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

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There is a frequent electric tramway service in Cairo. It is very convenient and very dirty, and moderately slow, and most informally conducted. The spirit of bargaining has infected even the collector of fares. Journeying is informal in other ways; only in theory is it forbidden (in French, Arabic, Greek, and English) to ride on the footboard. You ride where you can. Many soldiers you will see squatting on the roofs. And if the regulations about riding on footboards were enforced the hawkers of meats and drinks and curios would not plague you with their constant solicitation. The boot-boys carry on their trade furtively between the seats: often they ride a mile, working hard at a half-dozen boots. The conductor objects only to the extent of a facetious cuff, which he is the last to expect to take effect. Both motorman and conductor raise the voice in song: an incongruous practice to the earnest-working Briton. But the Cairene Arab who takes life seriously is far to seek. There is nothing here of the struggling earnestness of spirit of the old Bedouin Arabs to whom Mahomet preached. The Cairene is a carnal creature, flippant and voluptuous, with more than a touch of the Parisian. You'll find him asleep at his shop-door at ten in the morning, and gambling earlier still. Well-defined articulation is unknown amongst the Arabs here, except in anger and in fight. They do not open their teeth either to speak or to sing. The sense of effort is everywhere wanting—in their slouching gait, their intonation; their very writing drags and trails itself along. But what are you due to expect in a country where the heat blisters most of the year; where change of temperature and of physical outlook are foreign—a country of perennially wrinkled skins, where a rousing thunder-storm is unknown, and where the physical outlook varies only between the limits of sand and rock? The call for comment would arise if physical inertia were other than the rule. And of the Anglo-Egyptian, what may you expect?...