Thomas Keneally - The Daughters of Mars

The train carriages look cranky old affairs with not enough windows, but once you’re inside they’re comfortable. The village houses on the way to Cairo are all mud-walled. They look flat and unfinished as if they’re waiting for another floor to go on top. People laboring on green patches of earth—they have irrigation from the Sweetwater Canal that winds for miles and into Cairo. The camels mince along with lowered heads and when they rest in shade you see their owners asleep on top of them.

You ought to see Cairo station! It has a great glass roof and is very grand in an Arabic sort of way—though British built. Orderlies carry everything for us except our valises. This is pretty flash. They’re like porters but you don’t have to slip them a shilling a bag!

Many beggars and it is a shock to the system. Blind children—some tell me that their own parents get them blinded in one eye by a hot needle when they are just babies—all so they can beg. And this in what they call the British Empire.

More soon, dear Papa. I hope the Sorley girl is looking after you.

That last sentence written with edginess and with eyes half-closed.

She could barely make a stab at writing letters about Cairo. It overflowed the borders of any possible letter. Here at the railway station they were loaded by a transport officer—four at a time—into open gharries, each one driven by a soft-speaking brown man in a tarboosh and wearing a crisp white jacket over a jalabiya. They were carried out in late afternoon into a frenzy of people and traffic. A city that was everything, too many people moving with too many ambitions, too many hopes and destinations. It was at the same time a glimpse of moored riverboats on—could it be?—the Nile. (These were officers’ clubs where Nubian waiters in red tarbooshes and long white robes glided along with drinks trays held high.) It was people carrying all possible items on their heads—a child’s coffin new-bought, a lounge chair, a haunch of camel meat, a bed. It was camels and donkeys on pavements and the smell of their urine, and men seated by them on mats working with sewing machines or turning furniture legs on little lathes. It was car horns of the army and of the rich blaring at one time with the clang of trams and the trumpet blasts of tram conductors. It was street sellers leaning into your gharry trying to sell flyswatters and whisks, scarabs and lottery tickets, and passing British soldiers telling them darkly to clear out— imshi! —and leave the ladies alone. It was raucous native bands in unexplained processions booming and howling—brass and trumpet—and shoe shiners crying, “’Allo, George” to the soldiers, and the soldiers with cockney accents calling, “’Ello, sweetie” at the nurses’ gharries. Whistles from Australian soldiers—wandering the streets like men used to the place—frosted the hubbub with levity. And then the strange sight of the dragoman—who could translate a letter into English or Arabic or Greek or French—trudging along with his portable desk, pens, and ink and looking for business without business looking for him. Effendis—Egyptian gentlemen in well-cut suits and tarbooshes—sat at café tables talking at an impossible pace yet like centers of calm in all the fury. There were acrobats, fire-eaters, snake charmers—all yelling out at passing Australian and British soldiers for baksheesh. Shocking beggars—young girls with infants, crippled crones, their hands stained pink and yellow, and every kind of blindness and crookedness of body and amputation—as if these people themselves were the ones who’d taken part in a recent and very savage war. And if you looked at the sky you saw kites circling above the putrid streets, waiting to descend to their abominable yet cleansing meals of flesh. Even amongst the more talkative women in the gharries making for their hospital across the city at Mena the chatter stilled a little.

All this just the surface anyhow, the visible part of the crammed ocean of life here that you were not equipped to deal with in any way other than by looking at it—if at all—at a tangent.

Dear Papa,

How can I tell you of what Naomi and I have seen…?

As the city was crossed, the peaks of the pyramids showed up ahead in a dust-tainted twilight. They had been heavenly creatures from picture books, gigantic entities in everyone’s imagination, and it was hard now to believe they were tethered to a specific patch of earth—that they could be casually seen and perhaps approached and then passed by as you’d pass a town. Sweat ran down the sides of Sally’s face and she could hear girls even from other gharries swearing they would wear their straw hats full-time. Bare, hard ground led to groves where their hospital lay with the pyramids blue now and pressing closer, pushing their reality on the women. The palmed oasis ahead seemed flat as a stage painting and defied belief too. The road took them into the trees to a flat-roofed mansion with a red cross on its veranda-ed wall. Once a hunting lodge—they’d been told—where the kings of Egypt invited their friends to shoot gazelles. More recently a hotel. Now a hospital.

The women were quartered in small rooms with spacious windows on the upper floors. Three beds waited in the room Sally shared with Carradine and Slattery—with Naomi next door, since they still kept their distance. One large lowboy and one deal table and a chair completed the amenities of the room. For bareness, said Carradine, it put a boarding-school room to shame. Yet from these windows could be seen across treetops—in the phenomenal blueness of dusk—the pyramid of Cheops.

Eric Carradine was in the Mena camp out there in the desert and that evening turned up suntanned and handsome to visit his wife. His brow was a bit foreshortened, women said, but he was A1 apart from that. It was apparent that Elsie and Eric Carradine were the least striving, most relaxed of people, with the long frenzy of searching for each other behind them.

One of the senior matrons spoke to the nurses in their mess on the first night and convinced them that in these premises their conversation must not be above a murmur, their laughter suppressed, their talk with patients reduced to the minimum of politeness and information. The chief medical officer—whom they had never seen before but who had come in now—was very elderly, well over sixty. Well, welcome then, ladies, was all he said. Matron will tell you the rest.

He seemed to suggest: since you’ve insisted on presenting yourselves here, we’ll need to have you amongst us.

The matron and colonel seemed at first to be brother and sister in their contempt for nurses. For the girls were set to work scrubbing with carbolic the big rooms which had once been perhaps hotel libraries or ballrooms, while orderlies smoked and mucked about with one another in the shade of trees. Then—more normally—nurses were set to air mattresses and wash down rubber mattress covers and make beds, ready for the brave, shaking out the linen with a thud in the hot, dry air, with a whiplash beneath which their restrained conversation and their muted laughter were permitted. Next they moved out of the house to do similar work in marquees—which the colonel called “brigaded tents”—set in the gardens. A sign, said Honora, that some lunatic thought the huge hotel might not be enough for the wounded.

On a dim path Sally’s shoe slipped off the duckboard laid out to the marquee and her ankle was sprained. In her family little pains like this fell instantly under the dictum: if that’s the worst thing that happens to you… But with her mother—she remembered acutely as she limped—the adage had run out of its capacity to help. With their mother the worst thing had happened and set up its nest in her eye sockets.