Men God Forgot - pg. 25

Near by, in the Cul-de-sac of the Cripples, a woman scolded her husband in pictured terms: 'You washingline, you colourless rag!' The voice died away, stifled by the heat. Somewhere in Mohamed Aly street a tram ran on its rails with its lugubrious whistle, announcing the distress of a far-off world. On the shop wall, whitened with chalk, a popular painting represented a bank of the Nile with a sailingboat upright on the river, immobile as if it did not wish to move any more, but to stay like that forever, afraid of the wide and vast unknown. And it seemed as if everything, quarter, people and things, were fixed like this sailing-boat painted on the wall, no longer wishing to know that one can move; to hope for other ends than those already attained ; to go further and further on the road. And that it was folly.