ANZAC IN EGYPT
Mahomed was Mahomed. He was also a guide. The combination meant that he knew everything, and what he didn’t know he made up, and what he made up he told so often that at last he believed it.
We were on the usual Nile excursion—made by nearly the whole Australasian force at one time or another—to Memphis and Sakkara.
A boat had been arranged, and Mahomed tried to entertain us on the boat. He did. Knowing our absence from home and wives, he gave us a full account of his three wives; also some obscure, but not uninteresting, details of their feelings towards each other. Each was “a pearl,†and he didn’t know which was the pearliest. The idyllic peace of Mrs. Mahomed in triplicate was enough to make one a follower of the Prophet.
His next dissertation was on the Koran. But theology doesn’t appeal much to soldiers. Padres have reduced their services to a maximum of twenty minutes. Before long our astute guide recognised a necessity of a change of subject. He gave us riddles—theriddle of the Sphinx: How one could divide equally between two men a ten-gallon flask of water with only three- and seven-gallon flasks to do it with. The best of us took nine moves to do it in; Mahomed did it in five—and looked humble. Then he gave us another: Four men and their wives are on one side of the Nile, and have to pass over to the other; but their jealousy will not allow any man to be alone with a lady not his wife. Mahomed threw this problem at us with an air of triumph. There was the boat, there were the four men, there were the four wives, there was the Nile.
The Nile was certainly there, and our puffing, stodgy steamer had gone two or three miles before we gave it up. We did give it up. Mahomed manipulatedthe ladies and their spouses with ease, landed each on the other side, all conventions being strictly observed.
Then the Pyramids came into view. We were rather tired of the Pyramids. But the guide wasn’t. What would a guide be without Pyramids—or the Pyramids without guides? So we heard again all their history. Each new Mahomed throws in a thousand years or two more or less. But what is a thousand years in Egypt?
We were tiring of the Pyramids. Mahomed started on the other bank—Napoleon, Napoleon’s towers, Napoleon’s granaries, Napoleon’s fortifications.
Now there is a limit to all things. We could stand Moses Island; we could listen to the accounts of Pharaohs, Pyramids, Sphinxes, and Mrs. Sphinxes. But Napoleon! Napoleon hadn’t even known Australia.
However, Mahomed was wound up. He was inspired. He was even intrepid. What if the infidel dogs did cut down his baksheesh; they should have the whole story. So the British (and the Australasians) in Egypt went to the wall. Napoleon reigned. He got it all.
It was then that our youngest subaltern put in an easy under-arm, and Mahomed hit out!
“Yes, we know all that about Napoleon,†said the sub., “but what about Sir George Reid?â€
We waited breathless. Was it a boundary hit or a catch at point?
“Oh,†said Mahomed, “I know all about Saint George Reid. He a great man. There is his mound over there.â€
“Ah!†we exclaimed. And then, with happy inspiration, someone asked, “Is he dead?â€
“Oh, yes; dead a hundred years. Saint George Reid, a very good and great man. He has a fine tomb. If a sick man goes there, he gets cured quickly.â€
We tipped Mahomed generously.
C.
I hardly think old Benci’s little wineshop in Alexandria will be known to many of the A.N.Z.A.C., or to many Alexandrians for that matter. But in case any of you find yourselves ever in Alexandria again, this is how you will discover it:
Standing at the head of the Rue Cherif Pacha—everyone in Alexandria knows the Rue Cherif Pacha who knows anything at all about the place—with the Kodak Company’s fine shop on your right hand and His Britannic Majesty’s fine Caracol on your left, you could reach it in three bomb-throws, if the last of the three happened to be a “googly†and swerved in from the off, just round the corner into the Rue Attarine. So, you see, it is right opposite the Attarine Mosque; and as you sit of an evening at Benci’s doorway, smoking his cigarettes, with his wine at your elbow, and watch the motley, polyglot crowd ceaselessly passing, you have your eyes always coming back tothe carved and inlaid door of the old temple, and up the graceful minaret into the great lift of a night sky glorious with such liquid gold of stars that memory of herself will take you back to many a mellow night when stars of even more melting loveliness bent above you in your own homeland down South.
But you never saw such a restless crowd in an Australian or New Zealand street as this double line of dapper Europeans and of sallow Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians and hungry-looking Greeks, threading the low swirl of khaki tunics and Arab rags. And ever and anon the stream ebbs before your “garry-driver’s†long-drawn “Haa-sib†(mind out), to let pass some official dignitary or some riotous party of Kangaroos, or some handsome, red-tabbed officer of the regular staff, or maybe ’tis an even more handsome and stalwart private of the ranks, beside some dear, dainty, winsome thing under one of those little fly-away hats, with that dark kiss-curl clinging close to her cheek—you know exactly the kind of maid and the kind of curl I mean.
And still the tall, quiet minaret and the broad, quiet heaven seem to lean together; and one grows pensive sitting at Benci’s narrow door of a summer evening.
Old Benci himself is a brisk little Italian, doubtless of middle age. I think it must have been as a mark of affection that we called him “Old Benci,†for his hair still keeps something of its youthful brown. He has not a word of English and about two of French, but you know at once from his open, sunny face that, like most of his compatriots, he has a heart of gold; and, at a price to fit a ranker’s pocket, he keeps a Chianti that is first-rate.
It was Tillett who found him for us. Tillett is a New Zealand Medical Corps man, grey-headed, full of years and the experience they have brought him; equally at ease in French, Italian and Spanish from his early life on the Continent, and a dabbler in Greek and German by way of diversion; but so quiet and unassuming withal, and so rarely confidential about himself and his affairs, that we knew little of him beyond that he was at that time doing odd jobs of healing for the drivers of a New Zealand battery withdrawn from the Peninsula. For us he was a most likeable chap, an excellent interpreter when our mediocre French failed, and—his chief merit—the discoverer of Benci and his tavern. With a palate tormented by stewed tea and the heavy canteen beer beloved of the yokels of Old England, he had traversed wellnigh every quarter of Alexandria in vain quest of the cheap and honest draught wine that he knew must be there somewhere, and yet must be neither that so very “ordinaire†red wine of France, nor yet the wretched “health wines†of Greece, that carry in their tang memories of the physician and the sick-bed of our pre-war days. And between him and Old Benci there had grown up quite a sincere affection, apart altogether from Chianti at P.T. 1 per glass.
It was delightful, the pantomime that went on whenever any of us arrived without Tillett. With a countenance full of anxious solicitude, Benci would point vaguely out into the night, carry his forefinger to his own grey head, and then up would go hiseyebrows in interrogation. This we knew to mean, “Where is our friend of the grey hair that you are here to-night without him?†And one of us would answer by laying his face to the table and snoring heavily or in mimic sentry-go along the passage. Oh, but it was good to see the smile that broke and beamed across his honest face, with his pleasure at finding himself intelligible to his country’s allies.
The rest of these allies, so far as our coterie was concerned, were a sergeant of the Ceylon Tea-planters, back from Gallipoli in charge of his company’s horses, and a Maori of that gallant, reckless band whose “Komaté! Komaté!†rang along those hills in August—well-born and well-educated, in physique strong and solid, but with movements as quick and sure as a cat’s. In this tanned army only the full lips and the slightly flattened nose betrayed his origin.
He and I had been friends at the same New Zealand ’varsity, but, like so many of the best of his race, he was no “sticker,†and in the third year of his medical course he had side-tracked himself on troubled studies of mind and consciousness and refused to carry on with his dull public health and medical jurisprudence. Since leaving ’varsity he had been living on his means, he told me, spending most of his time in wandering. Napier, the tea-planter of Ceylon, was your well-bred, clean-limbed, rather aggressively healthy-minded young Englishman.
These three, at any rate, were the centre of that bright little knot of friends that, in a three months’ stay in Alexandria, had drifted and stuck together in a community of tastes and ideas and downright liking for one another. And though one or other of us might be held by night pickets, or C.B., or on visits to our hospitable French and Italian friends, yet on any night of the week, from seven till midnight, you would find two or three of us forgathered at the back of the little shop in the shadow of the great black casks and behind the wooden grille that, while allowing us from the dim interior a clear view of the street, yet shut us off effectively from the eyes of the night patrol. For it was before Sir John Maxwell’s “Iron Law of closing time†that we held our revelrychezBenci, and it was safe to wager that something was amiss if we went home by any but the 1.10A.M.tram for Ramleh, or by carriage even later.
But those were our palmy days in Alexandria—the days before the swarm of Tommies came, and our pockets began to empty, and an officious picket in the fullness of its own importance went farther afield than Sisters Street and patrolled the whole town in its lumbering motor-wagons....
L. J. Ivory,4th Howitzer Battery N.Z.F.A.