Egypt -- Description and travel -- Humor; London (England) -- Description and travel -- Humor; Voyages and travels -- Humor
When you are London bound the train leaves the green country (for the
country is green, even in February), dashes into a region of closely
built streets, and you look out from the elevated train across an
endless expanse of chimney-pots. Two or three stations, plated with
enameled advertising signs, buzz past. The pall of smoky fog becomes
heavier and the streets more crowded. Next, the train has come to a
grinding stop under a huge vaulted roof. The noise of the wheels give
way to the roar of London town.
You step down and out and fall into the arms of a porter who wishes to
carry your "bags." You are in the midst of parallel tracks and
shifting trains. Beyond the platform is a scramble of cabs. The
sounds of the busy station are joined into a deafening monotone. You
shout into the ear of your travelling companion to get a "four-wheeler"
while you watch the trunks.
He struggles away to hail a four-wheeler. You push your way with the
others down toward the front of the train to where the baggage is being
thrown out on the platform. You seize a porter and engage him to
attend to the handling of the trunks. As you point them out he loads
them onto a truck. Your companion arrives in a wild-eyed search for
you.
"I've got a four-wheeler," he gasps. "All the baggage here?"
"Yes, yes, yes."
Everybody is excited and hopping about, put into a state of hysteria by
the horrible hubbub and confusion.
"It's number 48."
The porter handling the truck leads the way to the cab platform and
howls "Forty-ite! Forty-ite!"
"'Ere you are," shouts forty-eight, who is wedged in behind two hansoms.
By some miracle of driving he gets over or under or past the hansoms
and comes to the platform. The steamer trunks are thrown on top and
the porter, accepting the shilling with a "'k you, sir," slams the door
behind you.
Then you can hear your driver overhead managing his way out of the
blockade.
"Pull a bit forward, cahn't you?" he shouts. Then to someone else,
"'Urry up, 'urry up, cahn't you?"
You are in a tangle of wheels and lamps, but you get out of it in some
way, and then the rubber tires roll easily along the spattering
pavement of a street which seems heavenly quietude.
This is the time to lean back and try to realise that you are in
London. The town may be common and time-worn to those people going in
and out of the shops, but to you it is a storehouse of novelties, a
library of things to be learned, a museum of the landmarks of history.
We could read the names on the windows, and they were good homely
Anglo-Saxon names. We didn't have to get out of the four-wheeler and
go into the shops to convince ourselves that Messrs. Brown, Jones,
Simpson, Perkins, Jackson, Smith, Thompson, Williams, and the others
were serious men of deferential habits, who spoke in hollow whispers of
the king, drank tea at intervals and loved a pipe of tobacco in the
garden of a Sunday morning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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