I
BOOM!
Hardly had the distant reverberations ceased before the sunset wind
blew in the greenery of the city palms. It was as if Cairo sighed
audibly. Day was officially dead. Crowned in red, squatting in the
colours of the west, the Moqattam Hills peered down, perhaps to glimpse
a miraculous moment on the surface of the Nile.
The Nile flowed red like a river of blood.
Rejeb ibn Saud, squatting in the Bulaq hut by the Nile bank, looked
at his wrist watch, at the face of the unconscious boy on the string-bed,
at the fall of light on Gezireh across the river. But for one insistent
whisper, the startling sunset was now a thing woven of silence.
‘The sea! The sea!’
Song of the homing Nile! Gathering, hastening to fulfillment and freedom,
joining its thousand voices, all the yearnings of its leagues of desert
wandering, in that passionately whispered under-cry: ‘The sea!’
All that afternoon the cry had haunted him. Now, as the boy on the
bed tossed and moaned, Ibn Saud shook himself, stood up, and bent
over the bed.
‘Son Hassan…’
The hut door opened of a sudden. Out of the sunset glare, into the
dimness of the hut, Sayyiya, Ibn Saud’s sister-in-law, entered.
She was a Sudanese, young, full-faced, thick-lipped. At the tall figure
of Ibn Saud she glanced inquiringly, then also went to the bed and
bent over it. The boy Hassan seemed scarce to breathe.
‘In an hour we shall know, master.’
‘In an hour I shall not be here.’ The man looked away
from the string-bed. The chill on his heart had chilled his voice.
Even in that moment, only by an effort could he keep from listening
to the insistent whisper of the river.
‘You go to the Khan Khalil to lead the Jihad? It is to-night?’
Ibn Saud nodded. It was to-night. An hour after the fall of darkness
the Warren hordes, poured into the Khan il Khalil, were to be mustered
and armed. Police and gendarmes, half of them active adherents of
the insurrection, would have withdrawn from all western and central
Cairo. The two native regiments had been seduced from allegiance to
the puppet nationalist Government: were enthusiastically for the rising:
themselves awaited only the signal from the Khan il Khalil, the lighting
of the torch.
And it would be lit. That was to be Rejeb ibn Saud’s part. Golden-tongued,
first in popularity of the rising’s masters, he was the last
to address the brown battalions in the Khan. For them he was to strike
fire to the torch that would, ere another morning, light the flames
of vengeance and revolution across the European city from Bulaq to
Heliopolis.
The song of the Nile – of a sudden he knew why it had so haunted.
Such the cry – of fulfilment, of freedom attained – that
would to-night rise on the welling tide of the Black Warrens, from
thousands of throats, from all the pitiful Cohorts of the Lost, the
Cheated of the Sunlight…
‘Master, if you come not back –‘
Ibn Saud started. In his cold ecstasy he had forgotten the hut, Sayyiya,
even Hassan.
‘That is with God. But if Hassan – Listen, woman. You
will come to me at the Khan. When the change, one way or another,
has passed upon my son, come to the Shoemakers’ Bazaar, by the
south side of the Khan, and send word to me. You will find your way?’
‘I will come.’
Something in her glance touched him, stirred him from his abstraction.
‘The time has been weary for you since Edei died, Sayyiya. If
I live through this night – ‘
Suddenly the woman was crouching at his feet on the mud floor. Passionately,
sacredly, she caught at the long cloak he had wrapped about him.
‘Master – Rejeb … Those English whom you lead against
to-night – they are ever strong, ever wary. If you die, what
will happen to Hassan and to me? Master –‘
Ibn Saud’s cold eyes blazed. He flung the woman from him, flung
open the hut door. Beyond, seen from the elevation of the Bulaq bank,
the Cairene roofs lay chequered in shadows.
‘And what of the folk – our brothers, our sisters –
who die out there in their hovels and hunger? Thousands every year.’
He blazed with the sudden, white-hot anger of the fanatic. ‘What
matters your miserable life – Hassan’s – mine –
if we can show the sun to those who rot their lives away in the kennels
of the Warrens? We miserable “natives” –- unclean
things with unclean souls – to-night we shall light such a candle
in Egypt as no man –‘
He halted abruptly. The fire fell from him. Speaking in Arabic, he
had yet thought in a famous alien phrase. Under his dark skin spread
a slow flush. Without further speech he bent and kissed his son, and
then walked out of the hut into the wine0red gloaming.
Sayyiya crouched dazed upon the floor. Then a sound disturbed her.
From the throat of the boy Hassan came a strange, strangled moan.
The small, wasted body tossed for a little, then lay very still.
II
Darkness was still an hour distant. European cairo thronged her streets,
cried her wares, wore her gayest frocks, set forth on evening excursions
to Saqqara and the Sphinx. John Caldon, seated on the terrace of the
Continental, awoke from a sunset dream and turned towards his brother-in-law,
Robert Sidgwick.
‘Eh?’
‘…the edge of a volcano.’
‘Where?’
‘There.’ Sidgwick waved his hand to the brown driftage
in the street below them. ‘The political situation’s the
worst it has been for months. The Cairenes have been propaganda’ed
for months by Nationalist extremists. Trade and employment are bad.
The native quarters are seething.’
‘Very proper of them.’
Caldon smiled into the lighting of a cigarette. An artist, he was
making a westward world-tour from England. Together with his wife
and daughter, he had arrived from India, via Suez, only the day before.
Sidgwick’s statement left him unimpressed. He had never yet
encountered a white man, settled amongst brown, who was not living
on the edge of a volcano.
