Four Hundred Bales

The night was warm. It was the twelfth of November and it had no business being warm, but the wind was off the land, and the air in the streets sat on the skin like a hand.

The runner from the harbour division had come up to headquarters a little after eleven: a man dead in one of the cotton houses at Minet el-Bassal, the head of the firm, and would we send somebody down. The somebody was me. I took a trap from the rank outside, and we went down through the sleeping town towards the harbour with the driver clicking his tongue at the horse the whole way.

You smell the cotton quarter before you reach it. Under the salt of the sea there is a dry smell, faintly sweet, like a linen cupboard opened in a hot room — the dust of the bales, which in season gets into everything. By day that street is a river of carts and porters and men in tarbooshes shouting prices; the season had a week to run and the whole Delta's crop was coming down through it. At midnight it was another place. The warehouses stood shuttered on both sides, tall and blind, and along the gutters lay a drift of white fluff, cotton waste swept out of the doorways and left for the night to deal with. Carts loaded for tomorrow's steamer stood against the walls with their shafts in the air.

There was one light in the whole length of it. It hung under a painted board that said Vassiliou & Son, over a street door with an iron lamp beside it, and beneath the lamp stood a constable with his hands behind his back, looking at nothing.

I got down, told the driver to wait, and walked towards the light.