Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

“I have heard about you,” said the sheikh. “You are no friend of the Rifa’i.”

“On the contrary,” said Owen, “I have come because I am their friend.”

“You are the Mamur Zapt?”

“Yes.”

“The Mamur Zapt is the friend of the great. He can never be the friend of the Rifa’i.”

“Because he is the friend of the great, he can sometimes avert the wrath of the great.”

“Why should the wrath of the great be turned on the Rifa’i?”

“Because one of the Rifa’i has done a bad thing.”

“If he has, then the fault belongs to him and not to the Rifa’i.”

“That is true, and that is what I think, too. And so I am anxious to separate the man from the Rifa’i.”

“How might that be done?”

“It would need your help.”

“Tell me what you want,” said the sheikh, “and then I will tell you if I will help you.”

“Men come to you for preparation,” said Owen. “Some have come to you recently. I would like you to give me their names.”

“That is a secret.”

“Think for a moment,” said Owen. “A snake catcher is known by repute. If I wish, I can find out the names of all the snake catchers in the city. I can find out, too, those that were away at the time. Such knowledge is no secret. I could find it out myself.”

“If you can find it out for yourself,” said the sheikh, “why ask me?”

“So that I can find out more quickly. Before more harm is done.”

The sheikh considered.

“It is true,” he said after a while, “that there are bad men among the Rifa’i.”

“Let us separate the two,” said Owen, “so that I look at the men and not at the Rifa’i.”

The sheikh regarded him thoughtfully.

“The Khedive’s birthday!” said McPhee the next day. “Splendid!” The parade had passed off without anyone taking a potshot at their sovereign. The reception, held safe behind the iron railings of the palace, had been undergone. The Khedive had at last retired thankfully to his private apartments; and everybody else had taken to the streets.

By the time Owen emerged from the palace, the Midan was full of little stalls. There were two sorts of stall. There were the ones in which the well-to-do sat and consumed Turkish delight or sherbet. These were carpeted enclosures; only the carpets were on the walls not on the floor. The walls were about four feet high so that those inside could see and be seen.

The other sort of stall was the ordinary selling stall which normally blocked most of Cairo’s streets. Usually they sold vegetables. Today they sold sweets, a source of friction between them and the ordinary sweetmeat vendors. Cairo had a sweet tooth and the chief point of occasions like this, it seemed, was to indulge it. For the very poorest there were sticks of sugar cane, to be sucked with audible gusto. Even a few milliemes, however, would purchase a bag of boiled or a jar of jellied or, more likely, a shapeless, sticky, multi-coloured mess of mucked about sugar. Young, old, Copt, Arab, Greek, Turk, Albanian, Montenegrin, all in their best boots and traditional finery, walked up and down among the stalls guzzling sweets.

“Splendid!” said McPhee, with deep satisfaction.

“They could be doing worse things, I suppose,” said Owen. “Killing each other, for example.”

“In a country like Egypt,” said McPhee seriously, “where there is so much ethnic and religious tension, it is important to relieve the tensions occasionally.”

“By eating sweets?”

“Well-?”

“A country glued together with sugar?”

“You may scoff, Owen, but traditional festivity serves a purpose and does more for social order than any amount of efficiency in the Police Force.”

“Hello!” said Garvin, coming up beside them.

“Oh, hello. We were just talking about efficiency.” Garvin looked a little surprised.

“Well,” he said, “it didn’t go off too badly, I must admit. I brought the band forward and that screened off one side. It was a good idea, don’t you think?”

“Oh, very good.”

McPhee slipped off. Garvin and Owen strolled down between the lines of stalls.

Suddenly Garvin ducked away. Owen pushed after him and found him standing over an old, scantily-dressed Arab, from the Western deserts, it looked, who was squatting beside a pile of twigs. As Owen looked, Garvin picked up a twig and put the end in his mouth.

“Haven’t had any of this since, oh, eighteen ninety-seven,” he said happily, “when I was in the Desert Patrol.”

“What is it?”

“A kind of liquorice root. Try some.”

Owen declined and left Garvin chatting away to the old Arab. One of the disconcerting things about Garvin was that when he could remember to forget about efficiency he actually knew quite a lot about Egypt.

He caught up with McPhee.

“I’ll give you an example,” said McPhee, harking back to their previous conversation, on which he had evidently been brooding. “I’m sure the C-G shouldn’t have been so cavalier over the Molid-en-Nebbi.”

“Things were getting out of hand.”

One of the highlights of the Molid-en-Nebbi, the Birthday of the Prophet, had been for the devoted to lie down in the street in scores so that the Descendant of the Prophet could ride over them. The British, possibly concerned about the risk to the horses, had decreed that the practice should no longer continue.

“Or take the Ashura as an example.”

“Well, yes, take the Ashura.”

One of the features of the Ashura procession was that it was preceded by hundreds of dervishes slashing themselves with knives and scourging their bare backs with chains.

Banned, too.

“Well, I don’t know-” McPhee began.

“I do,” said Mahmoud, who had just joined them. “It is a disgusting practice.”

“Centuries old!”

“Time it was stopped. What impression of us do you think it gives to tourists? That we go in for self-mutilation?”

“Incidental,” said McPhee. “Incidental.”

Owen fell in beside Mahmoud and they drifted away together.

“How is it that you’re here?” asked Owen. “Joining them if you can’t beat them?”

“Passing through,” said Mahmoud. “I’ve just been at a big meeting at the Ecole de Droit.”

Owen didn’t ask after the nature of the meeting, but if it had been timed so as to clash with the festivities it was unlikely to be a gathering of supporters of the regime, and if it was being held in the Law School, it was almost certainly a Nationalist meeting of some sort.

“The trouble with festivities,” said Mahmoud, “is that they are a kind of popular obscurantism.”

Owen was still trying to work out what this meant when he saw Garvin directly ahead of them. He wondered for a moment if he should pilot Mahmoud the other way. It was too late; they were on him.

They greeted each other with reserve, but politely. “Mahmoud was just saying that all this is a kind of popular obscurantism.”

Garvin understood the point in a flash.

“Distracts from the struggle, does it?”

“It’s the circus that goes with the bread,” said Mahmoud.

“McPhee would disagree with you,” said Owen. “He believes that the sugar sweetens the tensions.”

“That’s the same point,” said Garvin.

“And dissolves them.”

“Well-”

Garvin and Mahmoud looked at each other and laughed and walked on beside each other for a little while. Owen got held up by a camel. When he caught up with them they were deep in conversation.

“The second time he’s done it,” said Garvin. “Twice in a year!”

“Well, yes. I suppose with all the preparation-”

“Exactly. But it knocks on all the way back. Government offices-”