This is a collection of short stories about colonial Egypt, most with a supernatural twist. Written at the time, they give an intriguing and entering insight into colonial life and Egypt of the 1920s against a backdrop of mystery and the occult. Moreau worked in the British Army Audit Office in Cairo from 1920 until 1928 but unlike most British expats of the time, he spent a great deal of his free time traveling in the desert, studying birds, learning Arabic and mixing with the locals who gave him the nickname of Abu Nadaar, and “Father of Glasses and ” because he wore spectacles and used binoculars. Considered something of a crank by his fellow expatriates these stories show Moreau’s love of the country and how he felt something of an outsider in British circles. They also show his love of birds and nature. His first stories were published in a number of magazines under the name of Abu Nadaar as, being a civil servant, he was not allowed to publish fiction in his own name. In 1930, he combined all his stories into this book which he published under the name E.R.Morrough. The original cover notes from the first edition described it as – A collection of stories of Egypt – the Egypt unknown to the casual traveller and only revealed to the privileged with eyes to see and mind to understand. The magic and lure of antiquity descends, and the goddess of love may yet inhabit an ancient temple to the discomfiture of modern archaeologists; a daughter of the East may yet forecast her doom in her dreams and live it out in a remote oasis to provide a paper for the Royal Psychical Society; an old Shiah pilgrim might have the power to bring down his curses on a village and ravage it with a human-hyaena; in a cell of a Coptic monastery might be found one older that Methuselah. And all this strangeness is seen against the background of the up-to-date world which provides other stories, not less dramatic, but in the realm of familiar human experience – stories of European rivalries; of ill-fated big-game expeditions; of tribal punishment for a girl who had dishonoured her family; of a distinguished scientist turned tribesman. Finally there is a group of traditional Arab tales as told in the tents of the Bedouins……..

The Temple Servant: Short Stories from Colonial Egypt with a Supernatural Twist. PDF

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