CAIRO FORTUNETELLERS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18554, 29 April 1930, Page 13

CAIRO FORTUNETELLERS.

DIVINERS AND PIASTRES. The future of other men may seem to you a thing curiously stale and unexciting; to yourself it is a thing wilder and more romantic than all tales spoken or sung (writes Louis Golding). I confess, for my own part, to a stout disbelief in all manner of divination, and to being a prompt victim to all diviners. It was in an “Eastern” drawing-room in London, in a chaste suburb, that I last had my fortune told. The room was padded with all the correct Eastern trappings, rugs and carpets, and candelabra suspended mysteriously amid incense-burners. The lady (who eats nuts) wore beads. She turned a crystal over between her hands, and miaowed occasionally. And some of her divinations have come to pass. There were so many that it was not possible that some should not. But the feeling did not desert me that somehow we were not transported to the East. We persisted in the chaste London suburb, and though the lady called herself “Fatima,” she was really Minnie. And when she did not eat nuts, she had an orgy. She ate bananas with raisins chopped in them. But this is the veritable land of soothsayers, where the diviners during these last days have gathered about me like vultures and squealed like bats. And the Great Pyramid stands beyond the verge of the city among the hot sands, and all the future not less than all tha-past is involved in the stupendous courses of its masonry, and if a hand reaches for you out of Cheops’ central chamber and seizes your own and reads there, by the stonelike candle flame, what secrets the womb of time holds in store for you—you are not a man if you are not awed, but a typewriter; and your proper place is not the Great Pyramid, but a sea office in Throgmorton Street. Or you can make it keadenhall Street.

It was not more than a few hours after my arrival in Cairo that the first fortune-teller seized me. I sat upon a low straw-matted stool before an Egyptian cafe, puffing valorously through the intricate tubing of a narghileh. A cup of thick coffee was at hand. Behind me a gramophone record wheezed and howled and stopped and spluttered. I was told that “El Arabi" had made the record, the champion singer of the bazaars. And then an old man, inevitably, filthy, approached—scarcely human he seemed. I was for waving him away rather forlornly, for each of thirty-two beggars had had his half-piastre, and a thirtythird seemed mere self indulgence. But my friend, Abd el Fathah Ali Mohamed, looked at me horror stricken. “The curse will be upon you!" he said; I put my palm out as I was bid. A vulturine grip embraced it. Ali Mohamed interpreted.

“Beware of blood!” the refrain came, like the croak of a carrion bird. “The blood that shall stain the hems of thy coat.”

I cannot in this place tell of the appalling street accident I was involved in within twenty-four hours, of a tram-car and three human creatures pinned under it. I can tell only of a jacket tagged duly by a Holborn tailor, splashed red in the Square of Ataba-el-Khadra, bound about a stone and flung for propitiation into the dark bosom of the Nile.

Of the diviners who followed him, I next recall the tall Bedouin in the turban and the yellow caftan, who squatted upon his haunches among the vast squat pillars of the Temple under the Sphinx. And there he drew a wheel—the symbolic Wheel of Life—and bade me choose one of the spokes. This being done he, he made further and more esoteric hieroglyphs and proceeded to interpret them in a more astounding language than any the deaf ears of the Sphinx have listened to till now. It was a language compounded of American and German, French and Greek, with instructive twangings and gutturals such as the sweating builders of the Pyramids uttered in their hours of travail. The purpose was manifest enough—the piastre or two, or ten, he hoped he might gouge out of me. But his difficulty was to make his prophecy light-hearted enough. For even as he spoke, his clear eyes clouded and his voice failed.

But none of all the sooth-sayers of Cairo was stranger than the ancient negress who squatted among the tombs of that great city of the dead beyond the confines of the living city. Here the dead are buried in silent palaces and silent hovels and the people who look after their dust seem not less dead than they. And the ebony negress squatted among these and bent down over her hoard of shells and amulets and coins and beads set down upon the insect haunted sands. And I was bidden to choose this stone and throw it where I would, and confuse her heap and choose another stone. But I did not dare to listen to her auguries, not for fear of them, but for fear of her. “For Heaven’s sake," I cried. “Drive on! Let’s get out of this! Bring me to music—a jazz-band and a quart of ale!”