The Charm of Egypt by filippo marinetti

Author:filippo marinetti
Format: epub

The Bardotti by Her Majesty the Cotton

A crowd of ragged Arabs, green, yellow, and blue, observes the painful screeching of pivots and cogwheels on an iron bridge, which, turning slowly, permits passage of high sails through sky and muddy riverbed, stretched on long taut ropes.

I observe a sleepwalking crowd. Stunned by the light. Still all smoky and filthy from its chocolate-colored villages, low winding silt hovels, cattle, goats, dogs, hens, reeking of gaudy groups of roosters and black buffaloes pointing their horns against the splendid washed majolica of the sky.

Crammed in the lock basin, the boats are anxious to carry a load of crude cotton: moaning, grumbling, creaking with rage in that European trap! With a heavy and rhythmic step, four black, beggarly, half-naked sailors advance. Infinitely occupied, curved, and digging the mud while staring at it, endlessly.

They tighten the rope to drag the huge half-sunken sailing ship some distance under a millionaire load of cotton that crushes the torrid sacks of seeds. These already ripen the future fiber whiter, shinier, and longer. A little black man who bites into a piece of sugar cane commands its navigation, astride the tiller.

Cotton boats besiege a small Arab cemetery on the shore whose gray graves with stalks, turbans and agave swords descend to bathe in the Nile. Nasal rattles and lullabies resound in the warm wool of the atmosphere.

On the shiny rails a snorting steam-train maneuvers, warning with a sign, “Beware of Trains.” Black brats are colonized by flies, and the sun is already high. The wide round white smoke of the locomotive incenses a blue minaret, its blue-clad muezzin, and its blue cry launched to the four winds:

Allaaaah Ahkabar!

Hawks circle above in a halo, winged scavengers jealously watching over the carcass of a dog, whose stench softens the acrid aromatic smoke of an oven built with bricks of camel dung, cooking in the sun.

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