They might have come forth from the Taksali Gate in the city of Lahore on just such a cold weather morning as this, on their way to the Mohammedan burial-grounds by the river.  And the veiled countrywomen, shuffling side by side, elbow pressed to hip, and eloquent right hand pivoting round, palm uppermost, to give value to each shrill phrase, might have been the wives of so many Punjabi cultivators but that they wore another type of bangle and slipper.  A knotty-kneed youth sitting high on a donkey, both amuleted against the evil eye, chewed three purplish-feet of sugar-cane, which made one envious as well as voluptuously homesick, though the sugar-cane of Egypt is not to be compared with that of Bombay.

Hans Breitmann writes somewhere: 

    Oh, if you live in Leyden town
  You’ll meet, if troot be told,
    Der forms of all der freunds dot tied
  When du werst six years old.

And they were all there under the chanting palms—­saices, orderlies, pedlars, water-carriers, street-cleaners, chicken-sellers and the slate-coloured buffalo with the china-blue eyes being talked to by a little girl with the big stick.  Behind the hedges of well-kept gardens squatted the brown gardener, making trenches indifferently with a hoe or a toe, and under the municipal lamp-post lounged the bronze policeman—­a touch of Arab about mouth and lean nostril—­quite unconcerned with a ferocious row between two donkey-men.  They were fighting across the body of a Nubian who had chosen to sleep in that place.  Presently, one of them stepped back on the sleeper’s stomach.  The Nubian grunted, elbowed himself up, rolled his eyes, and pronounced a few utterly dispassionate words.  The warriors stopped, settled their headgear, and went away as quickly as the Nubian went to sleep again.  This was life, the real, unpolluted stuff—­worth a desert-full of mummies.  And right through the middle of it—­hooting and kicking up the Nile—­passed a Cook’s steamer all ready to take tourists to Assuan.  From the Nubian’s point of view she, and not himself, was the wonder—­as great as the Swiss-controlled, Swiss-staffed hotel behind her, whose lift, maybe, the Nubian helped to run.  Marids, and afrits, guardians of hidden gold, who choke or crush the rash seeker; encounters with the long-buried dead in a Cairo back-alley; undreamed-of promotions, and suddenly lit loves are the stuff of any respectable person’s daily life; but the white man from across the water, arriving in hundreds with his unveiled womenfolk, who builds himself flying-rooms and talks along wires, who flees up and down the river, mad to sit upon camels and asses, constrained to throw down silver from both hands—­at once a child and a warlock—­this thing must come to the Nubian sheer out of the Thousand and One Nights.  At any rate, the Nubian was perfectly sane.  Having eaten, he slept in God’s own sunlight, and I left him, to visit the fortunate and guarded and desirable