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3IO Oriental Cairo
its flat sands strewn with round boulders like Dutch cheeses ;
the precipices of chalk which succeed, if they look dry to you
as a belated traveller, nevertheless suggest home to you as a
wandering Briton ; but the black, aqueous rocks, just before
you reach your haven in the Oasis, are like the dreariest
fields of lava in the waste places of Mount Etna.
Though the desert is a disagreeable thing to cross, it is a
handy thing to have near a large town, for it contains a readymade
cemetery and ready-made golf-links, a ready-made
polo-ground, a ready-made racecourse, and a ready-made
Rotten Row, not to mention parade grounds, Bishareen
camps, and that sort of thing. Assuan could not have been
made a Cannes, or Khartilm a Washington with the stroke
of a pen if it had not been for the largess of the desert. In
fact, the desert serves all the purposes of the sea in Upper
Egypt. Helwan, the favourite week-end resort for Cairo, is
like a new seaside village dropped into the desert. People
talk of desert air instead of sea-breezes ; if auctioneers want
to lay out new city sites, like that melancholy pleasure-city,
the modern Hcliopolis, they buy a bit of the desert. If
an irrigation company wishes to reclaim land for cultivation,
it buys a bit of the desert. The desert is the park of every
Egyptian town. And, finally, the desert is Egypt, for Egypt
is like a village with one long street— the street being the
Nile.
Nobody in Egypt talks of the desert as a devouring fiend,
though whole expeditions, from the army of Cambyses the
Persian, to the sergeant's party bound for the Wady Natron,
have perished by the way in its serpentine embrace. Per-
haps, like the dwellers on Etna and Stromboli, they have
grown too accustomed to it. Alexandria is about the only
place in Egypt where it does not come up to the back door.
At Cairo you could motor to it in five minutes if you found
the streets empty. There are still places like .Siwa and Sinai,
which you can only reach by days and days of camel-riding
across the desert. The army goes and manoeuvres in it,
because there are no crops to trample down, and comes back
saying that it is as cold as hell—by night, and the converse