The House in Lordship Lane by A.E.W. Mason

MORDAUNT sat for a few minutes longer at his iron table. The functions of Devisher in Cairo and the unlikely action of Septimus Crottle were put aside. He rose a little reluctantly and turned back to the great Bazaar. Midday had emptied its narrow streets. He stopped once at a small booth and bought a packet of cigarettes from an old white-bearded Arab in a blue cloak. At a corner he turned to the north-east and walked into a quarter where the indifference and quiet of decay followed with an astonishing abruptness upon the noisy bargainings of the Bazaar. He came to a silent open space.

Mordaunt had seldom seen anything more desolate. Once, no doubt, it had been built upon. For it had certainly never been laid out as a garden or a place of ornament and rest. Here, for instance, a wall began for no reason, continued for a few yards, and for no reason ceased. Here a mound of bricks with a floor of bricks spread like an open fan about it showed where a house had slipped to the ground. Everywhere the earth was uneven and in colour of a dull yellow and was withdrawing, it seemed, from sight under a yellow pall made of its own dust. Were there a flint upon that ground, it had no facet from which the sun could strike a spark. The whole place was melancholy and more silent than the desert, as all places will be where dwellings are relapsing slowly into the shapeless earth from which they sprang.