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6 The down tree of Wad Hamid
replied that the government wished to build a stopping-place
for the steamer under the doum tree.
'Rut we have already given you our answer about that,' we
told them. 'What makes you think we'll accept it now?'
the government which gave in to you was a weak one,' they
said, 'hut the position has now changed.'
to cut a long story short, we took them by the scruffs of their
necks, hurled them into the water, and went off to our work.
It wasn't more than a week later when a group of soldiers came
along commanded by the small-headed official with the large
hat, shouting, 'Arrest that man, and that one, and that one,'
until they'd taken off twenty of us, I among them. We spent
a month in prison. Then one day the very soldiers who had put
its there impelled time prison gates. We asked them what it was
all about but no one said anything. Outside the prison we found
a great gathering of people; no sooner had we been spotted
than there were shouts and cheering and we were embraced by
some cleanly-dressed people, heavily scented and with gold
watches gleaming on their wrists. They carried us off in a great
procession, back to our own people. There we found an un-
believahly immense gathering of people, carts, horses, ana
camels. We said to each other, 'The din and flurry of the capital
has caught up with us.' They made us twenty men stand in a
row and the people passed along it shaking us by the hand:
the Prime Minister—time President of the Parliament—the
President of the Senate—the member for such and such
constituency—the member for such and such other con-
.
stituenc v.
We looked at each other without understanding a thing of
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