The fine drive is from Nouzha round the shore of Lake Mareotis and back to the Square by way of Ramleh--the Toorak of Alexandria. You are defied to conceive a suburb better bred. To drive through it in a gharry is to put yourself in the dress-circle.
If you are back in time--that is, by 6.30--you may perhaps go to the weekly organ-recital at St. Mark's. Nothing will bring Home before you more vividly than the tones of a pipe-organ. But you must close your eyes, for almost everything else in the church tears you back to war. There's more khaki than tweed in the pews, and most of the women present are Sisters from the hospitals. And the organist is a private who plays at an Edinburgh church when peace is on, and the soloist (and well he can sing) is an A.M.C. Sergeant. The "Gyppo" hired servant is even here--as he is everywhere--creeping up and down the aisle in his incongruous colours: none the less incongruous for his brushing against the Cambridge graduate's gown of the Assistant-Chaplain, distributing programmes. Music of Handel and Bach sends you aching back to your hotel. That night you do not want to go into the Arab quarter.
The map shows Port Said dumped at the end of a lean streak of sand flanking the Canal. For half the distance from Ismailia the train sweeps along this tract. There is the Canal on your right, rich-blue between its walled banks and foiled by the brown heat-hazed world east; and on your left are the interminable shallows exuding the stink of rank salt, and traversed drearily by fishing-craft. Port Said at the approach much resembles Alexandria: the same brown, toppling irregularity, and the multitude of masts protruding.
The Canal at its city mouth is fretted with rectangular berthing-basins crammed with craft, very busy and noisy. A network of railways threads the quays. The green-domed Canal company's offices tower above the smoke and din, redeeming them; they make a noble pile. All the shipping is on the west bank; the east is bare, but for some sombre stone houses and a Red Cross hospital in the sand, and a self-contained Armenian refugee camp south of the city-level. The Canal mouth is stuffed with cruisers and commercial ships anchored between the two stalwart stone sea-walls. They protrude two miles into the Mediterranean, keeping the channel. That on the west is crowned by the de Lesseps monument.