Yet perhaps this mud of Egypt was working in his mind,
and but for Egypt would not have been in it.
Forster,
"Shakespeare and Egypt"
(The Egyptian Gazette, 21 April 1916)
After he first arrived in Alexandria in 1915, during World War I, Forster wrote to his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood:
"I do not like Egypt much--or rather, I do not see it, for Alexandria is cosmopolitan. But what I have seen seems vastly inferior to India, for which I am always longing in the most persistent way, and where I still hope to die. It is only at sunset that Egypt surpasses India--at all other hours it is flat, unromantic, unmysterious, and godless---the soil is mud, the inhabitants are of mud moving, and exasperating in the extreme: I feel as instinctively not at home among them as I feel instinctively at home among Indians." (Selected Letters, 152)
The phrase "mud moving," used here to disparage Egyptians, occurs later on, in A Passage to India, where it is applied by Forster to the Indian inhabitants of Chandrapore. However, the association of the image with Indians actually predates Forster's stay in Egypt, since it first appears in the 1913 manuscript drafts.
