The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt by Michael Pearce Page A

long.’
    ‘Still?’
    That, at any rate, had been one of the British achievements: the curbash, whipping, had been abolished.
    ‘Still. As I said, the city’s a long way away.’
    ‘Even so,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I am here.’
    The man gave an acknowledging nod of the head.
    ‘You may be all right,’ he said, ‘and so may be your friend, for all I know, even though he’s a foreigner. But you won’t get anywhere. The Pasha’s too big for you. He’s too big for us. We’re just little flies on his big wheel and when the wheel goes round we’re the ones who get squashed.’
    ‘Little stones,’ said Mahmoud, ‘can make big wheels jump.’
    ‘Which are you,’ asked the man, ‘the stone or the wheel?’
    ‘I’m one of those who are trying to change the wheel.’
    ‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘so you said. There are people, you said, in the city who are trying to change things. The Nationalists, was it? Well, there aren’t many Nationalists down here, I can tell you. And the city is still a long way away.’
     
    About a mile beyond the temple, where the great spur of rock which separated the plain from the Sahara curved sharply round, was the village. It merged so completely into the cliffs that, looking across in the daytime, Owen had hardly been aware it was there. At night, however, when the villagers were cooking the evening meal, the lower slopes were covered with the pinpricks of their fires.
    Approaching the village now, on mule-back, in the gathering dusk, Owen saw that the village was bigger than he had supposed. Children were playing among the boulders, women were busy in the courtyards at their buffalo-dung fires and men were sitting up on the roofs of their houses enjoying the evening breeze.
    The houses were not the usual ones of the river bank, tidy cubes of mud brick, with the roofs heaped high with onions and water-melons and firewood. These were built among the rocks and the walls were often piled stones. They ran back in deep trenches into the cliff face, so that they seemed half underground.
    There was no sociable communal square, no neat streets. The houses were scattered higgledy-piggledy over the slopes and the occupants sat on the roofs and shouted across to each other.
    There were indeed onions and water-melons and not infrequently tomato plants and beans straggling up the sides of houses, but compared with the abundance of the river this was subsistence only.
    Owen, used to the rich fields of the delta, was quite shocked. Yet in some curious way it seemed familiar. And then, seeing high up above the village the shafts of abandoned excavations, he realized suddenly what it was. This was a mining village.
    ‘Grim!’ said Paul, giving a little shudder of distaste.
    ‘Hard!’ said Owen, and realized suddenly that he was using the expression of the miners in the village he had known as a child.
    The difference between the two expressions was the difference in perspective between the æsthete and the labourer. Owen had never been a labourer in that sense—his father had been an Anglican clergyman—but although on the periphery, he had known the shared life of a Welsh mining village. Now it came back to him unexpectedly. He felt suddenly that he knew the people here.
    He did; although not quite in the way that he supposed.
    As he slid off the back of his donkey, a surprised voice greeted him warmly.
    ‘Effendi!’ it said. ‘You are my father and mother!’
    ‘I doubt it,’ said Owen, and then, seeing who had spoken, embraced the speaker warmly. ‘Sayid!’
    It was one of his favourite swindlers, last seen outside the Continental Hotel beguiling tourists with relics of dubious authenticity and patter of genuine imaginativeness. Astonished admiration of the patter had led Owen to pardon a few minor solecisms, thus laying the basis of a relationship which Sayid reasserted with eagerness every time he came to Cairo.
    ‘You have come to visit my home,’ said Sayid