V.

The Englishman put out his cigarette, rose and began to climb a tree nearby. Girgis lay muttering old curses. He could hear the Englishman wheezing and talking to himself as he ascended, crawled out on a limb, straddled it and peered in a window.

After a lag of fifteen seconds, Girgis distinctly heard the words, "A bit thick, you know," from the tree. Another cigarette-coal appeared, then abruptly swung in a quick arc downward and hung a few feet below the limb. The Englishman was swinging by one arm from the limb.

This is ridiculous, Girgis thought.

Crash. The Englishman fell into the bushes again. Girgis got cautiously to his feet and went over to him.

"Bongo-Shaftsbury?" the Englishman said, hearing Girgis approach. He lay looking up at a starless zenith, picking absently at flakes of dead skin on his face. Girgis stopped a few feet away. "Not yet," the other continued, "you haven't got me quite yet. They are up there, on my bed, Goodfellow and the girl. We've been together now for two years, and I can't begin, you know, to count all the girls he's done this to. As if every capital of Europe were Margate, and the promenade a continent long." He began to sing.

It isn't the girl I saw you wiv in Brighton,

Who, who, who's your lady friend?

Mad, thought Girgis, pitying. The sun hadn't stopped with this poor fellow's face, it had gone on into the brain.

"She will be in 'love' with him, whatever the word means. He will leave her. Do you think I care? One accepts his partner as one does any tool, with all its idiosyncrasies. I had read Goodfellow's dossier, I knew what I was getting . . .

"But perhaps the sun, and what is happening down the Nile, and the knife-switch on your arm, which I did not expect; and the frightened child, and now -" he gestured up at the window he'd left "have thrown me off. We all have a threshold. Put your revolver away, Bongo-Shaftsbury - there's a good fellow - and wait, only wait. She is still faceless, still expendable. God, who knows how many of us will have to be sacrificed this coming week? She is the least of my worries. She and Goodfellow."

What comfort could Girgis give him? His English wasn't good, he'd only understood half the words. The madman had not moved, had only continued to stare at the sky. Girgis opened his mouth to speak thought better of it, and began to back away. He realized all at once how tired he was, how much the days of acrobatics took out of him. Would that alienated figure on the ground be Girgis someday?

I'm getting old, Girgis thought. I have seen my own ghost. But I'll have a look at the Hotel du Nil anyway. The tourists there aren't as rich. But we all do what we can.

VII

The bierhalle north of the Ezbekiyeh Garden had been created by north European tourists in their own image. One memory of home among the dark-skinned and tropical. But so German as to be ultimately a parody of home.

Hanne had held on to the job only because she was stout and blond. A smaller brunette from the south had stayed for a time but was finally let go because she didn't look German enough. A Bavarian peasant but not German enough! The whims of Boeblich the owner got only amusement from Hanne. Bred to patience - a barmaid since age thirteen - she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm which served her now in good stead among the drunkenness, sex for sale and general fatuousness of the bierhalle.

To the bovine of this world - this tourist world, at least - love comes, is undergone, and goes away as unobtrusive as possible. So with Hanne and the itinerant Lepsius; a salesman - said he - of ladies' jewelry. Who was she to question? Having been through it (her phrase), Hanne, schooled in the ways of an unsentimental world, knew well enough that men were obsessed with politics almost as much as women with marriage. Knew the bierhalle to be more than a place to get drunk or fixed up with a woman, just as its list of frequent customers did comprise individuals strange to Karl Baedeker's way of life.

How upset Boeblich would be could he see her lover. Hanne mooned about the kitchen now, in the slack period between dinner and serious drinking, up to her elbows in soapy water. Lepsius was certainly "not German enough." Half a head shorter than Hanne, eyes so delicate that he must wear tinted glasses even in the murk of Boeblich's, and such poor thin arms and legs.

"There is a competitor in town," he confided to her, "pushing an inferior line, underselling us - it's unethical, don't you see?" She'd nodded.

Well if he came in . . . anything she happened to overhear . . . a rotten business, nothing he'd ever want to subject a woman to . . . but . . .

For his poor weak eyes, his loud snoring, his boylike way of mounting her, taking too long to come to rest in the embrace of her fat legs . . . of course, she would go on watch for any "competitor." English he was, and somewhere had got a bad touch of the sun.