This began the second period of Dimsdale’s career. As he went forth
from Cairo up the Nile with great designs in his mind, and an approving
Ministry behind him, he had the feeling of a hunter with a sure
quarry before him. Now he remembered Lucy Gray; and he flushed with a
delightful and victorious indignation remembering his last hour with
her. He even sentimentally recalled a song he once wrote for her
sympathetic voice. The song was called “No Man’s Land.” He recited two
of the verses to himself now, with a kind of unction:
“And we have wandered far, my dear, and we have loved apace;
A little hut we built upon the sand;
The sun without to brighten it-within your golden face:
O happy dream, O happy No Man’s Land!
“The pleasant furniture of spring was set in all the fields,
And sweet and wholesome all the herbs and flowers;
Our simple cloth, my dear, was spread with all the orchard yields,
And frugal only were the passing hours.”
A wave of feeling passed over him suddenly. Those verses were youth, and
youth was gone, with all its flushed and spirited dalliance and reckless
expenditure of feeling. Youth was behind him, and love was none of his,
nor any cares of home, nor wife nor children; nothing but ambition now,
and the vanity of successful labour.
Sitting on the deck of the Sefi at El Wasta, he looked round him. In the
far distance was the Maydoum Pyramid, “the Imperfect One,” unexplored
by man these thousands of years, and all round it the soft yellowish
desert, with a mirage quivering over it in the distance, a mirage of
trees and water and green hills. A caravan lounged its way slowly into
the waste. At the waterside, here and there devout Mahommedans were
saying their prayers, now standing, now bowing towards the east, now
kneeling and touching the ground with the forehead. Then, piercing and
painfully musical, came the call of the Muezzin from the turret of
the mosque a quarter of a mile away. Near by the fellah worked in his
onion-field; and on the khiassas loaded with feddan at the shore, just
out of the current, and tied up for the night, sat the riverine folk
eating their dourha and drinking black coffee. Now Dimsdale noticed
that, nearer still, just below the Sefi, on the shore, sat a
singing-girl, an a’l’meh, with a darkfaced Arab beside her, a kemengeh
in his lap. Looking down, Dimsdale caught their eyes, nodded to them,
and the singing-girl and the kemengeh-player got to their feet and
salaamed. The girl’s face was in the light of evening. Her dark skin
took on a curious reddish radiance, her eyes were lustrous and her
figure beautiful. The kemengeh-player stood with his instrument ready,
and he lifted it in a kind of appeal. Dimsdale beckoned them up on deck.
Lighting a cigarette, he asked the a’l’meh to sing. Her voice had
the curious vibrant note of the Arab, and the words were in singular
sympathy with Dimsdale’s thoughts:
“I have a journey to make, and perils are in hiding,
Many moons must I travel, many foes meet;
A morsel of bread my food, a goolah of water for drinking,
Desert sand for my bed, the moonlight my sheet....
Come, my love, to the scented palms:
Behold, the hour of remembrance!”
For the moment Dimsdale ceased to be the practical scientist--he was all
sentimentalist. He gave himself the luxury of retrospection, he
enjoyed the languorous moment; the music, the voice, the tinkle of the
tambourine, the girl herself, sinuous, sensuous. It struck him that he
had never seen an a’l’meh so cleanly and so finely dressed, so graceful,
so delicate in manner. It struck him also that the kemengeh-player was
a better-class Arab than he had ever met. The man’s face attracted
him, fascinated him. As he looked it seemed familiar. He studied it, he
racked his brain to recall it. Suddenly he remembered that it was
like the face of a servant of Imshi Pasha--a kind of mouffetish of his
household. Now he studied the girl. He had never seen her before;
of that he was sure. He ordered them coffee, and handed the girl a
goldpiece. As he did so, he noticed that among several paste rings she
wore one of value. All at once the suspicion struck him: Imshi Pasha
had sent the girl--to try him perhaps, to gain power over him maybe,
as women had gained power over strong men before. But why should Imshi
Pasha send the girl and his mouffetish on this miserable mission? Was
not Imshi Pasha his friend?
Quietly smoking his cigarette, he said to the man: “You may go, Mahommed
Melik; I have had enough. Take your harem with you,” he added quickly.
The man scarcely stirred a muscle, the woman flushed deeply.
“So be it, effendi,” answered the man, rising unmoved, for his sort know
not shame. He beckoned to the girl. For an instant she stood hesitating,
then with sudden fury she threw on the table beside him the gold-piece
Dimsdale had given her.
“Magnoon!” she said, with blazing eyes, and ran after the man.
“I may be a fool, my dear,” Dimsdale said after her; “but you might say
the same of the Pasha who sent you here.”
Dimsdale was angry for a moment, and he said some hard words of Imshi
Pasha as he watched the two decoys hurry away into the dusk. He thought
it nothing more serious than an attempt to know of what stuff he was
made. He went to bed with dreams of vast new areas watered for summer
rice, of pumping-stations lifting millions of cubic metres of water per
day; of dykes to be protected by bulrushes and birriya weeds; of great
desert areas washed free of carbonates and sulphates and selling at
twenty pounds an acre; of a green Egypt with three crops, and himself
the Regenerator, the Friend of the Fellah.
In this way he soon forgot that he had remembered Lucy Gray, and the
incident of the girl ceased to trouble. His progress up the river,
however, was marked by incidents whose significance he did not at once
see. Everywhere his steamer stopped people came with backsheesh in the
shape of butter, cream, flour, eggs, fowls, cloths, and a myriad things.
Jewels from mummy cases, antichi, donkeys, were offered him: all of
which he steadfastly refused, sometimes with contumely. Officials
besought his services with indelicate bribes, and by devious
hospitalities and attentions more than one governor sought to bring his
projects for irrigation in line with their own particular duplicities.
“Behold, effendi,” said one to whom Dimsdale’s honesty was monstrous,
“may God preserve you from harm--the thing has not been known, that all
men shall fare alike! It is not the will of God.”
“It is the will of God that water shall be distributed as I am going
to distribute it; and that is, according to every man’s just claim,”
answered Dimsdale stubbornly, and he did not understand the vague smile
which met his remark.
It took him a long time to realise that his plans, approved by Imshi
Pasha, were constantly coming to naught; that after three years’ work,
and extensive invention and travel, and long reports to the Ministry,
and encouragement on paper, he had accomplished nothing; and that he had
no money with which to accomplish anything. Day in, day out, week in,
week out, month in, month out, when the whole land lay sweltering with
the moist heat of flood-time, in the period of the khamsin, in the dry
heat which turned the hair grey and chapped the skin like a bitter wind,
he slaved and schemed, the unconquerable enthusiast, who built houses
which immediately fell down.
Fifty times his schemes seemed marching to fulfilment; but something
always intervened. He wrote reams of protest, he made many arid journeys
to Cairo, he talked himself hoarse; and always he was met by the
sympathetic smiling of Imshi Pasha, by his encouraging approval.
“Ah, my dear friend, may. Heaven smooth your path! It is coming right.
All will be well. Time is man’s friend. The dam shall be built. The
reservoirs shall be made. But we are in the hands of the nations.
Poor Egypt cannot act alone--our Egypt that we love. The Council sits
to-morrow--we shall see.” This was the fashion of the Pasha’s speech.
After the sitting of the Council, Dimsdale would be sent away with
unfruitful promises.
Futility was written over the Temple of Endeavour, and by-and-by
Dimsdale lost hope and health and heart. He had Nilotic fever, he had
ophthalmia; and hot with indomitable will, he had striven to save one
great basin from destruction, for one whole week, without sleeping or
resting night and day: working like a navvy, sleeping like a fellah,
eating like a Bedouin.
Then the end came. He was stricken down, and lay above Assouan in a
hut by the shore, from which he could see the Temple of Philoe, and
Pharaoh’s Bed, and the great rocks, and the swift-flowing Nile. Here lay
his greatest hope, the splendid design of his life--the great barrage
of Assouan. With it he could add to the wealth of Egypt one-half. He had
believed in it, had worked for it and how much else! and his dreams and
his working had come to naught. He was sick to death--not with illness
alone, but with disappointment and broken hopes and a burden beyond the
powers of any one man.
He saw all now: all the falsehood and treachery and corruption. He
realised that Imshi Pasha had given him his hand that he might ruin
himself, that his own schemes might overwhelm him in the end. At every
turn he had been frustrated--by Imshi Pasha: three years of underground
circumvention, with a superficial approval and a mock support.
He lay and looked at the glow, the sunset glow of pink and gold on the
Libyan Hills, and his fevered eyes scarcely saw them; they were only a
part of this last helpless, senseless dream. Life itself was very far
away-practical, generous, hot-blooded life. This distance was so ample
and full and quiet, this mystery of the desert and the sky was so
immense, the spirit of it so boundless, that in the judgment of his
soul nothing mattered now. As he lay in reverie, he heard his servant
talking: it was the tale of the Mahdi and British valour and hopeless
fighting, and a red martyrdom set like a fixed star in a sunless sky.
What did it matter--what did it all matter, in this grave tremendous
quiet wherein his soul was hasting on?
The voices receded; he was alone with the immeasurable world; he fell
asleep.