‘Nye’s coming to Luxor?’ Professor Quelch is alert. ‘Dear lady? That’s the police chap?’
‘Don’ worry, prof. ‘E ‘asn’t come ter take yer ‘ome. The socialists won’t be able ter ‘urt ya. Besides ‘e’s not ‘ere fer ther dope.’ She reaches to pat his sallow cheek. ‘Picked art yer costume yet?’ The next day was Seaman’s birthday. As a concession, the Swede had authorised a limited use of the props basket. The main costumes, for the leading actors, could not be used, but there were considerable numbers of slave and soldier outfits in which it was proposed we dress the locals once we were filming again in Karnak. In our first scene the ancient city would come to life in a reverse dissolve. Ali Pasha Khamsa had recommended a family of skilled plaster-casters who would recreate the monuments of Ramesid Egypt as they had been at the height of their glory. This weary land of ruins would flourish again. It would be our tribute to the ancient world’s master-builders. How the natives would marvel when they saw their own past reborn! But would they feel pride or shame?
Esmé had been fascinated to watch the few rushes in which she had appeared. She admitted she had fallen in love with herself. We laughed about it. ‘Now we have something else in common,’ I said. Sir Ranalf Steeton had equipped the boat with its own darkroom and viewing-saloon, a projector already firmly in place for us, and even some films to look at if we wished. I watched a few. They were low-grade things, unmistakably British or local in origin, involving frequent loss of clothing. I had never been fond of Chaplin, let alone these badly shot imitations, but the other men seemed to enjoy them. I was not surprised. They were almost all first-or second-generation peasants from the backward European nations. A turd on a top-hat would have been the epitome of sophisticated comedy. Today they would make a perfect audience for the Andy Warhoon comedy-Western I was forced to watch at the Essoldo last week. Thark at the Whitehall was another such fairground entertainment. Mrs Cornelius loved it. I pointed to the rest of the audience and told her to note the straws in their hair. We might have been gathered around a village marketplace watching one itinerant peasant belabour another with a blown-up pig’s bladder. The British genius is for making the banal and vulgar respectable. It is the secret of British television and why Benny Hill is watched round the world. The most splendid triumph of British philistinism came when the BBC discovered at last the lowest common denominator and blessed it as Art. P.J. Proby only understood part of the equation when he exposed his bottom to the teenage eye. Nobody would have minded if he had been wearing a dog-collar and a pair of pince-nez. Within a few years he would have received a knighthood, another Attenborough. I have watched all the careerists. In Bolshevik Russia, in Paris, in the literary and scientific communities, in Fascist Italy and Socialist Britain, in Berlin and in Hollywood they climbed by means of familiar ambition. I am no stranger to their strategies. However, my own pride refuses to let me employ such techniques. I remain, I suppose, too much of an idealistic individual.
Women recognise this. It is why some of them find me dangerous. Even Esmé said so more than once and Mrs Cornelius confirmed my girl’s opinion. ‘If ya weren’t so dumb ya’d be dangerous.’ She meant that my own good nature was frequently my downfall. She has never belittled my intellect.
The ardour of reconquest abated, I passed some time in reading to my little girl from the books we had found on board. My favourite was an English translation of Salammbô. How right was Kingsley Amis when he remarked that this, rather than Madame Bovary, was Flaubert’s masterpiece. It is much more colourful. Flaubert read a thousand books for every chapter of his own. His research for that other, far more depressing novel, was minimal. It was through this exquisite romance that Esmé and I became acquainted with the depths and complexities of Carthage, although in those days I was naive enough to believe the book no more than a piece of wonderful fiction. Insufficient has been written about Flaubert’s gift of prophecy.
We scarcely progressed a hundred pages before the eve of Seaman’s birthday. Increasingly, Esmé would take the book gently from my hand and kiss me, suggesting that we pass the time in some other way. A gentleman always, I was unable to refuse her, though as our various fantasies became less able to arouse me, I was drawn more and more towards the Frenchman’s history. My sense of foreboding would not abate. At night I took to smoking Quelch’s kif in an effort to calm my racing heart. While I have deep reservations about all narcotics, as opposed to specific stimulants, I found for a while a unique pleasure in absorbing myself in Salammbô on the deck of a boat moving steadily into Africa. The brilliant descriptions of the book were mirrored in the reality. This in turn was enhanced by the effects of the hasheesh. But all this was still not enough to drive away my unspecific terrors, my half-sensed ghosts. It reminded me of some of the worst episodes in De Quincey. I breathed jewelled air, surrounded by exotically scented wonders and deliciously erotic sensations, but somewhere in the shadows I glimpsed the face of a goat, winking from garnet eyes, grinning through yellowed teeth; a senile goat whose only distinguishable quality was an air of implacable malice. For some reason I was reminded of Yermeloff, the Cossack camp and the night Brodmann saw me with Grishenko. Esmé! Esmé! Little teeth suck the marrow from my bones. They brand my flesh; they put their twin marks upon me, the Mark of Death and the Mark of Shame. Those camps all stink of fear. I refused to become a Musselman. They did their worst in Kiev and Oregon and Hannibal, in Aswan and Sachsenhausen. Most of them are dead now and I am still alive. If I had been born in Hellenistic times there is an operation I could have had which would have undone my father’s hygienic decision and enabled me to put behind me a confused and crowded past, whose fictions and distortions would have taken a further lifetime to untangle. My own vision was a clear, uncluttered vision of the Future. The past became my enemy. I could have saved us all, Esmé. I could have shown you Paradise. It is not true that I am filius nullius. I am related to the most distinguished blood in Russia. Those great, scattered families represent the heart and soul of our country. I carry their secrets with me. I have never betrayed them. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin an Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ikh farshtey nit. I saw the film about the heroes of Kiev. It was in ‘Sovcolour’ and ‘Sovscope’ and was made by a ‘Sovdirector’ with ‘Sovactors’, yet it conveyed much of the force of those old legends, the stories of our fights against the brute hordes of Asia Minor. I had a great relish for films until it became the fashion to depress us all the time. And they wonder where their audiences went! Why their cinemas turned into bingo halls! They blamed the public for staying away. In this, at least, they had the truth. Who in their right mind, having spent a long day in a factory or an office, can relax in the dark watching an inferior and inaccurate account of life in an office or a factory? Do not mistake me—a musical or a Western or a romance are fantasy, but these new melodramas are merely unreal. In the International Cinema, Westbourne Grove, I watched The L-Shaped Room, set in Notting Hill. The theatre filled with spontaneous laughter as we enjoyed the profound inaccuracies of character and scene. Like most of the audience, I left half-way through. We wanted our lives made legend, not merely sentimentalised and thus enfeebled. This was the message of The Great Escape?
Esmé made me close my eyes and then admire her costume. She had taken one of the houri outfits. To the blossoming scarlet trousers, metallic breastcups, and gauzy accessories she added a pretty veil which, if anything, enhanced her beauty. I told her she looked wonderful but warned her against wearing such revealing clothes during the day. On the night of the party, when we were all dressed up, there would hardly be problems. She pouted. She thought I would be stimulated by having a slave-girl of my own, but I was not, I gently pointed out, the kind of man who needs public confirmation of a conquest. Then, understanding I had hurt her feelings, I quickly added that since she was already the most beautiful girl in Egypt I was afraid some powerful Pasha would cast lustful eyes upon her and demand she be captured for his harem. While this flatt
ered and consoled her, I still insisted it was imprudent of her to wear the costume out of context. For my own part I was to dress as a Wahabi warrior, in simple black and white, but sporting the dark glasses which those tribesmen wore as a mark of their civilised dignity, while Captain Quelch had settled on Rameses Il and Mrs Cornelius would be our Cleopatra, some general Ptolemaic consort rather than that most famous Egyptian queen. To swell the feminine ranks, Grace had decided upon Nefertiti. Only Seaman himself, our birthday boy, refused these childish excitements as if he felt it was his duty to maintain an appropriate directorial gravitas.
When he emerged at lunchtime on his birthday, a small group of us had already gathered at the bar to sing the English birthday song and insist on his drinking a special cocktail which Mrs Cornelius had ordered. Very rapidly he began to enjoy our company and, for a change, we his. I remember little of the afternoon, save that I became at one point emotional and wept for a while. Professor Quelch and Mrs Cornelius helped me back to my cabin and I slept until Quelch, his exposed flesh darkened by a solution of Mars Oil and cooking butter, woke me to say that it was after seven and the party itself was due to begin at eight. A little cocaine brought me back to the world and after a brisk shower I was ready to slip into my simple gelabea, burnoose and set of false whiskers fixed to my chin by gum arabic. As I stepped into the passage, one of our Nubians caught sight of me and addressed me in his native tongue. When I asked him to translate he laughed and apologised. He had taken me for one of those Wahabim barbarians, he said. ‘I had thought us captured, effendi.’ I was still a little the worse for the cocktails but this restored my spirits as I made my way up to the deck. Like pantomime conspirators we gathered around a small table on which sat an enormous iced cake blazing with candles. How they managed to get the chef to bake and then decorate this work of art I do not know! While the pastry itself was somewhat oversweet and the icing a riot of local geometric designs, calligraphy and pidgin English, Seaman seemed deeply moved by this expression of kindness and was weeping as he poised his knife.
Esmé, a dream in her slave-girl pantaloons and flimsy silks, made a delicious frou-frou whenever she moved and it was clear our Nubians were gripped not by lechery but by adoration. She was a little goddess to Mrs Cornelius’s magnificent Queen. Both women sported extravagant peacock-feather headdresses at least a foot higher than Pola Negri’s. They swayed at alarming angles through the course of the evening as we danced to the music of O.K. Radonic’s portable phonograph. Since women were in short supply, we cheerfully agreed that each man should take his turn. If he became impatient, we said, then he was more than welcome to ask Grace for a pirouette or two around the deck. As the evening wore on, more than one of us gave in to boredom and Grace was rarely without a partner, albeit a somewhat drunken one. Professor Quelch, heroically teetotal, had grown expansive in his rôle and attached himself to Esmé, promising her ‘the finest tomb in Egypt’ if she would only permit him a kiss. She found him amusing. She would gladly give him a kiss before the tomb. I think it was Esmé who first saw the lights of Luxor ahead, a scattering of electric bulbs and oil-lamps in the forward blackness. Professor Quelch raised his eyes from her tiny chest and licked his lips, sniffing deeply. ‘No question of it. That’s Luxor.’ He straightened to accept from one of our boys a glass of Vichy and a slice of cake. ‘You can smell the sewage from here.’ Then he got to his feet, raised his paper wig to Esmé, and drew the boy into the shadows.
All I could smell was jasmine. Under the awning, by the piano, Wolf Seaman had begun to play some repetitive Scandinavian polka and sing mournfully to Sri Harold Kramp in his native tongue. From time to time he darted wounded and significant looks at Mrs Cornelius, who, having pursued Malcolm Quelch and the boy below decks, now returned, grinning to herself. Grace, overwhelmed by excitement and alcohol, was puking over the rail and O.K. Radonic was waltzing with our captain, Yussef al-Sharkiya, a gargling fat man who held a cigar in one grubby hand and a defiant glass of whisky in the other. Our Charon had a faded blue gelabea, a dirty white turban, a pair of sandals made from tyre-rubber and lips permanently stained from the nuts he chewed. Earlier that week he had approached me with effusive good humour, making some mysterious proposal. When I failed to understand him, he had withdrawn in disgust; thereafter speaking to me only in the most formal terms while having nothing but greasy smiles for most of the others. I believe he had somehow lost face with me and was embarrassed. I had no notion, however, of the circumstances or the cause. Resting for a moment in a chair near the port rail I watched Captain Yussef cast glances of extraordinary heat at Mrs Cornelius and, had I been a little more sober, would have offered him some sharp admonishment. I already knew such men frequently lusted to possess a beautiful European woman but those around us were generally discreet with their fantasies. The captain, his habitual caution banished by unfamiliar alcohol, was now incapable of hiding his disgusting longings. Soon even Mrs Cornelius herself noticed his glances and wagged a chiding finger. She wished no man to get into trouble on her account. Returning from the lavatory, Esmé suggested we dance. I summoned as much of my resources as were left and once again took the floor, uncertain whether to follow Radonic’s groaning, wound-down Am I Blue? or the erratic chords of Seaman’s Nordic folklorique. Meanwhile, from somewhere amidships, I thought I detected the tumbling rhythms and twanging catgut of a Nubian concert, as our servants celebrated the director’s nativity and our saviour’s sacrifice in their own quarters. The steam-whistle’s vast bellow drowned all of this suddenly when the captain returned to his wheelhouse, intent on alerting Luxor to our imminence. There was a stirring of comic Bedouin, fanciful Pharaonic dignitaries, caricatures of tarbooshed Cairenes and Theban soldiery as members of our party understood the signal to mean we were sinking and ran about shouting loudly before being calmed. Esmé became urgent, drunkenly eager, leading me below decks to my cabin forward. We reached it. She was already sinking to her knees before me. To my angry frustration, my door was stuck. It did not occur to me that the cabin was anything but empty as I put my shoulder to the panel and flung my weight to smash the lock, exposing my angel to the nightmarish sight of Professor Malcolm Quelch lifting a red and terrified mouth from the rampant genitals of our youngest Nubian.
EIGHTEEN
LUXOR IS DOMINATED by her two greatest monuments. The dreaming ruins of Karnak and the confident edifice of the Winter Palace Hotel dwarf a miscellany of native houses, official buildings and hovels, the modern village. The hotel is the magnificent pride of all Englishmen and the envy of every other race; she is fully worthy of the ancient city. A huge white building, her wide, winding twin stairways to the long outer terrace dominate the riverfront and look directly across to distant Theban mountains. From her flowery balconies you can see ancient temples, the dim battlements of Medinet Habu and the twin colossi who are all that remain of the lost temple of Amenhotep. Then come the dusty terraces of Deir el Bahari. Between these, on the cliff-side, is a curving honeycomb of nobles’ tombs. Then the great shoulder of the hill hides the Valley of the Kings, beyond which is the wide, unwelcoming desert and the hostile borderlands where wild Bedouin still rove and raid.
The hotel’s great garden faces east. One can almost forget Egypt, taking one’s meals in the company of other upper-class Europeans. With its imported shrubs and its tall walls, the Winter Palace is magically self-contained. All one sees of Luxor are the far-off eastern hills, blue and translucent as chalcedony in the morning light. The gardens boast every kind of familiar English flower—roses, carnations, pansies, irises, geraniums surrounded by smooth green lawns as sweet-smelling as any English cricket pitch, constantly tended by impeccably uniformed gardeners.
‘Luxor is the soul of Egypt,’ Malcolm Quelch insists. We sip our afternoon Darjeeling. (I had slammed the broken door swiftly that night but was convinced he had in that instant seen us both. He had chosen to pretend amnesia, perhaps to save us all embarrassment. Save for a single passing reference to his two year
s of medical training with the army and his willingness to use his skills to help any native who might be in discomfort, he did not attempt to explain the affair. Indirectly, I had let him know I was a man of the world and that Esmé had no notion of the world at all.) ‘Karnak is perfectly fitted for a great city, don’t you think? On the east we have the long stretch of rich plain, a shadowy changing green reaching to the very foot of the hills! To the west we have that wonderful view of the western plain. Then, between east and west is our sinuous Nile!’
With Esmé I had already taken to renting a kalash to explore the vicinity. We had trotted beside fair fields, dotted with palm thickets, through hills which rose low to the south before suddenly towering, knife-edged, to the Red Mountain—that huge and fantastic outcrop, scarred white as Odysseus’s old wound by a pathway descending from the ridge. ‘That mountain is as the ghost of the greatness of Thebes,’ declared Quelch, drawing closer, ‘as a liss of the Earth-gods, as a thunder-cloud advancing out of an open sky! Whether it be close upon you, grim, brown-red, hot, arid, impenetrable, rugged against all time—or far away, a mass of shimmering rose with paths of faint blue shadow in the early morning! And it is always immense and immediate, my dear friends, upon all things and all men!’
He has become emphatically lyrical since we disembarked. Far from avoiding Esmé or myself, he takes to seeking us out, as if needing to impose upon that graphic moment a different image of himself which we can respect and which might even erase all memory of it. His manner is more urbane, and increasingly avuncular. ‘No Ptolemy, no Roman, no Frenchman ever built anything as magnificent and practical as this hotel,’ continues Quelch as I begin to consider escape. ‘Monsieur Pierre Loti, in that peevish and decadent epitome of Anglophobia which he entitled The Death of Philae, murmurs fretfully against this hotel, you know. But don’t you find it has a fine presence? It dwarfs the modern village to forgetfulness. That alone is surely a valuable quality? I have said all this in my book. I was flattered to receive a personal letter from Thomas Cook’s and, before the War, could sign for anything I pleased at the bar or in the restaurant. The War lowered the tone of so much. What sort of Will was it that drove us to such terrible self-destruction?’
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