Egypt -- Description and travel -- Humor; London (England) -- Description and travel -- Humor; Voyages and travels -- Humor
It is all different in Egypt. The greatest indignity that a Mohammedan
ever offers a fly is to give him a gentle shove and request him to move
on. It is contrary to the religious teachings to kill or even cripple
this diminutive household companion. The belief in the transmigration
of souls seems to prevail everywhere in the mystical East, and perhaps
the fly that follows and nags you all afternoon may harbour the
spiritual essence of a former head waiter or a bey or some other
dignitary. When the flies assemble in large numbers around the various
apertures of a baby's face, the child, obeying an instinct of
self-defence, tries to "spat" them and drive them away. But the mother
restrains the infant by holding its hands and the flies give themselves
over to unmolested enjoyment. The older children have learned their
lesson and seldom make any effort to brush away the flies which loiter
all over their bright young features. This is not a pleasant thing to
talk about, but inasmuch as the fly is omnipresent during a trip up the
Nile and this friendly understanding between the fly and the native is
constantly under the traveller's observation, a description of Egypt
would be sadly incomplete without a chapter on the fly.
Having been a privileged class for many generations, the flies are
impudent and familiar to a degree. When the white unbeliever, with no
conscientious scruples against murder, comes up the river, they swarm
about him and buzz into his ears, "Welcome to our city." Then when he
begins sparring with them and using sulphurous language, they gather
about him in augmented numbers and dodge when he strikes and side step
when he slaps himself and seem to think that he is trying to teach them
some new kind of a "tag" game. The Mohammedan fly cannot by any effort
of the imagination bring himself to believe that a human being would
wilfully injure him. This feeling of overconfidence in mankind breeds
carelessness, and during the open season for tourists many of them are
laid low. Mr. Peasley said that if there was anything in the
transmigration theory, he figured that he had massacred a regiment of
soldiers, several boards of directors, a high school and an insane
asylum. The mortalities during the tourist season do not seem to lower
the visible supply or in any way discourage the surviving millions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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