THE LAND OF SAND AND SWEAT

How we hated Egypt before we left it! It may be a land of fascination
to the tourist who drives about in gharris to view its wonders and
stays at a European hotel, but to be there as a soldier, to lie in its
vile sand, to swallow its conglomerated stinks, to rub the filth off
the seats in the third-class train-carriages, to have under your eyes
continually the animated lump of muck that the "Gyppo" is, to have your
ears filled continually with the vile expressions that the Egyptian
conceives as wit, is an experience that makes one so disgusted that few
Australians that were there will ever want to see the rotten country
again. At first, however, all was novelty, and we were like children
on a picnic as we marched from the wharf into the third-class carriages
of the Egyptian state railways waiting for us just outside the gates.
It was some job getting into those carriages. Ordinarily white people
travelled first-class, but we were troops, and it was like pushing
against a wall to pass the smell that came from the doors of these
carriages that had been the preserves of the unwashed nigger of varied
age and sex for the Lord knows how many years.

We left the ship with twenty-four hours' provisions, which were all
consumed on that train. Some of us managed to get a little sleep by
packing all the equipment in the end of the carriage and sitting on the
floor back to back. Now and again the train would stop at nowhere in
particular, when we would be assailed by anything-but-clean niggers,
who would draw oranges and other fruit from inside their shirts. We
had been warned against eating anything in Egypt that could not be
skinned, and when we saw the niggers and where they kept their stock in
trade we knew the reason. So far we had nothing but English money,
and, though we had been given lectures before disembarking on the