Alexandria

Alexandria becomes the setting for a lesson its teachers cannot control. On a hotel veranda, Bella Baxter sees hunger staged as entertainment; when she responds by trying to take a blind girl and baby away, the adults around her turn the scene into an argument about empire, social order, and the limits of compassion. The city’s significance lies in that collision between visible suffering and the explanations offered to make it seem inevitable.

Arrival and the promised lesson

Before the Alexandria episode, Bella has asked what baksheesh means, recalling a crowd she saw after visiting the pyramids. Dr. Hooker offers to explain it during a stop in Alexandria, promising a shocking sight that, in his view, will demonstrate human depravity, the need for Christian redemption, and the supposed civilizing mission of the Anglo-Saxon race. Harry Astley objects that Hooker has broken their bargain by discussing the subject, but Hooker defends the decision: Bella’s speech, he says, shows a clear and logical mind, and withholding the information she seeks would leave her intellectually like a precocious infant. The invitation thus presents the visit as both an education and a test of what Bella will make of what she sees.

The hotel veranda

At the hotel, Bella and her companions sit among well-dressed diners on a veranda. Across the open space, a crowd of nearly naked people, mostly children, watches them while two men with whips patrol. People in the crowd bow, pray, wriggle, and grin to amuse the diners; coins are thrown onto the dusty ground, and one or many people race out to scramble for them. The men with whips then break up the crowd and drive it back. Some diners laugh, some look disgusted, and others turn away. The sequence makes the divide between spectators and the people scrambling for money unmistakable: suffering is not hidden from the veranda but made into a spectacle for it.

Astley describes the crowd as remnants of the race that carved the Sphinx, while Hooker points out a girl who is blind in one eye and carrying a baby blind in both. Bella becomes fixed on the child and approaches through the crowd, purse in hand. Before she can give the money to the girl, someone snatches the purse. Bella embraces the girl and baby, lifts them, and tries to carry them back through the crowd, where blind and crippled children, old men with running sores, and others scramble over one another for the scattered coins.

Bella’s intervention and its limits

When Bella reaches the veranda, a hotel employee tells her she cannot bring the children there. She insists they are coming home with her. Astley warns that neither the port authorities nor the ship’s captain will allow her to take them aboard; the baby wails, and the girl clings to Bella. They are pulled apart. Hooker shouts that Bella can do no good, and Astley confirms that she can do none at all. Bella tries to scream, then bites Astley’s hand when he covers her mouth. The gesture turns her frustrated protest into a physical injury: Astley loses colour and nearly collapses, and Bella helps Hooker bring him inside. Although Hooker orders hot water, iodine, and clean bandages, Bella cleans and dresses the wound, binds it with a tourniquet bandage, and apologizes. Astley answers that, compared with his education at Eton, an unexpected flesh wound is a flea bite.

The city as an argument about society

On the cab ride back to the ship, Hooker recasts what Bella has seen as evidence for the Anglo-Saxon races’ supposed civilizing task and for an afterlife that would counter earthly evils. He also cautions her against exaggerating the scene: open sores, he claims, provide income to those who display them, and the beggars may be happier and freer than people who earn an honest living. He says the girl and baby are accustomed to their condition and would be less happy in a civilized country. In his account, the shock has served its purpose by making Bella think like a woman rather than a child.

Astley offers a parallel defence of the social order. Bella’s pity, he says, is proper when directed toward people of her own class, but acting on it indiscriminately would prolong the misery of those who might be better dead. He interprets the veranda and crowd as a model of society: the diners represent owners and rulers whose inherited intelligence and wealth place them above others; the beggars represent a jealous and incompetent majority; and the men with whips stand for the police and functionaries who keep the arrangement in place. Bella leaves the scene unable to decide how to stop the suffering, but the explanations she hears reveal how religion, imperial claims, and class hierarchy can be used to justify looking away. In her account, Alexandria is therefore not simply the place where she sees deprivation; it is where compassion meets an organized argument against acting on it.