Chapter 19

A RETURN TO THE EAST

The East is a much larger slice of the world than Europeans care to
admit. Some say it begins at St. Gothard, where the smells of two
continents meet and fight all through that terrible restaurant-car
dinner in the tunnel. Others have found it at Venice on warm April
mornings. But the East is wherever one sees the lateen sail--that
shark's fin of a rig which for hundreds of years has dogged all white
bathers round the Mediterranean. There is still a suggestion of menace,
a hint of piracy, in the blood whenever the lateen goes by, fishing or
fruiting or coasting.

'This is _not_ my ancestral trade,' she whispers to the accomplice sea.
'If everybody had their rights I should be doing something quite
different; for my father, he was the Junk, and my mother, she was the
Dhow, and between the two of 'em they made Asia.' Then she tacks,
disorderly but deadly quick, and shuffles past the unimaginative
steam-packet with her hat over one eye and a knife, as it were, up her
baggy sleeves.

Even the stone-boats at Port Said, busied on jetty extensions, show
their untamed descent beneath their loaded clumsiness. They are all
children of the camel-nosed dhow, who is the mother of mischief; but it
was very good to meet them again in raw sunshine, unchanged in any rope
and patch.

Old Port Said had disappeared beneath acres of new buildings where one
could walk at leisure without being turned back by soldiers.

Two or three landmarks remained; two or three were reported as still in
existence, and one Face showed itself after many years--ravaged but
respectable--rigidly respectable.

'Yes,' said the Face, 'I have been here all the time. But I have made
money, and when I die I am going home to be buried.'

'Why not go home before you are buried, O Face?'

'Because I have lived here _so_ long. Home is only good to be buried
in.'

'And what do you do, nowadays?'

'Nothing now. I live on my _rentes_--my income.'

Think of it! To live icily in a perpetual cinematograph show of excited,
uneasy travellers; to watch huge steamers, sliding in and out all day
and all night like railway trucks, unknowing and unsought by a single
soul aboard; to talk five or six tongues indifferently, but to have no
country--no interest in any earth except one reservation in a
Continental cemetery.

It was a cold evening after heavy rain and the half-flooded streets
reeked. But we undefeated tourists ran about in droves and saw all that
could be seen before train-time. We missed, most of us, the Canal
Company's garden, which happens to mark a certain dreadful and exact
division between East and West.

Up to that point--it is a fringe of palms, stiff