The Snake Catcher's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

troublemakers from causing a riot and by the time the hot spell was over, with luck they would have forgotten about it. As for Garvin and McPhee, Garvin would soon be departing on leave. He usually liked to return to his old haunts at Alexandria and go duck shooting. With luck, he would return in a less savage frame of mind. Perhaps McPhee, too, could be induced to take a break: go and look at some of the monasteries in Sinai, for example. In heat like this people tended to get things out of perspective.
    He had better watch that this didn’t happen in his own case. Perhaps he should take a holiday, too? The trouble was that Zeinab would insist on going to Paris. She regarded everywhere else as boringly provincial. The Government, on the other hand, insisted that its employees take their leave locally. Perhaps, on second thoughts, it might be best not to take a holiday. Besides, if Garvin and McPhee were away, someone had to look after the shop.
    However, he must certainly guard against getting things out of perspective. He ought to take it easy for a bit. Working on this theory, he stepped out of the office midmorning and went to his favourite café, taking the next day’s newspapers or, at least, the Arabic, French and English ones with him. He could always pretend that it was work. One of the Mamur Zapt’s duties was control of the press, a necessary function (in the view of the British) in a city of more than a dozen religions, a score of nationalities, a hundred different ethnic flavours and over a thousand sects, half of which at any given time were at the throats of the other half. To this end, he received advance copies of all publications.
    Control, though, was another matter. Debate in the Arab world tended to be conducted at voice top anyway, and in the press the normal temperature was feverish. Cairo had taken to newspapers late but with gusto and there were hundreds of them. Each faction had at least two newspapers (two, because any group in Cairo could be guaranteed to split at least two ways) and they vied with each other in the extremity of their views and the vehemence with which they expressed them. Even the weather reports were fiercely disputed.
    How to distinguish the normal incandescent from the potentially explosive? Owen usually did not try. After a year or two’s experience he developed a sixth sense which alerted him to passages likely to bring rival communities to blows.
    The rest he left well alone, on the assumption that readers were more interested in the violence of rhetoric than in the violence of action: an approach, however, which his superiors did not always understand.
    The real value of the newspapers (to Owen) was that beneath the hyperbole it was sometimes possible to detect new concerns and growth of feeling. They were sometimes, despite everything, a useful source of intelligence. Another, of course, was the gossip of Cairo’s café culture. What better, then, than to combine the two? Where better for the Mamur Zapt, the Head of Political Intelligence, to sit than in a well-populated Arab café with all his intelligence material to hand? So, at least, argued Owen; and turned to the sports pages.
    He became aware of someone trying covertly to attract his attention. It was a man at an adjoining table. His face seemed familiar, although it took a little while for Owen to place him. Not one of his agents but a man who sometimes gave his agents useful information. A Greek, with the dark suit and pot-like red tarboosh of the Effendi, or office worker.
    “Have you heard about Philipides?” he said.
    “Philipides?”
    “He’s coming out tomorrow.” Misunderstanding Owen’s puzzlement, he said: “It may not be in the Arab papers. It’s in the Greek ones.”
    “What’s special about Philipides?” asked Owen.
    The man smiled, obviously thinking Owen was playing with him.
    “The Mamur Zapt, of all people, should know that,” he said.
    He put some milliemes out for the