Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
17
Once Adrian had said to me : “Only a man with a
bank-balance can afford to look at a sunrise.” And
I had no bank-balance.
But my sunrises !
I leant from my window, spendthrift yet, to look
on this new one. You know that stormy skyward
charge of pale hosts of videttes that daylight sends
across the Egyptian desert; these, and behind them
the dull-smocked storm-troops (foot-weary and
remembering their wives); then, bannered and in
chariots, the Immortals of the Sun . . .
‘Akh God/ I said to myself in some dis¬
gust. ‘You are becoming a little man of litera¬
ture.J
And thereat my past drew its head out of limbo,
brushed the dust from its hair, and regarded me
with surprise.
‘Dragoman and tout for the Pyramids ?—perhaps
you are. But once you were I—Anton Kyrilovitch
Saloney, Professor of English Literature in the
Gymnasium of Kazan.’
‘That was long ago/ I told my past, ‘and now
the chinless have inherited the earth.’
And, a little cheered at the puzzled look on the
face of my past, I divested myself of pyjamas and
rang my bell—no push-bell, but a sturdy instrument
once property of some Mameluke. It had acquired
notoriety in Heliopolis, this bell of mine, and it
was told me that neighbours set their watches by it.
They would set them awrong this morning.
After the surprised interval Annie Marie came
B