Down the gangway; into a clumsy bumboat painted red and blue; through hordes of fruit, cigarette and postcard venders; towards the breakwater near which brown-legged fishermen stood up to their knees in water hauling at nets; past a towering Orient liner from Australia; along teeming quays—the red tarbooshes, the Arabic inscriptions on signboards, the solicitations of dirty dragomans—the whole miscellany welded together in a brassy light which sharpened lines and angles, all under a pearl and turquoise sky. Already, at this wicked portal, Paul had recaptured the smell of the East.
As he left the quay a ragged urchin came running up to advertise the attractions of a bawdy house prepared to cater to the most exactingly perverse. The proffered enticements, each more indecent than the last, Paul declined with a shake of the head, but let the boy complete the catalogue. There was something piquant in the contrast between the tender years of the child and his monstrous sapience. "Hi, Mist' Ferguson, you wan' see" and the diminutive tout put forward a final bait.
Ferguson was a generic name for Englishmen, interchangeable with Disraeli and Cornwallis-West. Paul had heard enough.
"Ecklahburra!" he cried. "Kaleb!"
And at the sudden menace in his tone the boy scuttled off.
Fascinating, putrid land! Its very babes were born wicked. Paul had a new conception of what was meant by the doctrine of original sin, As a boy he had supposed "original" sin signified some specially ingenious form of iniquity.
The book shops as usual lured him, but he coveted so many objects that he ended by buying none, and wandered on. In two more hours he would be back on board, bound south through the canal, an automaton in the
