The Daughters Of Mars by Tom Keneally

Author:Tom Keneally
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Published: 2012-05-29T14:00:00+00:00

Condon suggested they try the adventure of an Egyptian bus to Sakkara. It was a novel idea since everyone else she knew tried to cadge lifts in army trucks or ambulances or commandeer a car when on a jaunt. People had told him they could get a truck back to Cairo or even Heliopolis without difficulty that afternoon. Sakkara was on the south-north road from Aswan. To her it counted for little that soldiers might smirk at picking up an officer and a nurse from the side of the road.

Catching the tram from Heliopolis and the bus from the railway station seemed a genuine adventure. It bemused the bus-travelling effendis – the Egyptian gentlemen in heavy European suits and tarbooshes – and the shy fellahin, labourers and small farmers, Nile cow-cockies as Condon would say, who frowned and stared as if the universal order had been upset.

As she watched unaccustomed quarters of the city sweep by, she realised that her elated feeling that the world had altered was because she and Condon had for a few hours moved beyond military reach. They rolled out into the irrigated countryside and its strips of cultivation and she assessed that the day was like a warmer autumn day at home and the sky wide open and vast. Occasional trucks going northwards showed unwelcome glimpses of khaki.

It’s a little mean of me, said Charlie as they sat and the bus engine whined and dragged them along at perhaps twenty miles an hour. I know all the travel guides at Sakkara try to make a living. But I think I’d rather not have a guide. I mean, some of them talk you blind and distract you when you see something marvellous and try to sell you rubbish.

He wanted to know – of course – whether this was agreeable to her. She said it was. He assured her he had a Murray guidebook with him – people preferred them over the German Baedeker guides – and somehow she knew that he had absorbed it conscientiously and would reliably tell her everything she needed to know at Sakkara.

As they travelled he confessed he’d been studying in a Sydney art school which emphasised sketching as the building block of all art and whose motto was that it was better to sketch well for a lifetime than to paint badly for twenty years. He didn’t like to bring out his pad when there were lots of people around. But the reason he liked sketching was not just that a sketchpad was so much more portable. It began to show you – as one of his teachers had argued – that light is everything. Colour was a mere servant to light. Light is everything to everything, and in everything too. It was, of course, the first time she had heard a discourse on these matters. She was as impressed with this reflection as with the bus – which seemed in part Condon’s own conception.

When they got off in the flat-roofed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.