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.
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