“Yes,” said Andrus, with less than his usual certainty.
There was a little silence. Then Sesostris said:
“You are tired, old friend. It has been a hard battle and you have borne the brunt of it. Keep going for just a little longer and then I will have someone else take over.”
“I wish you had not given the money to the Moslems.”
“It was necessary. They would not have responded on such a scale otherwise. It had to be big, Andrus, for the Khedive to notice and be influenced.”
“But for them to use it against our own people!”
“It is hard, I know. But it was necessary. How else are we to break through the effects of centuries of compliance and make the Copts erect and independent once again?”
Again there was a silence. This time it was Andrus who broke it.
“Will there ever be an end to the trouble between Copts and Moslems?” he asked wearily.
“Yes. But on our terms.”
“I hope you are right. You play a dangerous game, Sesostris.” The two men talked for a little longer. Andrus was the first to leave. Owen waited, as he had agreed, until the door closed behind him. Then he stepped out from behind the hangings.
CHAPTER 13
The Moulid of the Sheikh el-Herera was peculiar among Moslem saint’s days in that its date was fixed not by the Moslem calendar but by the Coptic one. It always fell on Easter Monday. In the view of the Copts this was a deliberate attempt by the Moslems to borrow reflected glory from the greater spiritual event and to obfuscate its uniqueness. In the view of the Moslems the Christian feast was an irrelevance, pursued by the Copts with characteristically unhelpful enthusiasm in order to distract attention from the joyful celebration of the saint’s holy day and to clutter up the streets at the time of the Zeffa, or procession, in which the Moulid culminated.
What gave the day added piquancy was that it sometimes coincided, as it did this year, with yet another festival, that of the Sham el-Nessim, the old Egyptian spring festival, elements of which antedated both the Christian celebration and the Moslem one, and which called on the allegiance of all Egyptians whether Christian or Moslem or, indeed, anything else. In practice, the effect of all this was to blur the day into one of general celebration, and tension between Christian and Moslem only erupted into open conflict if things went badly wrong.
At the moment, fortunately, there was no sign of this happening. Everyone seemed in carnival mood. There were children everywhere, many of them dressed up in comic costumes and holding little red lamps. Every so often a few of them would form themselves into a line, each holding on to the coattails of the one in front, and then go burrowing through the crowds like snakes to the good-natured protests of the spectators.
The street-artists were out in force. Tumblers, acrobats, dancers, clowns, entertainers, wild men from the south, mixed with spectators and competed for their attention. As the evening wore on and the moment of the procession drew near, they were increasingly joined by small groups of Zikr, dancing and spinning in the light of the lurid, many-coloured lamps with which the streets were festooned.
Musicians were drumming on their tablas and darabukas, flutes were playing and fireworks cracking loudly. As they exploded they lit up for a moment the crowds with their excited faces, startling the donkeys in the donkey-vous and making the little horses stir uneasily. The few policemen on duty gawked heavenwards with the rest.
“It’s all quiet, at any rate,” said Paul, who had come with them to escort John Postlethwaite or, as he put it, “mark” him.
“Quiet?” said Jane Postlethwaite, her ears still ringing from the last explosion.
“In policing terms, that is,” said Paul, laughing. He turned to John Postlethwaite. “I don’t know if you were aware, sir, that there’s been a bit of trouble lately between the Copts and the Moslems. We were quite worried about that, you know, with Patros Pasha becoming Prime Minister.”
“A good man,” said John Postlethwaite, “a good financial head on him.”
“Yes. Well, in the run-up to the appointment there was quite a lot of tension. It broke out in the occasional incident between Copt and Moslem. Fortunately, Captain Owen has managed to get it under control.”
Owen knew that Paul meant to be helpful.
“You’d have your work cut out with this lot,” said John Postlethwaite, as a flock of dancing Zikr spiralled down the street holding flaming torches in their mouths, forcing the crowd to swirl and eddy unnervingly. “Religion, I take it.”
“What?” said Paul.
On the other side of the street Owen saw McPhee’s tall figure. McPhee was there, as he was, partly on purposes of pleasure. They both reckoned there would be no large-scale trouble that night. Small incidents there would certainly be, but both Andrus and Osman had honoured their undertakings and not only pulled their gangs off the streets but instructed them to avoid anything which could lead to trouble.
Across the street McPhee caught sight of them and began to weave his way in their direction.
“Religion’s at the bottom of it,” said John Postlethwaite. “It usually is.”
“Actually, there are a lot of pagan elements too,” said McPhee, overhearing and mishearing as he came up, and thinking that Postlethwaite was referring to the festival. “The Sham el-Nessim goes back to pharaonic times and even before, and some of its features, notably the phallic ones, have crept into the Moulid and even into the ceremony of the Coptic Easter.”
“A bit of a mixture, eh?” said John Postlethwaite.
“Like Cairo,” said Owen; “like Egypt.”
In the crowd celebrating the Moslem saint he could see Copts as well as Moslems. The humbler Egyptians saw no incongruity between attending the Christian festival in the morning and the Moslem one in the evening; and the Sham el-Nessim was common to all.
A squeal of pipes in the distance announced the imminence of the procession. The policemen remembered their business and began trying to chivvy people back off the streets, or rather, since that was out of the question, attempting to open up a space through which the procession might pass.
Then round the corner came twelve men bearing aloft cressets full of flaming wood. Behind them came three giant camels draped almost to their feet with a sort of scarlet pall encrusted with shells and bits of brass and mirror. The centre camel had a flat saddle on which stood a Bedouin sheikh in grand robes flourishing a battle-axe. The other two camels carried boys with a kettle-drum slung on each side, which they beat incessantly. Right on their heels were a foot band with more kettle-drums and also cymbals which they clashed and bashed without stopping or having any regard to tune.
Then came the first of the carts, drawn by donkeys and crammed full of children all in gay carnival attire. As they passed, they threw brightly-coloured paper streamers into the crowd.
Other carts followed, each representing some guild of workmen or perhaps just a scene which had struck the organizer’s fancy. Around them were masqueraders and tumblers and musicians. The music and the merriment were deafening.
There was a sudden gap in the procession and looks of agitation. The pause became protracted and the crowd fell quiet. And then, struggling round the corner, caught in the lines of lamps and crystal balls which hung across the street, came a huge wooden contraption, a large frame with about fifty lamps on it arranged in four revolving circles, carried by staggering men. Revived by the applause, they struggled on but then were stopped by sudden shouts of alarm. Hanging low over the street in front of them was the shopkeeper’s pride, a line hung with huge gilt crystal chandeliers which swung in the wind and made shifting kaleidoscopic patterns of light and shadow. There was a brief halt while eager youths climbed up the shopfronts and hauled the line high enough for the contraption to pass underneath. With a magnificent flourish on the hautboys, the procession resumed.