DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.27180#0024
PYRAMID AND TEMPLE
exaggerate it, for Fiirstenberg, my doctor, thinks my kidneys
are not doing too badly. Whenever possible I invent this
detail for the sake of literature, otherwise my story might be
even more exaggerated. But even with the liveliest nephritis
you would feel a champion here.
This disposition drove me in the first place into the arms
of my friend Ibrahim, one of the Bedouin who swarm here
outside every hotel. Ibrahim was wearing a yellowish-white
striped-silk undergarment, and over this a heavy cloak of
the deepest ultramarine. A white turban was twisted round
his brown head, and a white silk cloth was knotted about his
neck. He had one eye missing; the remaining eye glinted
at you shrewdly, but kindly. Babuschka could not bear him,
because he would take us into mosques and tutoyer us: a
purely linguistic peculiarity which had its charms for me, as
it reminded me of Louise, my old Swiss bonne in Paris; she
used to do it too, and she was a treasure. I liked him, though
I also am indifferent to the attractions of mosques.
However, Ibrahim was also our companion on our first
expedition to the pyramids. Babuschka’s theory that we
could quite well do the pyramids without him, and that it
would be cheaper to go by tram, did not carry the day.
Women succeed in combining with their devotion to the
higher pleasures an attention to detail to which we men are
driven professionally but which we try to avoid when
occasion offers, if only to convey the impression that we
know how to generalize. Many women are completely
indifferent to this impression, and quite often are actually
proud of their powers of resisting it. Babuschka perhaps
enjoyed the overwhelming spectacle even more than I did,
and was not to be dragged away from the hill which after-
wards we came to call our hill; yet she none the less had her
eye on Ibrahim, who was quite well aware of her aversion for
him. Actually there was little to complain of - even the
18
exaggerate it, for Fiirstenberg, my doctor, thinks my kidneys
are not doing too badly. Whenever possible I invent this
detail for the sake of literature, otherwise my story might be
even more exaggerated. But even with the liveliest nephritis
you would feel a champion here.
This disposition drove me in the first place into the arms
of my friend Ibrahim, one of the Bedouin who swarm here
outside every hotel. Ibrahim was wearing a yellowish-white
striped-silk undergarment, and over this a heavy cloak of
the deepest ultramarine. A white turban was twisted round
his brown head, and a white silk cloth was knotted about his
neck. He had one eye missing; the remaining eye glinted
at you shrewdly, but kindly. Babuschka could not bear him,
because he would take us into mosques and tutoyer us: a
purely linguistic peculiarity which had its charms for me, as
it reminded me of Louise, my old Swiss bonne in Paris; she
used to do it too, and she was a treasure. I liked him, though
I also am indifferent to the attractions of mosques.
However, Ibrahim was also our companion on our first
expedition to the pyramids. Babuschka’s theory that we
could quite well do the pyramids without him, and that it
would be cheaper to go by tram, did not carry the day.
Women succeed in combining with their devotion to the
higher pleasures an attention to detail to which we men are
driven professionally but which we try to avoid when
occasion offers, if only to convey the impression that we
know how to generalize. Many women are completely
indifferent to this impression, and quite often are actually
proud of their powers of resisting it. Babuschka perhaps
enjoyed the overwhelming spectacle even more than I did,
and was not to be dragged away from the hill which after-
wards we came to call our hill; yet she none the less had her
eye on Ibrahim, who was quite well aware of her aversion for
him. Actually there was little to complain of - even the
18