Lost trumpet

101
THE LOST TRUMPET
so weary that we did but scant justice to the excellent
food of the little Georgios. There was no time or
inclination, I found, to brood on the great Twin
Insects. For even though all things were a weariness
under the sun, yet now it was a physical weariness,
bringing a cheering glow of well-being to my body,
long pent in the soft airs and colours of Cairo.
I think they will live with me always, those days.
The heat and flare of the sun across the parched lands
of Selim Hanna—land that under our probings and
questionings steadily betook to itself the appearance
of a hard-fought trench-sector on the Western Front
in the European War; the gang-chanting of the
labourers, bent double as they trotted with bags of
earth up and away and down again in this or that
excavation now growing the deeper; the booming
of Huebsch s immense, considering voice ; sudden
view of his great ovoid head over a bank of earth,
with its stare of purple-blue eyes, the great red lips
slowly shaping to propound a new proposal or
demanding to know of the size and no-being of our
luck ; Marrot, energetic, tireless, yet at every possible
chance adjuring the labourers, Georgios and myself
to remember we were dupes of the capitalist system
and go slow, for the love of God, and act like men,
not helots; Georgios
Georgios wailed the comic chorus of each day in
a nullah far to the east. It must have been twenty
minutes walk there, yet religiously every evening,
having served us our dinner, he set forth to practise’
an absurd little, proud little figure offset by a drooping