I
"Oh, Heaven help us! What is that dreadful noise! Run, run! Has somebody been killed?"
"Do not distress yourself, kind-hearted sir. It is only the merchants of Alexandria, buying cotton."
"But they are murdering one another surely."
"Not so. They merely gesticulate."
"Does any place exist whence one could view their gestures in safety?"
"There is such a place."
"I shall come to no bodily harm there?"
"None, none."
"Then conduct me, pray."
And mounting to an upper chamber we looked down into a stupendous Hall.
It is usual to compare such visions to Dante's Inferno, but this really did resemble it, because it was marked out into the concentric circles of which the Florentine speaks. Divided from each other by ornamental balustrades, they increased in torment as they decreased in size, so that the inmost ring was congested beyond redemption with perspiring souls. They shouted and waved and spat at each other across the central basin which was empty but for a permanent official who sat there, fixed in ice. Now and then he rang a little bell, and now and then another official, who dwelt upon a ladder far away, climbed and wrote upon a board with chalk. The merchants hit their heads and howled. A terrible calm ensued. Something worse was coming. While it gathered we spoke.
"Oh, name this place!"
"It is none other than the Bourse. Cotton is sold at this end, Stocks and Shares at that."
And I perceived a duplicate fabric at the farther end of the Hall, a subsidiary or rather a superseded Hell, for its circles were deserted, it was lashed by no everlasting wind, and such souls as loitered against its balustrades seemed pensive in their mien. This was the Stock Exchange—such a great name in England, but negligible here where only cotton counts. Cotton shirts and cotton wool and reels of cotton would not come to us if merchants did not suffer in Alexandria. Nay, Alexandria herself could not have re-arisen from the waves, there would be no French gardens, no English church at Bulkeley, possibly not even any drains. . .
Help! oh, help! help! Oh, horrible, too horrible! For the storm had broken. With the scream of a devil in pain a stout Greek fell sideways over the balustrade, then righted himself, then fell again, and as he fell and rose he chanted "Teekoty Peapot, Teekoty Peapot." He was offering to sell cotton. Towards him, bull-shouldered, moved a lout in a tarboosh. Everyone else screamed too, using odd little rhythms to advertise their individuality. Some shouted unnoticed, others would evoke a kindred soul, and right across the central pool business would be transacted. They seemed to have evolved a new sense. They communicated by means unknown to normal men. A wave of the note-book, and the thing was done. And the imitation marble pillars shook, and the ceiling that was painted to look like sculpture trembled, and Time himself stood still in the person of a sham-renaissance clock. And a British officer who was watching the scene said—never mind what he said.
Hence, hence!
II
My next vision is cloistral in comparison. Vision of a quiet courtyard a mile away (Minet el Bassal), where the cotton was sold on sample. Pieces of fluff sailed through the sunlight and stuck to my clothes. Their source was the backs of Arabs, who were running noiselessly about, carrying packages, and as they passed it seemed to be the proper thing to stretch out one's hand and to pull out a tuft of cotton, to twiddle it, and to set it sailing. I like to think that the merchant to whom it next stuck bought it, but this is an unbridled fancy. Let us keep to facts, such as to the small fountain in the middle of the courtyard, which supported a few aquatic plants, or to the genuine Oriental carpets which were exposed for sale on the opposite wall. They lent an air of culture, which was very pleasing. Yet, though here there was no cause for fear, the place was even more mysterious than the Bourse. What did it all mean? To the outsider nothing seems more capricious than the mechanism of business. It runs smoothly when he expects it to creak, and creaks when he expects it to be still. Considering how these same men could howl and spit, one would have anticipated more animation over the samples. Perhaps they sometimes showed it, but my memory is of calm celibates in dust-coats who stood idling in the sunshine before the doors of their cells, sipping coffee and exchanging anecdotes of a somewhat mechanical impropriety. Very good the coffee was, too, and the very blue sky and the keen air and the bright dresses of some natives raised for a moment the illusion that this courtyard was actually the academic East, and that caravans of camels were waiting with their snowy bales outside. There were other courtyards with ramifications of passages and offices, where the same mixture of light business and light refreshments seemed in progress—architectural backwaters such as one used to come across in the Earl's Court Exhibition, where commerce and pleasure met in a slack communion. These I did not care for, but the main courtyard was really rather jolly, and that British officer (had he visited it) could certainly have left his comment (whatever it was) unspoken.
Hence!
III
In the final stage I was in the thick of it again, though in a very different sort of thickness. Cotton was everywhere. The flakes of Minet el Bassal had become a snowstorm, which hurtled through the air and lay upon the ground in drifts. The cotton was being pressed into bales, and perhaps being cleaned too—it is shocking not to be sure, but the row was tremendous. The noise was made no longer by merchants—who seldom so far remount the sources of their wealth—but by a certain amount of wooden machinery and by a great many Arabs. Some of them were fighting with masses of the stuff which was poured over them from an endless staircase. Just as they mastered it, more would arrive and completely bury them. They would shout with laughter and struggle, and then more cotton would come and more, quivering from the impetus of its transit, so that one could not tell which was vegetable, which man. They thrust it into a pit in the flooring, upon which other Arabs danced. This was the first stage in the pressing—exerted by the human foot with the assistance of song. The chant rose and fell. It was better than the chants of the Bourse, being generic not personal, and of immemorial age—older than Hell at all events. When the Arabs had trodden the cotton tight, up they jumped, and one of them struck the flooring with his hand. The bottom of the pit opened in response, a sack was drawn across by invisible agents, and the mass sank out of sight into a lower room, where the final pressure was exerted on it by machinery. We went down to see this and to hear the "cri du coton," which it gives when it can shrink no more. Metal binders were clamped round it and secured by hand, and then the completed bale—as hard as iron and containing two or three Arabs inside it for all I know—was tumbled away to the warehouse.
It is difficult to speak intelligently about or against machinery, and my comments made no great stir—e.g. "Why has it to be pressed?" and "Do the different people's cotton not get mixed?" and "What I like is, it is so primitive." To this last indeed it was somewhat severely replied that the process I had viewed was anything but primitive—nay, that it was the last word on cotton-pressing, or it would not have been adopted at Alexandria. This was conclusive, and one can only hope that it will be the last word for ever, and that for century after century brown legs and rhythmic songs will greet the advancing cataracts of snow. That peevish British officer would have forgotten his peevishness had he come here. He would have regretted his criticism of the Bourse. It was "A bomb in the middle of them is the only possible comment," and when he made it I realized that there was someone in the world even more outside cotton than I was myself.