Remote People by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718197728
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

BRITISH EMPIRE

One

Pure mischance had brought me to Aden, and I expected to dislike it. I had, in fact, a fairly clear picture in my mind of what it would be like; a climate notoriously corrosive of all intellect and initiative; a landscape barren of any growing or living thing; a community, full of placid self-esteem, typical in part of Welwyn Garden City, in part of the Trocadero bar; conversation full of dreary technical shop among the men, and harsh little snobberies among the women. I contrasted it angrily with the glamour and rich beauty I expected to find at Zanzibar. How wrong I was.

How wrong I was, as things turned out, in all my preconceived notions about this journey. Zanzibar and the Congo, names pregnant with romantic suggestion, gave me nothing, while the places I found most full of interest were those I expected to detest – Kenya and Aden.

On first acquaintance, however, there was much about the Settlement to justify my forebodings. It is, as every passenger down the Red Sea knows, an extinct volcano joined to the mainland by a flat and almost invisible neck of sand; not a tree or flower or blade of grass grows on it, the only vegetation is a meagre crop of colourless scrub which has broken out in patches among the cinders; there is no earth and no water, except what is dragged there in a ceaseless succession of camel-carts through the tunnelled road; the sanitation everywhere – in the hotels, the club, the mess, the private bungalows – is still that of a temporary camp. Architecture, except for a series of water-tanks of unknown age, does not exist. A haphazard jumble of bungalows has been spilt over the hillside, like the litter of picnic-parties after Bank Holiday. Opposite the quay a waste space has been faintly formalized and called a garden, and behind it stands a mean crescent, comprising shipping offices, two hotels, and a few shops peddling oriental trash in silk, brass, and ivory. The chief hotel is as expensive as Torr’s at Nairobi; the food has only two flavours – tomato ketchup and Worcestershire sauce; the bathroom consists of a cubicle in which a tin can is suspended on a rope; there is a nozzle at the bottom of the can encrusted with stalactites of green slime; the bather stands on the slippery cement floor and pulls a string releasing a jet of water over his head and back; for a heavy extra charge it is possible, with due notice, to have the water warmed; the hall-porter has marked criminal tendencies; the terrace is infested by moneychangers. The only compensating luxury, a seedy, stuffed sea-animal, unmistakably male, which is kept in a chest and solemnly exhibited – on payment – as a mermaid. You would have to search a long time before finding many such hotels in the whole of England.

There are other superficial disadvantages about Aden, notably the division of the Settlement into two towns. So far I

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