The Arab is intelligent, and in many cases has picked up decent English and speaks with fluency. Between the early parade and breakfast we often engage them in talk, partly for amusement, partly to improve our mongrel Arabic. They are good subjects for interrogation, with a nice sense of humour--indulged often at your expense--and a knack of getting behind the mind of the questioner. They excel, too, in the furnishing of examples in illustration of answers to questions about custom and usage in Egypt. The best conversationalists, by far, are the native police sergeants, who are chosen a good deal for their intelligence and mental alertfulness. Get a police sergeant into your tent after tea, and you have a fruitful evening before you. He readily discusses Mohammedanism, and Egyptian history and peoples, and local geography and customs, and is as pleased to discuss as you to start him. The intelligent Arab in British employ is a revelation in intellectual freshness and open-mindedness. He never speaks in formula, and is clearly astonished at the want of intellectual curiosity in many of his interlocutors.
The men sleep in bell-tents--some in the sand; others, more flush of piastres, on a species of matting supplied by the native weavers. Sand may be warm and comfortable enough in itself, but it breeds vermin prolifically, specialising in fleas. And at midnight you will see an unhappy infested fellow squatting, roused from sleep because of their importunity, conducting a search by candle-light, engaged in much the same business as his Simian ancestors; the difference is that whereas they were too strong-minded to be disturbed in their sleep by any such trifle, his search is mostly nocturnal--though not exclusively so; and, moreover, in place of their merely impatient gibbering, he speaks with eloquence and consecutiveness, often in quite sustained periods, logically constructed and glowing with purple patches.... The Medical Officer has got a paragraph inserted in camp routine orders about a bathing parade on Fridays, compelling a complete ablution. But what avails cold water, once a week? Most men, however, have been known to bathe more often.
The military Medical Officer in this country is as considerable a personage as the medicine-man amongst the American Indians. In a land where the rainfall is not worth mentioning, and the sun is hot, and the natural drainage poor, and sanitation little considered by the natives, he is a man whose word in camp is law. He speaks almost daily, through camp orders or through pamphlets of his own compiling, imperative words of warning, and in the daily camp inspection the Commandant is his mere satellite. "Avoid," says he (in effect) in his fifth philippic against dirt, "the incontinent consumption of fruit unpeeled and raw or unwashed vegetables. Therefrom proceed dysentery, enteritis, Mediterranean fever, parasitic diseases, and all manner of Egyptian scourges. Would you fly the plagues of Egypt, abhor the Arab hawker and the native beer-shop." Certain quarters are hygienically declared "out of bounds." They include "all liquor-shops and cafés, except those specified hereafter ..."; the village of Abbassieh; the village adjoining the Tombs of the Caliphs (the most squalid in Cairo). It is for other reasons than hygienic that the gardens of the Sultan's palace at Koubbeh and the Egyptian State-railways are placed out of bounds too.