y small boy who was lifted out
of a railway-carriage and set down beneath a whitewashed wall under
naked stars in an illimitable emptiness because, they told him, the
train was on fire. Childlike, this did not worry him. What stuck in his
sleepy mind was the absurd name of the place and his father's prophecy
that when he grew up he would 'come that way in a big steamer.'

So all his life, the word 'Zagazig' carried memories of a brick shed,
the flicker of an oil-lamp's floating wick, a sky full of eyes, and an
engine coughing in a desert at the world's end; which memories returned
in a restaurant-car jolting through what seemed to be miles of
brilliantly lighted streets and factories. No one at the table had even
turned his head for the battlefields of Kassassin and Tel-el-Kebir.
After all, why should they? That work is done, and children are getting
ready to be born who will say: '_I_ can remember Gondokoro (or El-Obeid
or some undreamed of Clapham Junction, Abyssinia-way) before a single
factory was started--before the overhead traffic began. Yes, when there
was a fever--actually fever--in the city itself!'

The gap is no greater than that between to-day's and t'other day's
Zagazig--between the horsed vans of the Overland Route in Lieutenant
Waghorn's time and the shining motor that flashed us to our Cairo hotel
through what looked like the suburbs of Marseilles or Rome.

Always keep a new city till morning, 'In the daytime,' as it is written
in the Perspicuous Book,[6] 'thou hast long occupation,' Our window gave
on to the river, but before one moved toward it one heard the thrilling
squeal of the kites--those same thievish Companions of the Road who, at
that hour, were watching every Englishman's breakfast in every compound
and camp from Cairo to Calcutta.

[Footnote 6: The Koran.]

Voices rose from below--unintelligible words in maddeningly familiar
accents. A black boy in one blue garment climbed, using his toes as
fingers, the tipped mainyard of a Nile boat and framed himself in the
window. Then, because he felt happy, he sang, all among the wheeling
kites. And beneath our balcony rolled very Nile Himself, golden in
sunshine, wrinkled under strong breezes, with a crowd of creaking
cargo-boats waiting for a bridge to be opened.

On the cut-stone quay above, a line of cab drivers--a _ticca-gharri_
stand, nothing less--lolled and chaffed and tinkered with their
harnesses in every beautiful attitude of the ungi