This itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried out in full. I
was able at times both to go to the bank and buy a shirt in a single
morning: at other times I was able to buy razor blades and almost to
find the National Picture Gallery. Meantime I was urged on all sides by
my London acquaintances not to fail to see the Tower. "There's a grim
fascination about the place," they said; "you mustn't miss it." I am
quite certain that in due course of time I should have made my way to
the Tower but for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found out
that the London people who urged me to go and see the Tower had never
seen it themselves. It appears they never go near it. One night at a
dinner a man next to me said, "Have you seen the Tower? You really ought
to. There's a grim fascination about it." I looked him in the face.
"Have you seen it yourself?" I asked. "Oh, yes," he answered. "I've seen
it." "When?" I asked. The man hesitated. "When I was just a boy," he
said, "my father took me there." "How long ago is that?" I enquired.
"About forty years ago," he answered;
"I always mean to go again but I don't somehow seem to get the time."
After this I got to understand that when a Londoner says, "Have you seen
the Tower of London?" the answer is, "No, and neither have you."
Take the parallel case of the British Museum. Here is a place that is
a veritable treasure house. A repository of some of the most priceless
historical relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for instance,
the famous Papyrus Manuscript of Thotmes II of the first Egyptian
dynasty--a thing known to scholars all over the world as the oldest
extant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here see
the actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or at
least from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to the
phonetic syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscript
and have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N.Y.) or
any such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take a whole trip
to England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, to
look at that papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this changed. The
railway stations of London have been so arranged that to get to any
train for the north or west, the traveller must pass the British Museum.
The first time I went by it in a taxi, I felt quite a thrill. "Inside
those walls," I thought to myself, "is the manuscript of Thotmes II."
The next time I actually stopped the taxi. "Is that the British Museum?"
I asked the driver, "I think it is something of the sort, sir," he
said. I hesitated. "Drive me," I said, "to where I can buy safety razor
blades."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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