Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 14]
All Fools' Day 3.
and veal steak (Young camel is quoted at 2 piastres per lb.) So we find the wisest course is just to accept the good gifts the cook sets before us and say nuffin. We have the best cook in Egypt and he does well though to be sure he does want a few piastres now and then.
A piastre is 21/2d. 971/2= £1 English. 100 piastres= £1 Egyptian. But to us piastres seem like pennies and they go quite quickly.
Good Friday :-
I wonder what all you home folk are doing to-day. Doubtless there is the Show or maybe there are picinics or other recreations, so I'm sending an Easter greeting in the screed. May you all have an enjoyable time, and may the war clouds not darken everything.
Yesterday we had a route march to Helwan, the whole Brigade. we cut across the desert on the way down and came back via the road. The long snake-like column meandered across the sands, along the Wadis, skirted the Tara Hills, impinged on Wadi Wiggle Woggle - goodness only knows how it got the name - went under a huge railway embankment and bivouacked on the banks of a canal fed from the Nile. A troup of Gyppies hung on our flank all the while and at each halt made hay selling oranges and cigarettes. One thing you should remember - the desert is not absolutely level. Here and there for a few miles back from the Nile it is as smooth as a billiard table. But further out it is all kopjes and hills and ridges and wadis (a wadi is a gully or dry creek. The creek runs once in two years). The hills are only about 300 feet high, but they often rise sheer from the desert - like bastions and in the bad old days must have witnessed some merry skirmishing. There are remains of forts and walls all over the place.
On the right of our line of march by lay the Nile with its green strip of verdure on either side and a dozen pyramids out westward. It was hot. The mirage seemed to shimmer on the rim of the earth and horsement camels and Bedouins a few miles away seemd to be floating in the air. Like white wings gliding up and down the Nile were the triangular sails of the native dhows and they looked wonderfully picturesque. Often the larger boats carried two sails and they are set just like wings and have a curious effect.
That is a rather sorry looking boat, I'm afraid. The wings aren't big enough . The spars are tremendous things and tower right into the sky. At old Cairo there is a veritable forest of masts. The rudders of those river boats are huge things. The noses are painted in gaudy colours and are always turned up disdainfully, as if they had been bumped against a pier.
(X) No hot cross buns to-day. Nothing at all to remind us of Easter except a church parade which I duly attended for a few minutes, as I had to go to Cairo.
Just in from Maadi where I had a few games of tennis. Talk about the plagues of Egypt ... We had one this afternoon. True bill. It started at about 3 o'clock and lasted till after sundown - Millions and millions and billions and billions and quadrillions etc. etc. etc. of locusts. The air was absolutely full of them, darkening the sun. As far as the eye could reach, nothing by myriads of locusts - big yellow and black and brown ones mostly about two inches long. They sounded like thousands of whirring wheels, and their droppings on the roof sounded like rain. Where they landed
they/