‘And each other, yes.’
The guarding cohorts seemed for the time being, however, to have struck up an amicable alliance. They had found a brazier from somewhere and fuelled it with dried dung from around the well. The bitter fumes drifted across towards them. Daniel, the Copt, emerged from the balsam trees leading a donkey.
‘Well, I’m off now,’ he said, perching himself on the back of his donkey. ‘Otherwise I won’t get home in the light. There may be bad men about. Keep your eyes open!’ he said to the Copts. ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the Copts. ‘It will still be here.’
They watched him go.
‘Mean bastard,’ they said. ‘You’d think he’d have found us a chicken or two!’
‘Isa’s a mean bastard, too,’ said one of the Sons of Islam. ‘I reckon he’s forgotten about us entirely.’
‘The government’s mean bastard, too,’ said the policeman, looking at Owen.
‘All right,’ said Owen, ‘I’ll get somebody from the village to bring you up something.’
The men settled down around the brazier.
Mahmoud shrugged, then turned and walked a little way away and began looking round him. Owen knew he was trying to visualize what had happened.
But it had happened at night, thought Owen. There had been nothing to see. There had only been sounds in the darkness.
Over in the balsam trees around the well there was a little scurry and two goats came bounding out. Owen went across and found the old goatherd lying under a tree.
‘Still here, then?’
‘We’ve been over to Tel-el-Hasan for a couple of days,’ said the old man. ‘We’d have stayed longer but somebody had been there before us.’
‘Eaten all the food, had they?’
‘They’ve taken the lowest shoots. We can do better here.’
Owen sat down beside him. The heat had gone out of the sun now and the shadows were creeping over the sand.
‘Tel-el-Hasan? Not many people go between there and here, do they?’
‘Only the Copt.’
‘You remember the night the man was found on the railway line?’
The old man nodded.
And you heard voices up here by the Tree?’
‘Yes.’
‘Earlier that night, perhaps just when it was getting dark, did you see anyone coming over here from Tel-el-Hasan?’
The old man shook his head.
‘A man, perhaps, or two men?’
‘I saw no one.’
‘Or even,’ Owen persisted, ‘a man and a woman? You said you had heard a man and a woman talking up by the Tree.’
‘I heard. I did not see.’
‘But earlier?’
The old man considered.
‘I remember seeing no one,’ he said finally.
Owen nodded. Mahmoud had probably already asked the questions.
‘The goats were restless,’ said the old man. ‘It was a bad night.’
Owen made sympathetic noises. Up by the Tree, Mahmoud had walked off at a tangent and now was looking back at the spot where, according to the tracker, the attack had taken place. Owen guessed he was trying to work out how the two, the man and the woman, had approached. They must have been waiting by the Tree. But why had Ibrahim gone there anyway?
‘It was a bad night,’ said the old man again. ‘The goats were restless. There was no quieting them down. First, the people. Then the bird.’
‘Bird?’ said Owen.
‘There was a bird about. An ostrich.’
‘You saw it?’
‘No. But the goats knew. That was why they were restless.’
‘When was this? About the time that you heard the people talking?’
‘No. After.’
Puzzled, Owen went to join Mahmoud.
It was getting dark now and if they did not leave soon they might find it difficult to trace their way back across the fields to the station.
As they left the village behind they saw a long line of people coming across the desert. They were leading donkeys and camels heaped high with packs and some of them were carrying banners.
Owen and Mahmoud stopped to watch them pass.
‘Have you thought,’ said Mahmoud, ‘that the concentration of pilgrims will be at its highest at just the moment that the new railway reaches Heliopolis?’
Chapter 10
Owen had not; but other people, it soon appeared, had. One of the Mamur Zapt’s duties was to read the press for material of a politically inflammatory nature. Splashed across the front page of one of the most popular Nationalist newspapers the following morning was a heavy-breathing article drawing attention to the fact and making much of the insensitivity of the government and of foreign businessmen in allowing such a thing to happen. ‘Surely,’ the article concluded, ‘someone could have foreseen how greatly traditional religious susceptibilities would be offended by such an untimely intrusion at an important moment of spiritual preparation.’
Owen had just put the newspaper down when the phone rang. It was the Syndicate.
‘Have you seen-?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Owen wearily.
‘We wouldn’t want everything to go wrong now. Not when we’re so close to completion.’
‘ Are you so close to completion?’
‘Another couple of weeks. Working Fridays will make all the difference.’
The railwaymen had in the end decided not to strike. They were too near the end of their contracts to want to lose money.
The railway, then, would be finished on time; and that would certainly be while the pilgrims were still congregated at Birket-el-Hadj. It took them several weeks to gather, not as long as in the past, when the first pilgrims would arrive months before departure, but long enough for them to be a considerable presence in the neighbourhood for some time.
But how close would the terminus of the railway actually be to Birket-el-Hadj?
‘Not very close,’ said the man from the Syndicate. ‘We’re ending it in Heliopolis. Quite near to the racecourse, as it happens.’
But distance, like so many other things, was blurred by the paper’s feverish prose, and the next day another article appeared recording, with satisfaction, the volume of protest the paper had received about the foreigners’ determination to press ahead and calling for a public demonstration at the Pont de Limoun the following evening.
The demonstration, coincidentally, was timed to start at exactly the moment that Mr Rabbiki, the veteran Nationalist politician, was due to initiate debate in the Assembly on the question he had put. The question, of course, was to do with Ibrahim and not with the arrival of the railway at Heliopolis, but Owen had no doubt that Mr Rabbiki’s broad brush would tar widely.
‘Any problems?’ he asked Paul.
‘Nothing that we can’t handle,’ said Paul confidently, ‘if you can handle it at your end.’
Owen’s end was the demonstration. It was far larger than the previous one. The Nationalist Party had pulled out all the stops and there were banners everywhere, a properly constructed platform for speakers, speakers of stature and a bodyguard of even greater stature to protect them, together with cohorts of supporters marched in for the occasion.
Owen, too, had pulled out all the stops and had policemen at all street corners and lots more policemen close at hand but tucked away discreetly out of sight.
He had stationed himself on the roof of one of the houses, from where he soon saw first that the number of demonstrators was greater than he had anticipated and then that the policemen he had left on the street corners had noticed this and prudently withdrawn into the cafes with their fellows.
The square below was full of people, their faces ruddy in the light of the torches that many of them held. They were listening quietly and attentively. Owen was always impressed by this, more impressed than he usually was by what was served out to them. They had a kind of hunger, the same hunger that Ali and Ibrahim had shown.
And patience, too, the long patience of the Egyptian fellahin, patience enough to listen for hours to the inflated rhetoric, the got-up emotion, about issues that were in the end unreal. What did they care about when the new railway would get to Heliopolis? What, for that matter, did the Nationalists care, either? The whole thing was being stage-managed just in order to create difficulty for the government.