Trouble Postponed

All day long, over the sun-baked Suez base that sprawls for 90 miles along the canal banks, British spotter planes droned last week, alert for Egyptian concentrations. Big, Sunderland flying boats rumbled in from Malta with 600 commandos to beef up the 80,000 British troops already crammed into Britain's Middle East bastion. All home leaves were canceled; British soldiers took over local water and power plants and set up checkpoints flanked by machine-gun nests, sandbags and barbed wire.

Egypt pulled back its best division from Gaza on the Israeli border, where it might be cut off, and sent soldiers to establish roadblocks on Cairo-to-Suez highways. Egyptian staff officers pored over studies of the 1951-52 fighting to make sure that they wouldn't make the same mistakes. The government restricted sales of supplies to the British garrison (Tommies feared for their three-bottles-a-day quota of Stella beer).

"I don't like the look of it," murmured a worried British cabinet minister back in London. Three days later, he said: "It seems easier."

Both sides had talked themselves into an unhappy readiness to fight, while all the time hoping a fight might be avoided. To avoid inflaming the public, both nations, by unspoken agreement, had clamped a firm censorship on the almost daily clashes in the zone. Last week Britain's Minister of State Selwyn Lloyd broke the silence, reporting to the House of Commons that since April 1, Egyptians had on 30 occasions attacked British servicemen and installations. Egypt told foreign reporters that the British had killed eight Egyptians and wounded 17 others in the same period, but the volatile Cairo public was told not a word of this.

U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles arrived at the onset of the flurry (TIME, May 18), and his initial talk with

Premier Mohammed Naguib was interrupted by a news bulletin about Churchill's parliamentary attack on Naguib.--Shortly afterward, both sides walked out, looking agitated. Asked about the inscribed pistol presented to him by Dulles on behalf of Old Soldier Eisenhower, Old Soldier Naguib displayed it coldly, said, with no interest: "It's just a common pistol." Dulles' first written statement on the canal base had unhappy results. He intended to soften the effect of Churchill's blast, but the Egyptians and their noisy press took his remarks as a blanket endorsement of Churchill's position. Next day he managed to convince Egypt's emerging strong man, Lieut. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, that the U.S. is not merely an echo of Churchill. Result: Egypt promised to "make no drastic moves" until Dulles gets back home.

* Including a deliberate mispronunciation of the dictator's name, reminiscent of Churchill's contemptuous references to "Nahsy" for -Nazi." He pronounces it "Nee-gwuib" instead of "Nah-geeb," and with an air that seems to say no respectable fellow should have such a name.

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