After an ordeal that lasted two hours, in spite of the size of my luggage, I was liberated. I wandered up the track to the station where I learned that a train for Cairo was to leave at six o'clock in the morning. There was an hotel at Suez but I did not care to pay four dollars of my precious coin for an equal number of hours in bed. I stood in front of the deserted station for something, or anything, to happen. Presently a lean-looking Englishman ambled along. This man, who had a face like a dried prune, entered into conversation with me and I learned that he was a travelling acrobat who, with his wife and little daughter, had just come in from the Far East after a theatrical tour of several months.
"Where are you going to put up?" he asked.
"I don't know. I can't see the hotel for only four hours. I thought I would crawl in one of those passenger coaches on the siding over there," I said, pointing to several cars on an adjacent track.
"All right, old chap, I will go with you. Wait until I get my wife and daughter," said the acrobat as he stepped around the corner of the station for his family.
In a minute he returned with his wife, a London cockney type, whose general appearance indicated that she had seen chiefly the rough spots of this earth. She wore a dress of many colours and a hat which looked like a vegetable salad. Clinging to her skirt was a frail little girl who showed the effects of her wandering life. The four of us, with our luggage, crossed the tracks and tried the doors of several cars but all were locked. At this moment, a large greedy-looking Arab appeared out of the darkness and asked what we wanted.
We were so tired that if the devil himself had appeared on the scene and offered us a bed and shelter we would have eagerly accepted. We followed this burly human being and he led us to a small shed about ten by twelve feet. He opened the door and ushered us in and immediately left, stating that he would call us at six o'clock. This shack was certainly a beautiful bedroom for our homeless little band--nothing but a barren wooden house with the earth for the floor and cracks in the walls through which the cold wind rushed in torrents.
The acrobat's wife coiled up in one corner with the little girl on her lap, the man nestled in another and I stretched myself diagonally across a third. Sleep was impossible. We all were nearly petrified with the cold. The Englishman took to his feet and began walking the floor in silence. I soon followed his example. We paced and repaced that ten by twelve compartment for an hour, as speechless as two ghosts. Finally, into the tomb-like silence, the Englishman thrust these words, "Feed the animals." A few seconds' laughter at this remark and silence reigned again. At the end of the second hour the woman, whom we supposed had dozed off to sleep, murmured, "If my mother could see me now." In this way the night crept on and we ignored our hardships.