From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 4
CHAPTER VI
TOMMY'S EGYPTIAN CHRISTMAS
Our Christmas pudding, like our morning drum, rolls round the globe, and the British soldier keeps the great national festival in many a remote and unfamiliar region in every zone. But nowhere, perhaps, is it celebrated among stranger surroundings than environ one on the dusty parade-ground where the troops of our Cairo garrison are assembled for their Christmas sports. Could the great Saracen prince who built the Citadel only leave his green-scarfed houris for a couple of hours to revisit it, what would he think of the scene before his eyes? Saladin, it is true, would find an old acquaintance in the English infidel. He and we gave and took hard knocks in Palestine 700 years agone; but perhaps his recollections of Plantagenet knights and crossbowmen would hardly assist him to recognise their successors in the persons of Tommy Atkins and his officers. Nor would he be aided in this recognition by an observation of the particular form of activity in which, as we drive under the massive archway of the Citadel and enter the barrack-square, surrounded by a crowd of blue-gowned, grinning, gesticulating Arabs, who are probably not much altered in appearance from the Cairene donkey-boys of the days of the last Fatimite Caliphs, a row of broad-faced, bullet-headed British soldiers, each one of them planted firmly on the back of an unwillingly participating steed, is contending for the prize of victory. It is the second event in the day's programme—the "tug-of-war on donkeys"—and a long and indecisive event it proves. It might be war on the old system, with both of the armies withdrawn into winter quarters, so immovable are the two forces, and so uneventful the situation. Both sides pull till their joints crack, but neither produces the least effect upon the other. Nor does either receive the slightest assistance from their own animals, or encounter any resistance, save that of inertia, from those of their opponents. Each ass stands motionless, inconvenienced by both belligerents but aiding neither, a perfect type of the conscientious neutral; and as eight men cannot be expected, without some very commanding superiority in weight and strength, to drag along an equal number of their comrades plus eight donkeys, and at the same time to kick or otherwise persuade eight other profoundly unsympathetic asses into rendering their assistance, the contest naturally ends in a draw, both sides retiring with equal honour from the field.
The "Officers' Mule Race" would no doubt have been less surprising to our Saracenic revenant, who would naturally assume that the descendants of the Crusaders must know how to ride, though he might not expect to find them as much at home on a barebacked courser as his own wild horsemen of the desert. He would be puzzled, again, however, by the "Children's Handicap," one of the prettiest events of the day, with its dozen or so of small competitors dashing off at the word of the starter, and the fair-haired, delicate-featured officer's child running neck-and-neck with the sturdy progeny of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Atkins for a prize of thirty piastres, or a little more than six silver shillings. And, above all, what would Saladin, the son of Yussuf, have said to the boot-race, with its strange and onerous conditions? "Boots," he would have read, or his interpreter would have read to him from his programme—"Boots to be taken off at starting-post, placed in a heap fifty yards off, race to heap, competitors to pick out their own boots, and the first to return to starter with boots fully laced up to win." Severe as is this trial of the qualities of fleetness of the foot, quickness of eye, dexterity of hand, and a nice discrimination in boots, it is made yet more arduous by the exertions of the stewards, who mix the boots of the competitors with all the care of a croupier shuffling a pack of cards. At last the operation is completed, the bootless antagonists withdraw to the starting-place, and toe the line with their stocking-soled feet. The word is given, and they are off. The fifty yards are soon cleared and in another moment they fall headlong, hands and knees, upon the heap, a pushing, jostling, hustling mass, while the dust rises in a dense cloud, shoulder high, around them, and, above their heads—since the next best thing to finding your own boots is to throw those of your rivals to as great a distance as possible—the upper air is black with boots. After a minute or two of wild confusion, some half-dozen of the competitors burst breathless from the struggling crowd, each with a pair of boots, his own or another's, held high in air. One flings himself down at the very outskirts of the melée; another hurries to a distance—freedom from interruption seeming to him worth securing, even at the expense of lost ground. Dusty feet are thrust with furious haste into boots, themselves already half filled with dust by facetious hands; nervous fingers pluck at the laces; then one man leaps to his feet and rushes for the goal. In another moment a second is in pursuit of him, a slower lacer, but a faster racer, and the two breast the handkerchief almost side by side.
Other "events" as interesting, but certainly no less bewildering to the shade of his Highness the Caliph, succeed the boot-race. Infidel non-commissioned officers, each holding between his teeth a spoon with an egg balanced in its bowl, career cautiously over a fifty yards course for a prize of a turkey and a pair of chickens to him who shall reach the goal with his fragile charge unbroken. Then privates, mounted on donkeys for a wrestling match, proceed to show, as Napier says of their forefathers on the terrible field of Albuera, "with what majesty the British soldier fights." With little, it must be owned, of the science that the Arab equestrian wrestler displays, they tear the shirts off each other's back in the fury of their grapple, finishing, as a rule, in about sixty seconds or so a bout which a couple of native donkey-boys would have artistically prolonged for at least five minutes. In the meanwhile Arabs, narrowly watched by a British soldier or two told off to see that play does not become earnest, tackle each other at quarter-staff, to the profit of a veteran "gamester" of sixty years, bien sonnés, who simply does what he likes with every opponent that steps into the ring. It would have been a graceful compliment to the founder of the Citadel if the feat named after him—that of cleaving a floating veil in twain with a sword—had been exhibited, as it not infrequently is in English military games, by some trooper of our Egyptian contingent of cavalry. This, at any rate, the Caliph would have understood and appreciated. Unfortunately it is not in the programme.
But what is this which follows? Surely a contest still more familiar to him by report, at any rate, if not from actual experience, than any other. O Saladin! it is a tournament—a joust such as your spies may have brought you word of from the camp of the Crusaders before Acre and elsewhere in the lands overrun by their unbelieving hosts. A tournament, did I say? Nay, it is an "Ivanhoe Tournament," a passage of arms like that in which, though their names are recorded in no historic chronicle, knights as real as any you ever fought with took such gallant part. Hark! the note of the bugle! Will Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert come pricking forth into the lists with lance uplifted? Or will El Desdichado, the Disinherited Knight, appear amid a blare of trumpets at the far end of the barrack-square? No; there are other and more modern jousters. They are Sir Thomas de Blanchefarine and Sir Atkyn Le Ramoneur, one armed with a floury, the other with a sooty mop. At sound of bugle they lay besom in rest and, charging, meet in deadly shock in the centre of the tilt-yard. The gallant steeds bestridden by them, animals of a strangely human expression of countenance, who might easily be mistaken for two of their riders' comrades, are not exactly "thrown upon their haunches by the concussion," as was usual with the chargers of Saladin's day; but they certainly remain erect on their hind legs during the whole encounter, engaged, apparently, in an extremely animated, though not unfriendly, conversation. As to their riders, each of them has attempted that most ambitious, but, if successful, most effective coup of the tourney, which consists in aiming, not at the shield or body of an adversary, but at his head; and each has hit his mark. The dark features of Le Ramoneur are sicklied o'er with the pale cast of flour, and the candid countenance of De Blanchefarine has received a rich coating of lampblack. The two knights separate, and having with difficulty forced their steeds a few yards apart, they clash again and yet again, until at last the black champion, who has indeed by this time almost changed places with the white knight, is borne to the earth.
Let us dismiss the phantom of Saladin to his Moslem Paradise, and wander away from this scene of the British soldiers harmless high jinks on a quest of our own. The spot is full of associations which, though much more recent, are almost as grotesquely incongruous with this Yuletide horseplay of the nineteenth century as are those of the First Crusade. For the Citadel of Cairo is overshadowed by the sombre memories of Mohammed Ali, the last of the warlike Princes of Egypt, the statesman and soldier who, assisted by the military abilities of his adopted son, Ibrahim, might, but for the intervention of the Great Powers, have shaken down the tottering throne of the House of Othman fifty years ago, and have founded a new dynasty of his own upon the ruins. Not many yards from here rises the magnificent mosque which bears his name, and uprears the two exquisitely graceful minarets which form a landmark visible for many miles to the traveller in the desert. Within its walls, rich with shafted alabaster, lie Mohammed Ali's remains, and he built and dedicated it, the grim old satrap, on the very scene of the most ruthless and most treacherous massacre by which any ruler ever swept political enemies from his path. It was here on this height—or, rather, in the narrow way, with a high wall, which leads to it through the Bab-el-Azab—that the wretched Mamelukes and their followers, to the number of 450, lured thither by a pretended offer of hospitality, were slaughtered in huddled heaps by the soldiery of the Pasha in 1811, one only escaping, who had refused to enter the narrow way, and had cleared one of the walls of the courtyard on horseback, alighting on the steep slope outside. They still point you out the corner of the enclosure at which this desperate leap for life was taken, and from it, if the stately edifice which surrounds the body of Mohammed Ali were removed, you could pitch a pebble on to his tomb. So near to the death-place of the great company of his murdered victims did the slayer of the Mamelukes choose his last resting-place, nothing doubting, I daresay, of his own place in Paradise.
They had none of our weak Western misgivings on the subject of necessary, or what they deemed unnecessary, bloodshed, those Oriental princes of the old school, and none assuredly troubled the repose of Mohammed Ali. At the opening of the overland route to the East and South, a few years before the close of the Pasha's long life, a now aged Englishman passed through Egypt, among the first batch of travellers returning from one of our Australasian colonies. He and his companions were royally entertained at Cairo, and, among other attentions, he was admitted to view his host's bed-chamber. Its severe simplicity was relieved by but one mural decoration—a picture. It was a portrait of the single Mameluke who had escaped him. The sole memento of that ancient crime, now more than thirty years behind him, which Mohammed Ali cared to cherish, was one which would serve to remind him, for precaution's sake, of the features of his one surviving enemy.
But the sports are over. The turbaned spectators are trooping down the hill to the town, and Tommy Atkins is betaking himself to barracks after a Christmas Day spent much better, thanks to the kindly forethought of his officers, than in fortifying himself with strong liquors against the gentle melancholy naturally engendered by a Christmas celebrated in exile. Tea is awaiting us in the hospitable messroom of the Citadel, and from its windows, which command an unrivalled view of this pearl of Eastern cities, we can watch the countless domes and minarets of Cairo, now all suffused with the golden haze of sunset, grow gradually clearer and sharper in that intense olive green gloaming which melts so gradually into the magical Egyptian night.