too quickly; but with a certain desperate zeal, foreign to his whole creed and nature.  He fingered, he implored, he fawned with an unsteady eye, and while I wondered I saw behind him the puffy pink face of a fezzed Jew, watching him as a stoat watches a rabbit.  When he moved the Jew followed and took position at a commanding angle.  The old man glanced from me to him and renewed his solicitations.  So one could imagine an elderly hare thumping wildly on a tambourine with the stoat behind him.  They told me afterwards that Jews own most of the stalls in Assouan bazaar, the Mussulmans working for them, since tourists need Oriental colour.  Never having seen or imagined a Jew coercing a Mussulman, this colour was new and displeasing to me.

VII

THE RIDDLE OF EMPIRE

At Halfa one feels the first breath of a frontier.  Here the Egyptian Government retires into the background, and even the Cook steamer does not draw up in the exact centre of the postcard.  At the telegraph-office, too, there are traces, diluted but quite recognisable, of military administration.  Nor does the town, in any way or place whatever, smell—­which is proof that it is not looked after on popular lines.  There is nothing to see in it any more than there is in Hulk C. 60, late of her Majesty’s troopship Himalaya, now a coal-hulk in the Hamoaze at Plymouth.  A river front, a narrow terraced river-walk of semi-oriental houses, barracks, a mosque, and half-a-dozen streets at right angles, the Desert racing up to the end of each, make all the town.  A mile or so up stream under palm trees are bungalows of what must have been cantonments, some machinery repair-shops, and odds and ends of railway track.  It is all as paltry a collection of whitewashed houses, pitiful gardens, dead walls, and trodden waste spaces as one would wish to find anywhere; and every bit of it quivers with the remembered life of armies and river-fleets, as the finger-bowl rings when the rubbing finger is lifted.  The most unlikely men have done time there; stores by the thousand ton have been rolled and pushed and hauled up the banks by tens of thousands of scattered hands; hospitals have pitched themselves there, expanded enormously, shrivelled up and drifted away with the drifting regiments; railway sidings by the mile have been laid down and ripped up again, as need changed, and utterly wiped out by the sands.

Halfa has been the rail-head, Army Headquarters, and hub of the universe—­the one place where a man could make sure of buying tobacco and sardines, or could hope for letters for himself and medical attendance for his friend.  Now she is a little shrunken shell of a town without a proper hotel, where tourists hurry up from the river to buy complete sets of Soudan stamps at the Post Office.

I went for a purposeless walk from one end of the place to the other, and found a crowd of native boys playing football on what might have been a parade-ground of old days.