Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
239
At that I pulled myself out of the mental fog that
threatened to engulf me and beckoned to a waiter.
“Nothing is wrong. What will both of you eat ?”
She sat between us and ate like a hungry child,
deftly, with none of the groping motions of the
blind, and talked of the sick girl in the first Wagh
house, and of a client she herself had had the previous
evening, and of one occasion when she had visited
Abu Zabal. “There was a block-house there, and
soldiers. One of them took me out to a nullah and
we watched all night the fires of the coming army
from the south ”
“But a block-house ? There is no block-house at J
Abu Zabal,” I protested.
“No ? It was long ago. ... Ah, listen !”
All the Petrograd was listening. In the distance
had arisen the monotonous beating of a native drum.
It grew in volume, drawing nearer. So did other
sounds—the voices of marchers uplifted unintel-
hgibly in some Eastern song.
Presently the first of the marchers came in sight.
It was no student procession, but a march of the
Cairene Labour Unions. Clerks and such-like folk,
in shoddy European garb and tarbouches, marched
side by side with labourers in breech-clouts and
soiled turbans, and the end of the procession was
brought up by a rabble without name or classifica¬
tion. Half-naked, half-human things, seldom seen
in the modern quarters, were there; maimed and
brutalized by disease and want, their faces unhealed
sores, they looked their hate at us who watched.