Mamur Zapt 18 The Mouth of the Crocodile by Michael Pearce

Author:Michael Pearce [Pearce, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780106144
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2014-10-07T22:00:00+00:00

Aisha said that it was all very well for boys because when it ended they would go on to a job. But girls had to marry. Their parents would fix it up. And the prospect of being married to some fat Pasha years older than herself didn’t please her at all. She would run away, she said.

And that’s what she was trying to get Leila to do. In her own interest. Which was a phrase she had picked up from her mother and didn’t like the sound of.

The station at Cairo, the Gare Pont Limoun, was huge, much bigger even than the one at Khartoum. And all the signs were in French. This was a blow to Jamie, who had never taken his French lessons seriously. You would have thought that at least some of the signs would be in English but they were either in French or in Arabic. But Jamie had difficulties with Arabic writing. Spoken Arabic he could manage, up to a point. But these bizarre squiggles, he struggled with.

And the language being spoken, at least around the station, was also French. His father said that was because an earlier Khedive had been very keen on France, especially after the British had moved in, and that the posh hotels were all French. And in the office they went to they spoke French. What was the point of winning, thought Jamie, if then you gave it all away and used the other side’s language instead of your own?

He wondered if Aisha spoke French. She probably did, and that was why she wanted to go to Paris. Already she seemed to have moved further away from him.

Fortunately at the Railway Rest House they spoke English. Jamie had no difficulty there.

Owen went straight to his office at the Bab el Khalk. His desk was piled high with papers and the official clerk smiled at him maliciously. Nikos was a Copt and heir to two thousand years of bureaucratic tradition. Conquerors – the Pharaohs, the Romans, the Arabs, the French, the British – came and went but the man in the office went on forever. The Copts were the real rulers of Egypt. Nikos, Owen’s official clerk, ran his office and, probably, Egypt as well. He didn’t approve of Owen’s going away and showed his disapproval by erecting paper mountains. Owen pushed the piles aside.

‘Get me Georgiades,’ he said.

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