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

ON a Sunday morning Mordaunt waited anxiously in the gardens of Gezireh for coming of Rosalind Leete. He would hardly have admitted anxiety. For he could find no excuse for it in the help which so far she had given him. A few small tradesmen, like the little Arab with the white beard and the blue coat from whom once Mordaunt had bought cigarettes, had been gathered in for selling slippers of hashish, and a few more important dealers in carpets for selling the more deadly heroin. But the profits were so great that there were always others to take the risks.

There was the troublesome business that, although just when at one time the traffic in drugs seemed to be mastered, it had broadened out with a violence and fatality too big, it seemed, for the private trafficker and most difficult to explain. It was thought--no, it was believed--and surely it was more than believed, it was known--that a great and bloody-minded nation which called crime culture and theft civilisation and enslavement hegemony, had, as a wise policy, set out to corrupt and destroy the Egyptians by the illicit smuggling drugs into that country. It was no longer a case of this or that man, or this or that company, running hashish or heroin or cocaine into Egypt for profit at the risk of penal servitude for its officials on the spot. It was a national policy aiming at a national destruction. It was the curse of the fellaheen that he would starve rather, than control his lusts, leave his family to starve and himself, within a few months, die, an idiot and a pauper. However carefully he had tilled his land and paid his dues, however many the hours he had given to the tiny canals and ditches which had watered his fields and secured some sort of a livelihood for his family and himself, they would have no memories to restrain him. There were no cords which would bind him to the mast of his daily work, once the siren music condensed within those dark blue paper bags was allowed to swell. All would go, industry, food, life. Colossal! One of the great signal posts from which the world's traffic was controlled would lie open for a great and worthy nation to use it entirely for its own advantage. A people would have perished--well, great nations march to their destiny over roads ballasted by corpses. That was dutiful!