And then he thought of the way in which those few things had been tipped out on to the sand and scattered casually across the desert. Life, he thought, for people like Soraya, was pitiless. Cruel.
The thought revived the anger that burned within him when he thought of Egypt and what Egypt had come to. He was not, he thought, a bitter man but he felt bitter when he thought of how the ordinary people of his country struggled. Of the fellahin, who formed the great majority of the Egyptian population, struggling under the oppression of the Pashas. Of Egypt as a whole struggling under the rule of foreigners. Who were the British to rule his country?
As a young boy, still at school, he had vowed to right his country’s wrongs. And there were so many of them — and not just due to the British. Many were due to Egyptians themselves.
A lot of Egyptians, especially the young, thought like this. And so there was a revival of political activity, a growing feeling of the need for reform. Which is what Mahmoud, in a way, had decided to devote his life to.
Sometimes, as he never seemed to get anywhere, he felt discouraged. Why not do as others in the Parquet did and concentrate on getting rich? If you were a lawyer, there was every chance of doing that. His father would have wondered at Mahmoud. He had stinted himself to pay for his son’s education, scrimped and saved so that his son would be able to do better than he had. And now his son, just when he was getting there, was addressing himself to other things! Mahmoud would have liked to debate this with him but his father was dead. But in a way he did not need his father there. He knew what he would have said.
And then there was the question of what Mahmoud’s own children would say when they grew up. What would they say when all he could deliver to them was a country that could not even rule itself, that put up with the injustices and iniquities of life under the Pashas. Still! His heart burned with shame.
As he had ridden back to Denderah, his whole body aching from his long day in the saddle, his heart swimming from the sun, he had castigated himself more and more. The identification parades had been an utter failure. He had thought it would be easy. The clerk would identify the men and that would be that. But it had not turned out like that. Things weren’t so simple. He blamed himself for thinking that they should have been.
And the country, too, of course. He blamed Egypt for being as backward as it was. That was the root of all the problems.
But then he came back to himself again. What had he done about that? Where had his political commitment got him? All the work he had put into political activity, meetings, lobbying? The Pashas were still where they had been, the British still ruled, Egypt was still … well, Egypt!
He felt utterly drained. He had failed again. It was all failure. Everything was failure.
Owen could have told him he was always like this. When he started on a new case, he always hit it with enthusiasm, drive. But if things went wrong, or got stuck for some reason, his thoughts would go round and round. He would get more and more depressed, feel dragged down. It would happen when he felt tired, or felt that he should have succeeded and hadn’t. There was a pattern to it.
But there was another side to the pattern. At some point he would pull out of it, start to rise. He would feel buoyed up, anything would seem possible, and in no time at all he would be back to his best, driving away on top of things.
Owen had often talked about it with him. Everyone had their ups and downs, he would reassure him. It was just that he blamed himself while — said with a smile — everyone else blamed other people. This would often bring an answering, rueful smile out of Mahmoud, and would somehow start him on an upward path.
It didn’t seem to do so on this occasion but, as they went on sitting there, drinking tea, Mahmoud calmed down.
After a while he jumped to his feet and said he was going to take a walk around the midan to see how much had come in since he left. This, thought Owen, was a good sign. It was positive. The low this time was not as low as it sometimes could be. The other side of the pattern was activity, sometimes hyperactivity. That, at any rate, was preferable to the dreadful despondency of the low point.
As Mahmoud was wandering around he met someone he knew.
‘Ya Idris!’
‘Ya Mahmoud!’
They embraced joyfully.
When they had last seen each other, it had been at a political meeting in Cairo.
‘What brings you here?’
‘Work!’
‘Oh, yes?’ said Mahmoud sceptically. Idris had been a fellow student, and work had not been one of his strong points.
‘No, really! These days I am into trocchee shells.’
‘Trocchee shells! I never saw you as a trader!’
‘I am not, really. I am hanging around with a trader in the hope that some of it will rub off on me!’
‘But, Idris, down here? I thought you never went out of Cairo!’
‘I don’t normally. And from what I have seen of Upper Egypt, it is a policy I shall stick to in future.’ He looked around mock-furtively. ‘But don’t let anyone know that I have said that! The lot I am with now are all for unity.’
‘With Upper Egypt?’
‘It gets worse: with the Sudan, too!’
‘Idris, this doesn’t sound like you!’
‘I know. I have changed. The country has changed, too. Did you know that?’
‘I must confess I hadn’t spotted it.’
‘Oh, yes. We’re all for unity now. At least half of us are. The other half wants to go it alone. “Egypt for the Egyptians!” they say.’
‘Well, we’ve always said that. No British, no Pashas-’
‘You’re thinking too narrowly, Mahmoud. What is needed is a wider unity, a unity of the Nile valley. We need to work together with our suffering brothers in the Sudan.’
‘Idris, you know you can’t bear to go out of Cairo …’
‘I shall direct operations from home. Think of this foray down the Nile as an aberration. Not to be repeated.’
‘You said “direct”, Idris.’
‘Direct, in a manner of speaking. At the moment I merely file the papers. But I shall certainly rise.’
‘But, Idris, what brings you down here? This is a long way to go to file papers!’
‘A foolish person has said that I will do the job better if I know what the papers are about.’
‘And you come down here for enlightenment? Idris, are you sure you understood what they said? And, anyway, do you need to understand papers in order to file them? What,’ Mahmoud said, ‘are the papers about? What could they be about if you have to come to a place like this to find out?’
‘I am not sure I should tell you, Mahmoud, you being the hireling of the Pashas that you are.’
‘Look, Idris, no one down here can read or write. That rather restricts the significance of any papers that you might find to file.’
‘Mahmoud,’ said Idris, with dignity, ‘my work is not with the fellahin, whom both you and I know to be backward and so mired in ignorance that if they rise it can only be if you and I do their thinking for them.’
‘Who is it with, then?’
‘As I told you, I am now a promising young member of the trading community. They trade, Mahmoud; and someone has to keep track of their tradings in case they lose track.’
‘Filing the papers, you mean? But, Idris, people who trade in the desert …’
‘Yes, but they don’t trade with the people in the desert. They trade with people outside the desert. They are the only ones who can pay for what they trade in.’
‘You know, Idris, I think I am beginning to get an inkling of how you feeclass="underline" this sort of thing can surely be better handled from Cairo.’
‘My feelings exactly, Mahmoud.’
‘But I still don’t see how trading in trocchee shells is going to advance the cause of the great revolution — or, if you prefer, the wider cause of the unity of the Nile valley.’