uneasy conviction that the bill contains several over-charges – all these combine to produce a mental condition about halfway between plain "rattles" and female hysteria. And then, to add to the horror of the situation, Mr. Peasley had disappeared.
All hands were needed – one to boss the porters, another to round up the tippees, another to audit the charges for "extras," another to make a final search for razor strops and hot water bags (of which we had left a trail from Chicago to Cairo). Instead of attending to these really important duties we were loping madly about the hotel looking for Peasley. We asked one another why we had invited him to join the party. We called him all the names that we had invented on the trip to fit his unusual personality. One of these was a "flat-headed fush." I don't know what a "fush" is, but the more you study it and repeat it over to yourself, the more horrible becomes the full significance of the word. Also we called him a "swozzie," which means a chump who has gone on and on, exploring the furthermost regions of idiocy, until even his most daring companions are left far behind. We called Mr. Peasley a "wall-eyed spingo," the latter being a mullet that has lost all sense of shame. Ordinary abuse and profanity became weak and ineffective when pitted against words of this scathing nature.
Reader, if you have a life-long friend and you feel reasonably sure that you never could quarrel with him or be out of patience with him or find fault with any of his small peculiarities, go on a long trip with him in foreign lands. You will be together so much of the time that finally each will begin to hate the sight of the other. There will come off days, fraught with petty annoyances, when each will have a fretful desire to hurl cameras and suit cases at his beloved playmate. Suppose your lifelong friend has some little eccentricity of manner or speech, some slight irregularity of behaviour at the table, or a perverted and stubborn conviction which reveals itself in every controversy. You may have overlooked this defect for years because you meet him only at intervals, but when you begin to camp with him you discover every one of his shining faults. And how they do get on your nerves! Next to matrimony, perhaps travelling together is the most severe test of compatibility.
We liked Mr. Peasley. Looking back over the trip, we can well believe that the expedition would have been rather tame if deprived of his cheering presence. But he was so full of initiative and so given to discovering byways of adventure that he was always breaking in on the programme and starting little excursions of his own. He was a very hard man to mobilise. If we had solemnly agreed to get together for luncheon at one o'clock, three of us would be waiting at the food garage while Mr. Peasley would be a mile away, trying to buy a four-dollar Abyssinian war shield for $2.75.
And where do you suppose he was on the morning we were making our frenzied departure from Luxor? We found him in the barber shop, having his hair cut. A native stood alongside of him, brushing away the flies. The barber, a curly Italian, had ceased work when we came in, and, encouraged by the questions of Mr. Peasley, was describing the Bay of Naples, pointing out Capri, Sorrento, Vesuve, and other points of interest, with a comb in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. This barber had made an indelible impression on Mr. Peasley, because of his name, which was Signor Mosquito. Mr. Peasley said he didn't see how anyone with a name like that could live.
We lined up in front of Mr. Peasley and gazed at him in withering silence. He was not feazed.
"Talk about oriental luxury," he said. "Little did I think twenty years ago, when I was measurin' unbleached muslin and drawin' New Orleans syrup in a country store, that one day I'd recline on a spotted divan and have a private vassal to keep the flies off of me. To say nothing of bein' waited on by Signor Mosquito."
I tried to hold down the safety valve of my wrath.
"We have just held a meeting and by unanimous vote we have decided that you are an irresponsible fush, a night blooming swozzie, and a vitrified spingo," I said.
"Thanks," he replied. "I'll do as much for you sometime."
"Are you aware of the fact that the boat departs in twenty minutes?" asked No. 2.
"The boat will not leave its mooring until Peasley, of Iowa, is safely aboard," he replied. "Why is it that you fellows begin to throw duck fits every time we have to catch a boat or train? Kindly send my luggage aboard, and as soon as Signor Mosquito has concluded his amputations, I shall join you."
Words failed us. We hurried to the boat, feeling reasonably certain that he would follow us to Assouan by rail. When it came time to cast off, Mr. Peasley had not appeared, and our irritation was gradually softening into a deep joy. The warning whistle blew twice, and then Mr. Peasley came down the bank, carrying a Nubian spear eight feet long over his shoulder. By the time he had arrived on the upper deck the gangplank was drawn and we were swinging in the current.
He bestowed on us a cool smile of triumph, and then removed his hat. His hair had been given a shellac finish and smelled like the front doorway of a drug store.
"Signor Mosquito is well named," said Mr. Peasley. "When he got through with me he stung me for fifteen piastres."
For several hours we refused to speak to him or sit near him on deck, but finally we needed him to fill out a four-handed game of dominoes and he was taken back on probation. While we were engaged in a very stubborn session of "double nines," we noticed that most of our fellow passengers, and especially those of English persuasion, were making our little group the target for horrified glances. Some of them actually glared at us. We began to wonder if dominoes was regarded as an immoral practice in Egypt.
"These people keep on looking at us as if we were a happy band of burglars," said Mr. Peasley. "We think we are travelling incog., but our reputation has preceded us."
Then we heard one old lady ask another if there would be any evening services in the dining saloon, and Mr. Peasley, who was reaching into the "bone yard," suddenly paused with his hand up and exclaimed: – "Sanctified catfish! Boys, it's Sunday!"
It was. We had been sitting there among those nice people throughout the calm Sabbath afternoon playing a wicked game of chance. After two weeks among the Mohammedans and other heathen, with every day a working day and the English Sunday a dead letter, we had lost all trace of dates. Mr. Peasley said that if anyone had asked him the day of the week he would have guessed Wednesday.
This unfortunate incident helped to deepen and solidify the dark suspicion with which we, as Americans, were regarded by the contingent from Great Britain. If our conduct had been exemplary we could not have cleared away this suspicion, but after the domino debauch we were set down as hopeless. The middle class English guard their social status very carefully, and you can't blame them. It is a tender and uncertain growth that requires looking after all the time. If they didn't water it and prune it and set it out in the sunshine every day it would soon wither back to its original stalk.
Did you ever come across a bunch of melancholy pilgrims from the suburban villas and the dull gray provincial towns of dear old England? Did you ever observe the frightened manner in which they hold aloof from Germans, Americans, Bedouins, Turks, and other foreigners? They fear that if they drift into friendly relationship with people they meet while travelling, later on some of these chance acquaintances may look them up at Birmingham or Stoke-on-Trent and expect to be entertained at the foundry.
A large majority of our fellow passengers from Luxor to Assouan were of elderly pattern. We estimated the average age to be about eighty-three. Mr. Peasley said an irreverent thing about these venerable tourists.
"Why do these people come all the way to Egypt to look at the ruins?" he asked. "Why don't they stay at home and look at one another?"
We rebuked him for saying it, but somehow or other these rebukes never seemed to have any permanent restraining effect.
Our boat arrived at Assouan one morning accompanied by a sand storm and a cold wave. The Cataract Hotel stood on a promontory overlooking a new kind of Nile – a swift and narrow stream studded with gleaming boulders of granite. We liked Assouan because the weather was ideal (after the sand storm ran out of sand), the hotel was the best we had found in Egypt, and there were so few antiques that sightseeing became a pleasure. Besides, after one has been to Luxor, anything in the way of ancient temples is about as much of a come-down as turkey hash the day after Thanksgiving.
Here, on the border of Nubia, we began to get glimpses of real Africa. We rode on camels to a desert camp of hilarious Bisharins. They are the gypsies of Nubia – dress their hair with mud instead of bay rum and reside under a patch of gunnysack propped up by two sticks. On the hills back of the town we saw the barracks where the English army gathered itself to move south against the Mahdists. We were invited to go out in the moonlight and hunt hyenas, but did not think it right to kill off all the native game.
The big exhibit at Assouan, and one of the great engineering achievements of modern times, is the dam across the Nile. It is a solid wall of granite, a mile and a quarter long, 100 feet high in places and 88 feet through the base, and it looks larger than it sounds. We went across it on a push car after taking a boat ride in the reservoir basin, which is said to contain 234,000,000 gallons of water. This estimate is correct, as nearly as we could figure it. The dam is about four miles above the town. We rode up on a dummy train, with cars almost as large as Saratoga trunks, and came back in a small boat. We shot the rapids, just for excitement, and after we had caved in the bottom of the boat and stopped an hour for repairs we decided that we had stored up enough excitement, so after that we followed the more placid waters.
The black boatmen had a weird chant, which they repeated over and over, keeping time with the stroke. It was a combination of Egyptian melody and American college yell, and ran as follows: —
Hep! Hep! Horay!
Hep! Hep! Horay!
Hep! Hep! Horay!
All right! Thank you!
This effort represented their sum total of English, and they were very proud of it, and we liked it, too – that is, the first million times. After that, the charm of novelty was largely dissipated.
Many people visit Assouan because of the kiln-dried atmosphere, which is supposed to have a discouraging effect on rheumatism and other ailments that flourish in a damp climate. Assouan is as dry as Pittsburg on Sunday. It is surrounded by desert and the sun always seems to be working overtime. The traveller who does much rambling out of doors gradually assumes the brown and papery complexion of a royal mummy, his lips become parched and flaky, and he feels like a grocery store herring, which, it is believed, is about the driest thing on record.
We did love Assouan. Coming back from a camel ride, with a choppy sea on, gazing through the heat waves at the tufted palms and the shimmering white walls, we would know that there was ice only a mile ahead of us, and then our love for Assouan would become too deep for words.
Burton Holmes, the eminent lecturer and travelogue specialist, was lying up at Assouan, having a tiresome argument with the germ that invented malaria. He had come up the Nile in a deep draught boat and had succeeded in finding many sand bars that other voyagers had overlooked. Just below Assouan the boat wedged itself into the mud and could not be floated until thirty natives, summoned from the surrounding country, had waded underneath and "boosted" all afternoon. When it came time to pay the men the captain of the boat said to Mr. Holmes: "What do you think? They demand eight shillings."
"It is an outrage," said Mr. Holmes. "Eight shillings is two dollars. Even in America I can get union labour for two dollars a day. There are thirty of them. Couldn't we compromise for a lump sum of fifty dollars?"
"You do not understand," said the captain. "We are asked to pay eight shillings for the whole crowd. I think that six would be enough."
Whereupon Mr. Holmes gave them ten shillings, or 8 1-3 cents each, and as he sailed away the grateful assemblage gave three rousing cheers for Mr. Rockefeller.
When we left Assouan we scooted by rail direct to Cairo, to rest up and recover from our recuperation.
It is customary in winding up a series of letters to draw certain profound conclusions and give hints to travellers who may hope to follow the same beaten path. Fortunately, Mr. Peasley had done this for us. He promised a real estate agent in Fairfield, Iowa, that he would let him know about Egypt. One night in Assouan he read to us the letter to his friend, and we borrowed it: —
Assouan, Some time in April.
Deloss M. Gifford,
Fairfield, Iowa, U.S.A.
My Dear Giff: —
I have gone as far up the Nile as my time and the letter of credit will permit. At 8 G.M. to-morrow I turn my face toward the only country on earth where a man can get a steak that hasn't got goo poured all over it. Meet me at the station with a pie. Tell mother I am coming home to eat.
Do I like Egypt? Yes – because now I will be satisfied with Iowa. Only I'm afraid that when I go back and see 160 acres of corn in one field I won't believe it. Egypt is a wonderful country, but very small for its age. It is about as wide as the court house square, but it seems to me at least 10,000 miles long, as we have been two weeks getting up to the First Cataract. Most of the natives are farmers. The hard-working tenant gets one-tenth of the crop every year and if he looks up to see the steamboats go by he is docked. All Egyptians who are not farmers are robbers. The farmers live on the river. All other natives live on the tourists. I have seen so many tombs and crypts and family vaults that I am ashamed to look an undertaker in the face. For three weeks I have tried to let on to pretend to make a bluff at being deeply interested in these open graves. Other people gushed about them and I was afraid that if I didn't trail along and show some sentimental interest they might suspect that I was from Iowa and was shy on soulfulness. I'll say this much, however – I'm mighty glad I've seen them, because now I'll never have to look at them again.
Egypt is something like the old settler – you'd like to roast him and call him down, but you hate to jump on anything so venerable and weak. Egypt is so old that you get the headache trying to think back. Egypt had gone through forty changes of administration and was on the down grade before Iowa was staked out.
The principal products of this country are insects, dust, guides, and fake curios. I got my share of each. I am glad I came, and I may want to return some day, but not until I have worked the sand out of my ears and taken in two or three county fairs. I have been walking down the main aisle with my hat in my hand so long that now I am ready for something lively.
Americans are popular in Egypt, during business hours. Have not been showered with social attentions, but I am always comforted by the thought that the exclusive foreign set cannot say anything about me that I haven't already said about it. Of course, we could retaliate in proper fashion if we could lure the foreigners out to Iowa, but that seems out of the question. They think Iowa is in South America.
I shall mail this letter and then chase it all the way home.
Give my love to everybody, whether I know them or not. Yours,
PEASLEY.
P.S. – Open some preserves.
Not a comprehensive review of the fruits of our journey and yet fairly accurate.
