Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the return of the Carpet

Some of the more nervous cafe-owners were beginning to fold up chairs and tables and move them indoors. Obliging customers picked up their own chairs and took them into the shops and doorways, where they sat down again and continued their absorbing conversations. There were no women on the street now, and children were being called inside.

The barber wiped the last suds from the Greek’s face with a brave flourish.

The Greek felt his chin.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What about here?”

“Perfect,” said the barber.

“Show me!” commanded the Greek.

The barber reluctantly produced a tin mirror and held it before him.

“It’s lop-sided,” complained the Greek. “You’ve done one side and not the other!”

“Both sides I have done,” said the barber, casting an uneasy glance down the street. “It is just that one side of your face is longer than the other.”

The Greek insisted, and the barber began to snip and scrape at the offending part.

The tea-seller lifted his huge brass urn off the counter and took it up an alleyway. Owen felt in his pocket for the necessary milliemes.

The procession was about a hundred yards away now. At this stage it was still fairly orderly. The students had formed up into ranks about twenty abreast and were marching in a disciplined column, though with the usual untidy fringe around the flanks, which would melt away at the first sign of trouble.

The barber dropped his scissors into a metal bowl with a clang and hurriedly pulled the protective cloth from off the Greek. The Greek stood up and began to wipe his face. The barber threw his things together and made off down a sidestreet. As he went, the Greek dropped some milliemes in the bowl.

Owen folded his newspaper and stepped back into the protective cover of a carpet shop. The shop was, like all the shops, without a front, but the carpets might prove a useful shield if things got really nasty.

The Greek came over and stood beside him.

“Not long now,” he said.

The head of the procession entered the Place. Owen’s professional eye picked out among the black gowns several figures in European clothes. These were almost certainly not students but full-time retainers of the various political parties, maintained by them to marshal their own meetings and break up those of their rivals.

As the column marched past, the students seemed to become progressively younger. El Azhar took students as young as thirteen, and some of the students at the back of the column could have been no more than fourteen or fifteen.

The procession was now strung out across the Place, the bulk of it in the open space in the middle and the head approaching the street which led up to Abdin Square.

An open car suddenly shot out of a street at right angles to the procession, cut across in front of it and stopped. In it was McPhee.

He stood up and waited for the marchers to halt. The four armed policemen in the car with him leaned over the side of the car and trained their rifles on the front row of the demonstrators.

The procession hesitated, wavered and then came to a stop. Those behind bumped into those in front, spread round the sides and formed a semi-circle around the car.

McPhee began to speak.

The crowd listened in silence for a brief moment and then started muttering. One or two shouts were heard, and then more, and the chanting started up again. The crowd began to press forward at the edges.

Owen saw the first missiles and heard the warning shots.

Then, to the right, came the sound of a bugle and Owen looked up, with the crowd, to see a troop of mounted policemen advancing at the trot.

This was the pride of the Cairo Police: all ex-Egyptian Army cavalry men all with long police service, experienced, tough and disciplined, mounted on best quality Syrian Arab stallions expertly trained for riot work.

They advanced in three rows, spaced out to give the men swinging room.

Each man had a long pick-axe handle tied to his right wrist by a leather thong.

At an order the handles were raised.

And then the troop was among the crowd. Handles rose and fell. The crowd opened up, and there were horses in the gaps, forcing them open still further. They split the crowd into fragments, and round each fragment the horses wheeled and circled, and the sticks rose and fell.

Whenever a group formed, the horses were on to them.

Students fell to the ground and either scrabbled away from the horses’ hooves or lay motionless. All over the Place were little crumpled heaps.

And now there were very few groups, just people fleeing singly, and no matter how fast they fled, the horses always outpaced them.

All this while, McPhee had stayed in the car, watching. Now he signalled with his hand, and out of the street behind him emerged a mass of policemen on foot.

They spread out into a long, single line and began to work systematically across the Place.

Anyone who was standing they clubbed. Behind them, in an area of the Place which steadily became larger, there was no one standing at all, just people sitting, dazed, holding their heads, or black gowns stretched out.

The last groups broke and fled, harried by the horses.

“Very expertly done,” said the Greek.

A student darted in among the stalls and tables close by them, a rider in hot pursuit. The student threw himself on the ground behind a stack of chairs. The horse halted and the policeman leaned over and hit the student once or twice with his stick. Then he rode away.

The student got to his feet, panting and sobbing. He looked back across the Place and saw the line of foot policemen approaching. In a second he had shot off again.

He reminded Owen of a hare on the run, the same heaving sides, panicked eyes, even, with his turban gone and his shaven head, the hare’s laid-back ears.

Another student rushed along behind the row of deserted street-stalls. He brushed right past Owen and then doubled back up an alleyway.

“That one!” snapped Owen. “Follow him! Find out where he goes!”

Georgiades, the Greek, who was one of Owen’s best agents, was gone in a flash.

The student was Nuri Pasha’s secretary and son, the difficult Ahmed.

The tea-seller put the urn back on his stall with a thump. Without asking, he drew a glass of tea and handed it to Owen.

“Watching,” he said, “is thirsty work.”

The only students on the square now were walking in ones and twos, sometimes supporting a third. Around the edges of the square, though, the foot police were still in action, prising out the students from their hiding-places among the stalls and chairs. Owen was pleased to see that McPhee had them well in hand. It was only too easy for them to get out of control in a situation such as this.

McPhee, helmetless and with his fair hair all over the place, was plainly enjoying himself. His face was lit up with excitement. It was not that he was a violent man; he just loved, as he would have put it, a bit of a scrap. Strange, thought Owen, for he was a civilian, an exteacher. On second thoughts perhaps it was not so strange.

He was using a cane, not a pick-handle. He had a revolver at his waist but had not drawn it throughout the whole business, even when he had been threatened in the car.

He was driving slowly round the square now, ostensibly chivvying the students, in fact, Owen noted, calling off his men.

At the far side of the Place the mounted troop had reformed and was sitting at ease, the horses still excited and breathing heavily, pick-handles now hanging loosely again from the riders’ wrists.

Georgiades reappeared.

He spotted the tea-seller and came up to the stall.

“Here is a man who deserves to be favoured of Fortune,” he said, “the first man back on the street with his tea.”