Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt

You would feel something nudging your knee and look down and there would be a sheep painted in blue stripes and often with a child’s shoe hanging round its neck on a cheap silver necklace.

The answer lay, perhaps, in the fact that despite the trams and despite its proximity to the new European quarters the Ataba remained obstinately part of the native city. The people you saw were the ordinary people of Cairo: blue-gowned labourers, veiled women in black, office workers in suits and tarbooshes, the red, pot-like hat of the educated Egyptian, shopkeepers in striped gowns and tarbooshes but with a turban bound round the tarboosh.

The hawkers, too, of whom there were very many, were ones who served the ordinary Egyptian rather than the tourist. Instead of the souvenir-seller and dirty-postcard-seller of the great hotels you saw the brush, comb and buttonhook-seller, the pastry-seller, the lemonade-seller and the water-carrier.

It was two different worlds and despite the incessant clanging of the trams and the shouts of the street vendors Owen on the whole preferred this one to the hotel one.

He had been visiting the fire station on the Ataba and afterwards had adjourned with the chief, as was proper after transacting business, to the coffee house. They sat there now benignly watching the mêlée in the square.

‘So what would you do,’ asked Owen, ‘if you wanted to get out and your way was blocked?’

‘I would ring my bell and shout.’

‘But nearly everyone else in the square is ringing a bell and shouting,’ Owen pointed out.

‘I would exhort them,’ said the Fire Chief.

And by the time you got anywhere, thought Owen, half the city would have burned to the ground.

‘Is there no other exit?’

The Fire Chief pushed back his tarboosh and scratched his head.

‘Well—’ he was just beginning, when on the other side of the square there was a fierce squeal of brakes and a tram-bell started jangling furiously. An arabeah veered suddenly and there were agitated shouts.

A crowd seemed to be gathering in front of one of the trams. It looked as if there had been an accident.

A policeman somewhere was blowing his whistle. Owen could see him now pushing his way through the crowd. The crowd, unusually, parted and Owen caught a glimpse of a still form lying beside the tram.

It seemed to be a woman, a European.

He got to his feet. The Fire Chief, used to dealing with accidents, fell in beside him. Together they began to force a way through the crowd.

Even in that short time it had grown enormously. It was now well over a hundred deep. Traffic everywhere had come to a stop.

Some of the other trams had started ringing their bells. People were shouting, sheep bleating. As ass began to bray. It was bedlam.

The whole square now was an impenetrable mass of people. Owen looked at the Fire Chief and shrugged.

Over to one side was a native bus, totally becalmed. The driver had given up, laid his whip across the backs of his asses and was waiting resignedly. His passengers, content to watch the spectacle—all Cairo loved a good accident—chattered with excitement.

The Chief laid his hand on Owen’s arm and nodded in the direction of the bus. They made their way towards it.

The bus was one of the traditional sort and was basically a platform on wheels. From the corners of the platform tall posts rose to support a roof. The sides were open and the wooden benches faced towards the rear.

The Chief put his foot on the running-board and jumped up. The next moment he was shinning nimbly up one of the posts and clambering on to the roof.

Owen followed, less nimbly. For an instant one foot hovered desperately in the air. Then someone caught hold of it and gave a heave, the Chief caught his arm, and he levered himself up on to the roof.

He could see now right across the crowd. There was a little space beside the tram where some arabeah drivers and the conductor of the tram were holding back the crowd. The driver had collapsed against the side and was clasping his head in his hands, his face turned away.

The crowd by the tram suddenly eddied—a horse, it looked like, had objected to being hemmed in—and Owen caught another glimpse of the woman.

Something about her seemed familiar.

And the next moment he had slid to the ground and was fighting his way through the crowd towards her.

‘Make way! Make way!’

Someone looked up at him and took it into their head that he was the doctor.

‘Make way for the hakim!’ he shouted. ‘Make way!’

Others took up the shout.

‘The hakim! Make way!’

The crowd obligingly parted and hands tugged him through. He arrived dishevelled beside the tram and looked down. There, lying so close to the tram that she was almost beneath its running-boards, was Miss Skinner.

‘I did not see her!’ said the driver tearfully. ‘I did not see her!’

Somebody had stuffed a jacket under her head and a water-carrier was tenderly, uselessly, splashing water on her face.

There was no blood.

‘Get an ambulance!’ said Owen.

The cry was taken up and passed through the crowd and at its back someone ran off into the café. But the Ataba was totally jammed and the ambulance, like the fire-engine, would be unable to get through.

And then, over the heads of the crowd, something was being passed, and there, scrambling over people’s heads and shoulders, nimble as a monkey, was the Fire Chief.

A stretcher was passed down and, a moment later, the Chief arrived.

He dropped down on his knees beside Miss Skinner.

‘God be praised!’ he said.

‘Be praised?’ said Owen harshly.

‘She is not dead.’

The Chief seized a water-skin from the carrier and squeezed some of the water out on to Miss Skinner’s face.

Her eyes opened. For a moment they remained unfocused. And then the sharp look returned.

‘What is going on?’ demanded Miss Skinner.

‘An accident,’ said Owen. ‘You’ve had an accident. Just stay there for a moment. You’ll be all right.’

Miss Skinner’s eyes closed again. The Fire Chief dexterously wedged the stretcher under her. Cooperative hands hoisted it into the air. It was raised head high so that it could be passed back over the crowd.

As the stretcher lurched upwards Miss Skinner’s eyes opened again.

‘Accident?’ she said sharply. ‘That was no accident! I was pushed!’

CHAPTER 2

‘Look,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘I know a push when I feel one.’

She was sitting in a chair in the hotel lounge. Owen had suggested she remain in bed but Miss Skinner thought that was no place for a lady to receive a gentleman. She had made an appointment with Owen for six o’clock, taken a slightly extended siesta, and now here she was, not quite recovered—there was a nasty bruise on her face—but inclined in no sense to take this lying down.

‘In the crowd,’ murmured Owen, ‘so easy to mistake—’

Miss Skinner made an impatient gesture.

‘A push is a push,’ she said firmly.

‘So many people,’ said Owen, ‘perhaps carrying things. A porter, maybe. A package sticking out.’

‘A hand,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘gave me a deliberate push.’

Owen was silent. An image of the Ataba came into his mind. So many people milling about, jostling each other in the crowd, hurrying to catch a tram. The easiest thing in the world to bump into someone, collide. But a deliberate push?

‘Let me see, Miss Skinner: you were standing precisely where? Near where I saw you, obviously, but, just before you fell, precisely where?’

‘I had been looking at one of the boards—’

‘Ah, so you had your back towards the traffic, then?’

‘—but it was not the one I wanted and I had just turned away. I was looking for the one to the Zoological Gardens and this one, I remember, was for the Citadel. There! That will help you to place it.’