The three of them walked back slowly to the centre of the lawn where the majority of the guests had congregated. A little knot had gathered around the Consul-General. Most of them were ministers. One of them, recently appointed in a reshuffle by the Khedive, and known to Owen, greeted him as he came up. Owen returned the greeting.
“And how is your son getting on, Nuri Pasha?” he asked.
The son was in France; for the benefit of his health.
Nuri Pasha raised eyes heavenwards. “At least he’s a long way away,” he said.
“And how is my daughter, Captain Owen?” he asked in return.
Jane Postlethwaite, standing nearby, turned her face slightly under her sunbonnet.
“Quite well, thank you, sir,” Owen replied. “I rather expected she would be here.”
He scanned the crowd but Zeinab was nowhere to be seen.
“She has a mind of her own,” said Nuri. “Fortunately.”
He was pulled back into the inner circle.
“He might not be here for long,” said Ramses. “The word is that another reshuffle is on the cards.”
A man detached himself from the circle and made his way familiarly into the Residency.
“That could be the man to watch,” said Ramses. “He has done very well in our ministry. The Consul-General likes him.”
“Who is he?”
“Patros Bey.”
A Copt.
McPhee had told Owen that there was a gathering of the Zikr that night so he thought he would take Miss Postlethwaite to it to show her some local colour.
“The Zikr are a sort of sect, Miss Postlethwaite,” he explained. “Moslem, of course. The name refers to their practice of repeating the name of God, Allah, innumerable times.”
“It sounds very interesting,” said Miss Postlethwaite doubtfully.
Owen laughed.
“That’s not all there is to it. They whirl and dance and eat fire and that sort of thing. Sometimes they stick knives in themselves. In fact, they used to carry things to such an extreme that a few years ago the Government was obliged to step in and ban the most excessive practices.”
“Did they accept the ban?”
“More or less. You see, it was done with the support of their Grand Mufti-the religious leader so far as ecclesiastical law is concerned-who thought that the whole thing had become too self-indulgent.”
“Sticking knives in themselves is self-indulgent?”
“In theological terms, yes, apparently.”
Miss Postlethwaite was silent for some time. Then she asked: “Are you a theologian, Captain Owen?”
“I will introduce you to my colleague, Mr. McPhee, the Assistant Commandant of the Cairo Police, who has a great interest in local theology and religious customs. However,” said Owen, who did not feel that this line was particularly promising, “there will also be snake-charmers, acrobats, jugglers, that sort of thing, which I hope you will find equally interesting.”
Well before they reached the place where the Zikr were assembled they heard the sound of drumming and tambourines and as they came into the square they saw that the Zikr had already begun their chanting. There were about thirty of them, sitting cross-legged upon matting in the centre of the square, forming a kind of oblong ring. In the middle of the ring were three very large wax candles, each about four feet high and stuck in a low candlestick. In their light the Zikr could be seen clearly, staring at the flames, swinging their heads and bodies in time to the music, and chanting repeatedly “La ilaha ilia Allah-there is no god but God.”
As these were still in the nature of “warming up” exercises, the crowd took no great interest, concentrating instead on the ancillary services inseparable from any public occasion in Cairo. They clustered round the tea stalls, coffee stalls, sherbet stalls and sweetmeat stalls and sampled the chestnuts from the braziers at the foot of the trees. They watched with only an apparent lack of interest the tumblers, jugglers, snake-charmers, baboon-walkers, flute-players and story-tellers competing to entertain them. And they were lured in surprising numbers to the dark edges of the square, where veiled women from the villages read their fortune in the sand.
Owen took to all this like a Cairene; not so much the goods or turns in themselves as the pretext they provided for backchat and bonhomie. He had long ago come to the conclusion that the chief business of the Egyptian was conversation and that Egyptian institutions should be judged by the contribution they made to that. By that criterion the stall-holders, street-vendors and performers rated high. Round every stall was a knot of people all arguing vigorously. Owen would have liked to have joined in and normally would have done so. However, he felt slightly constrained by Miss Postlethwaite’s presence. He wondered, indeed, as he piloted her round the various turns in the open parts of the square, whether she was enjoying herself.
Once, she gave a little jump. This was when a baboon belonging to one of the street-performers put its hand in hers. Owen gave it the necessary milliemes and it released her hand and scuttled back to its owner.
“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Postlethwaite,” he said reassuringly. “They’re quite harmless. They look rather unpleasant, I know, especially when they’re exploited like this. But they’re the very same creatures as appear in the paintings in the tombs.”
It sounded horribly like the patter of the dragomans as they showed tourists round the Pyramids.
“Really?” said Miss Postlethwaite, slightly distantly.
She revived a little when they left the turns behind them and began to thread their way through the stalls. As always with a Cairo crowd, there was immense ethnic variety, and her interest seemed genuine as Owen pointed out the different types: the Nubians from the south, with their darker skins and scarred cheeks; the Arish from the Eastern Desert, the hawkfaced men with silver-corded headcloths and striped burnooses, their women unveiled but with their feet covered, as opposed to the ordinary Cairo women who exposed their legs but kept their faces concealed. He drew her attention to the dark turbans of the Copts. Was it his imagination or were there rather a lot of them? This was, after all, a Moslem occasion. He was beginning to think he had Copts on the brain when he heard one or two of the sweetmeat-sellers calling out, “A grain of salt in the eye of him who does not bless the Prophet,” the traditional cry for warding off bad luck, and knew he was not mistaken.
He bought Miss Postlethwaite a sherbet at one of the stalls and asked the stall-keeper why there were so many Copts around.
“Didn’t you know?” the man said. “This is the Moulid of Sheikh Darwish el-Ashmawi. All the expenses are paid by a Copt who became a Moslem.“ He grinned. ”They don’t like to see their money go so they come and eat it up.”
“To your great benefit, no doubt.”
The man mopped up a spill on the counter.
“I wish the benefit was greater,” he said.
“What is a Moulid?” Jane Postlethwaite asked.
“It’s a sort of feast-day for the local saint. In Egypt there are lots and lots of saints. Every village has one. Most have several. There are feast-days all the time. Everyone has a lot of fun.”
“Saints,” said Jane Postlethwaite, “and baboons!”
A change in the tempo of the drumming drew their attention back to the Zikr.
“The party’s starting,” said Owen, standing up. “It’s time for us to go.”
To one side of the Zikr was a roped-off enclosure for the elderly and more decorous. In it they were given cushions and coffee and settled back to watch developments. They were not long in coming.
In their absence the chanting had become more complex. Now it was more like an English catch-song or round. One group of Zikr would take up a phrase, embroider it and then give it to the others. In turn they would repeat it, embroider and give it back again. Gradually, the process became faster and faster until there was hardly a gap between the giving of a phrase and receiving it back again and all the Zikr seemed to be shouting all the time. The music rose to a crescendo.