Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
45
I had had the notion that if I went cautiously and
carefully, somewhere—perhaps after all I had drunk
too much of Simon’s brandy—I would find explana¬
tions and expiation. Even I, the frozen onlooker on
life’s hates and follies and loves !
I had gone down to the Warrens then, blindly,
as other lost souls go down to Hell. Down the
Khalig, in that late afternoon strong sunlight; out
through the dusty bazaars, by the Suq el Fahlamin,
cobalt and deserted, past the frowning walls of
Citadel, up and around and on to those walls on a
sudden impulse, so that all Cairo lay below me.
Cairo, Polis Polychrois, with no single colour of its
spectrum that for me, as other men, could shine and
abide and be mine . . .
Down dim dark lanes as the evening came on I
had wandered—lanes overhung with crumbling
balconies, lanes unknown even to me, dark corridors
where the poor and rejected—the maimed and
brutalized of this thing that East and West these
thousand years have called civilization—lived their
dark and fetid lives, and somehow found still the
courage to raise those bursts of laughter that I could
hear far in dim, stifling courtyards ; still to bring
with hope unlessened new life to add to that ferment
of pain and want, for children suckled at unshielded
breasts in almost every doorway; still to live and
lust and seek
The Cairene woman of the Warrens has ever gone
unveiled ; there has been little enough for body¬
wrapping, far less the blinding of the face that so