The Girl in the Nile: A Mamur Zapt Mystery by Michael Pearce

Author:Michael Pearce [Pearce, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: _NB_Fixed, 1900, Egypt, Fiction, Historical, Mystery & Detective, Suspense, mblsm, scan, good quality scan
ISBN: 9781590580530
Google: SZJangEACAAJ
Amazon: 1590580532
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
Published: 2003-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

By about ten in the morning the sun was already dazzlingly bright and all living objects were seeking the shade. One of the orderlies came round closing the shutters. The room was plunged into darkness and stayed like that for the rest of the day.

At first it was cool and rather pleasant but as the day wore on, the temperature in the room rose. You opened the door into the corridor but not the window into the sun and that way you got—but perhaps this was fancy—a draft of air.

There were fans suspended from the ceilings in each of the rooms but in Owen’s view all they did was to move hot air from one place to another and he very rarely switched his on. Besides, they blew the papers all over the place.

This morning was papers. He had a pile on his desk which he was working systematically through; reports from agents, neatly docketed and summarized by Nikos, offensive memoranda from the Finance Department, irrelevant offerings from Personnel and aggrieved submissions from the Khedive, the Kadi, the Mufti and all the others who considered that the Mamur Zapt was exceeding his powers.

He pushed them all aside. On the end of the desk was a heap of newspapers. The ones he had were in Arabic, French and English. The ones in Italian, Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Amharic would go to other people in the office. Cairo was a polyglot community and had a lively press.

Too lively on occasion. One of the Mamur Zapt’s duties was to read the press before publication and excise any passage he considered inflammatory. Censorship? Call it ensuring that people’s feelings were not offended.

He picked up one of the newspapers and began reading. It was the influential Al-Liwa, nationalist in sympathies and radical in tone. Also windy rhetorical in tone. It was heavy going. His attention wandered.

What was he going to do? He had tried all his usual lines, Paul, Garvin, others, the ones he always used when he wanted to get official policy reversed or amended, and he had got nowhere. The Administration, this time, was showing unusual unanimity.

Obviously, the Agreement mattered. Well, he didn’t mind that; it mattered to him, too. He wanted to stay in Egypt, didn’t he? And, unfortunately, that meant going along with the Khedive. They were there by his invitation and only by his invitation. The other powers didn’t like it—they wanted Britain to get out of Egypt—but so long as the fiction could be maintained that the British were there at the express request of the Egyptian sovereign, there was not much they could do about it.

Owen was all for the Agreement. He was also, on the whole, for the Khedive on the grounds that at least he was the devil they knew. True, there were some things he didn’t like about the Khedive’s regime, the patronage, the corruption, the inefficiency. He could understand the desire of people like Mahmoud for reform and change.

Well, they could certainly have change. The British Government in London, the Administration itself in Egypt, was committed to Progress.

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