As he handled the locks, and was
aware that he could no longer see the sights, the sum of his losses was
presented to him in a very definite and incontestable way.
He put his guns away, and was seized suddenly with a desire to disregard
his blindness, to pretend that it was no hindrance and to pretend so
hard that it should prove not to be one. The desire grew and shook him
like a passion and carried him winged out of the countries of dim stars
straight to the East. The smell of the East and its noises and the
domes of its mosques, the hot sun, the rabble in its streets, and the
steel-blue sky overhead, caught at him till he was plucked from his
chair and set pacing restlessly about his room.
He dreamed himself to Port Said, and was marshalled in the long
procession of steamers down the waterway of the canal. The song of the
Arabs coaling the ship was in his ears, and so loud that he could see
them as they went at night-time up and down the planks between the
barges and the deck, an endless chain of naked figures monotonously
chanting and lurid in the red glare of the braziers. He travelled out of
the canal, past the red headlands of the Sinaitic Peninsula, into the
chills of the Gulf of Suez.
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