[Mono-code-woodpusher] Forested, drained, urbanified and consequently cosmopolized

[Bethoney L. <hac...@op...>]

ESAR AND CLEOPATRA By George Bernard Shaw ACT I An October night on the
Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of the XXXIII Dynasty, in the
year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards reckoned by Christian
computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver fire, the dawn of a
moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars and the cloudless sky
are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half centuries younger than
we know them; but you would not guess that from their appearance. Below
them are two notable drawbacks of civilization: a palace, and soldiers.
The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of whitened mud, is not so ugly
as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in the courtyard are more highly
civilized than modern English officers: for example, they do not dig up
the corpses of their dead enemies and mutilate them, as we dug up
Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two groups: one intent on the
gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior of fifty, who, with his
spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping to throw dice with a
sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other gathered about a guardsman
who has just finished telling a naughty story (still current in English
barracks) at which they are laughing uproariously. They are about a
dozen in number, all highly aristocratic young Egyptian guardsmen,
handsomely equipped with weapons and armor, very unEnglish in point of
not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in their professional dress; on
the contrary, rather ostentatiously and arrogantly warlike, as valuing
themselves on their military caste. Belzanor is a typical veteran, tough
and wilful; prompt, capable and crafty where brute force will serve;
helpless and boyish when it will not: an effective sergeant, an
incompetent general, a deplorable dictator. Would, if influential