Lost trumpet

CHAPTER THE SECOND
‘ “And, as the manuscript relates, the Trumpet . . .
had been stolen and carried away by a renegade
Levite ” ’
Subchapter i
I RODE into Cairo on a tram-car, and, as we
swerved by the bend that leads to Abbassieh,
the Gift of the River, the City of Many Colours, the
Heart of Masr, lay revealed before us. There was
the dark bulking of Abbassieh, where English
soldiers lounge in boredom and dusty khald at
barrack-entrances and the little Greek folk of the
catering trades chatter over dank fruit in danker
alleys. There, dark-blue in the west, was Koubbah;
and in a shimmer far to the south, Manchiet el Sadr.
The day was shining like a burnished shield over
the strange city of Mansur in which for ten long
years I had guided the curiosities of the tourist and
restrained the curiosities of myself.
So I came at last, though not by tram-car, but
walking through the sun-haze of dust-ochred streets,
to the house of Adrian in Shoubra. I stopped outside
the house, I remember, in the hot flare of the sun,
thinking of the first time I had entered it—that
morning ten years before, when Adrian had found
3J