Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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Progress is slow towards the Square. Not the interest of the scene alone invites you to linger: the whole atmosphere is one of lounge. Everyone moves at a lounging pace; those not in motion lounge; there are periodical cafés where the men lounge in the fumes of smoke and native spirits by the half-day together. No one hurries. Business seems rather a hobby and an incident than the earnest, insistent thing it is in England. The advantage surely lies with the Arab; he finds time to live and contemplate and get to know something of himself. God help the American! Better, perhaps, to spend the evening of your life with your chin on your knees and your hubble-bubble adjacent, looking out on the life before you, and within upon your own, than boast yourself still keen in the steel trade; that your features are "mobile and alert," though your head is grey, whereas your contemporaries are "failing." ...

At the end of a half-day you'll know your proximity to the Centre by the uprising of "respectable" cafés and imposing cigarette-manufactories and of hotels. And you come into the Square overlooked by the noble statue of the noble Mahomet Aly—every ounce a soldier.