H. V. MORTON

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXII, Issue 4666, 18 July 1938, Page 6

H. V. MORTON

the Paris Marseilles express thundered through the night, I tried to cheer myself with thoughts of Egypt. If I came safely through this night, I told myself as we took a curve at a speed which felt like a hundred miles an hour, I shall be in Egypt in four days’ time —Egypt, the Pyramids, the Nile, tombs, temples, date-palms, and sunlight . . . The wheels began to beat time to my thoughts. They said with maddening monotony:— Egypt-Pyramids, Egypt-Pyramids, Egypt-Pyramids. Pyramids-Pyramids, Pyramids-Pyramids. . . . Then they would change the rhythm and say— The Nile-Egypt, The Nile-Egypt, The Nile-Egypt,

Pyramids, Pyramids, Pyramids . . . How strange it is, and how alarming, that trains, specially on the Continent, seem to travel twice as fast in the night. Although I know that French engine-drivers are among the best in the world, I am haunted in the dark by the horrible thought that at least one of them may have fallen off his locomotive, or is sitting with his back to the engine reading “Paris Soir.”

Even the confident, boyish whistle with which French locomotives announce their headlong progress, failed to comfort me as the express train poured itself across the dark length of France.

How cold it had been in London, and how grey. Was it really only this morning that I set out, rushing round Victoria Station in a last-moment panic to buy packets of razor-blades, a new pencil, and an electric torch to light the lesser known tombs in the Valley of the Dead? There I go again—the Valley of the Dead! I really must try and think of something cheerful! J LAY in the rushing darkness, and thought how wonderful it would be to feel again the warm sunlight of Egpyt. I was in Egypt only once before, fourteen years ago, a young reporter on his first big job. And what a job that was: the opening of the mummy chamber of the Tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen.

Fourteen years ago I used to get up early in the morning and row across the Nile at Luxor, such a breathless blue river, husked in the morning: and I would ride a donkey into the fiery canyon of the Valley of the King's, five miles of town desolation, with heat like a furnace where the hills narrowed to a gorge. I would watch golden chariots carried out into the sunlight. And what a moment it was when for the first time the sun touched these objects after their long sleep of over three thousand years in the darkness of the tomb.

I saw little of Egypt in those days. I was chained to one spot and had no chance to travel about the country. But the memory of Egypt remained with me, the memory of an enchanted land, where a windless river lies in almost perpetual sunlight; and I promised myself that some day I should go back and explore Egypt, visit the tombs and temples, and sail up its river. With such thoughts I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes the morning light had come to the olive trees of the South, and through openings in the rocks I could see the blue line of the Mediterranean Sea.

It was 7 a.m. when I stepped from the train and Marseilles had not yet awakened. I took a taxi to the docks. There is no moment in travel more thrilling, I think, than this change-

over from the train to the boat Marseilles.

This port is to the modern world what Corinth was to the Roman Empire; the belt-buckle of Orient and Occident.

My ship, a French liner, was lying at the dock-side. She- was an old hand in the Egyptian mail service, the Mariette Pacha. The first thing I noticed about her was an enormous French tricolour painted on her side amidships, and stretching down to the water.

“That’s because of Spain and the pirate submarines,” I was told. Festooned in my suit-cases, porters mounted the gangway, and I followed them through a black hole in the ship’s side.

Never, I though, had I been in a more curious ship. She is named in honour of Auguste Mariette, who was born in Boulogne, and began life as French master in a boys’ school at Stratford-on-Avon. He died in 1881, one of the most famous Egyptologists in the world. B UT of all the tributes showered on Mariette, this ship is surely the most spectacular. As he comes aboard, the startled traveller appears to be in Egypt, or about to cross the sea in a museum, for the Mariette Pacha looks like a floating temple.

Its public rooms are upheld by lotus columns of veneered wood, decorated with coloured hieroglyphs. Chairs, couches, and even card tables are copied from furniture found in the tombs of Egypt. Stiff gods and goddesses gaze from almost every wall. The dining room was clearly inspired by the Valley of the Dead. I wondered whether the stewards would observe the ancient custom of carrying round a mummy after dinner.

It would not be surprising, I thought, if passengers went about the ship Baedecker in hand, or if one encountered late at night a party of excavators, unable any longer to restrain their enthusiasm, busily at work in the lounge with picks and shovels.

I have an idea that the Mariette Pacha must at some time in her career have encountered a tourist who refused to land in Egypt on the plea that he had seen it all on the way across!

As we steamed out of Marseilles I settled down to four days at sea. And each day sea and sky become a deeper blue; each day the sun grew warmer; and each night stars were brighter in the sky as we drew near to the shores of Africa.

What a varied company we were: French and Syrians on their way to Beyrouth; Egyptians; a few English; several Jews bound for Palestine; and a British official on his way to the Persian Gulf. There was a French officer who wore uniform, with spurs, all the way across the Mediterranean.

There was a couple who looked as though they had strayed from a French farce. They always came to breakfast in their night clothes, the man in red pyjamas, the woman in a black silk wrap over a white nightdress.

On the after-deck were seven polo ponies in horse-boxes, in charge of a Swiss and his wife and a negro groom in plus fours. The ponies hated the sea nickering and kicking, and baring their teeth between long bouts of head-drooping boredom.

The negro would sit on a bale of hay and talk to them, and they would flatten their ears and look as though they would love to take a bite at his Harris tweed. The Swiss and his wife were so fond of the ponies that they slept on deck in a little tent which they had rigged up to cover the fodder. The man told me that the ponies were, going to Cairo.

Kind-hearted people would often take sugar to the ponies, but after a glance at the white of their eyes, they would put the sugar in their pockets and go away.

begins another Great Series.