Series 03: John Brady Nash letters, January 1914-December 1915 - Page 89
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[Page 89]
a donkey, or a camel, have the honour of carrying our bodies and spirits. I refused for both of us. Not so much on account of the piastres (Egyptian money) that needed to flow to the animal's driver, but because the beasts look dirtier than the owners, and that is going to great extents in this particular regard. The same remark applies to the camel. When a big man sits astride a small donkey, the following sentence comes to my mind, - Get off and carry the beast! –, learned in youth no doubt.
With Abdul Haleen Mahmund Salam as conductor we stepped from stone to stone, ever upwards reaching nearer to the sky, pausing for breath first when about one third the way, from here looking out upon Cairo, the Nile and the surrounding country to the North and East, not neglecting the desert and green lands in the foreground. A village inhabited by native Egyptians lay immediately below us, our eyes looked upon the roofs of the structures called houses and into the spaces comparable to small yards; the living places are but square box-like appartments, looking as if made of dried mud, with a covering of all sorts of refuse from the cultivations, dried corn stalks and the like; mud walls as high as the wall of the living places separate one yard from the other; in these spaces were walking about or stationery men women children goats sheep donkeys and fowls; just think of the dirt and wonder how people can live midst such surroundings. In this vast space of sand, where square feet look to be of no value and the cold at no time of year is great, the natives are huddled in such manner as you cannot imagine. Arguing from an Australian stand point, one would expect an epidemic of some kind, – plague, smallpox –, to come and sweep the population to another world. Perhaps such does happen. Yet have these same class of