My mind upon Kolya, I was only too pleased to be relieved of my sweetheart’s company. After all, it might take me all evening to find Kolya.
‘It would make such a wonderful impression, if I could introduce my friends to our leading lady.’ He bowed. This brought Mrs Cornelius to her feet with a disgusted snort to rival a camel’s. ‘I think I’ll go back ter me cabin an’ git art o’ these cloves,’ she said. ‘It’s really gettin’ a bit niffy, orl in orl, doncha fink, Ivan?’
I wished I had given her more support, but I was in her wake, heading for the reception desk, as she moved with dignified fury towards the electric lift. I understood her fury. She, not Esmé, was the featured star. Now she saw she had lost her last chance to appear in a romance with Barrymore, Gilbert or Valentino. Doubtless because of confusing messages from Goldfish, Sir Ranalf seemed a little unclear about the man’s identity. Irené Gay’s part would be nothing like as large as Gloria Cornish’s. While I had every sympathy for Mrs Cornelius, my attention was still upon my missing comrade and I did not want to lose my momentum. By the time the receptionist was able to check the register for me and tell me with fulsome regret that Prince Petroff was not yet with the Winter Palace, Mrs Cornelius was gone. I turned back to ask where a gentleman might otherwise stay and after a pause it was suggested I try the Karnak or, failing that, perhaps the Grand.
Luxor is not a large town and consists primarily of her ruins and her tourist establishments. Most of the good hotels were close to one another along the corniche and it took no more than half-an-hour to enquire if they had Kolya as a guest. Soon it became clear that even if he were staying in Luxor, my old comrade was not registered under his own name. It then occurred to me he might well be staying with one of the British officials so I set off for the Consulate. This proved to be a fairly unremarkable house surrounded by a high wall. When I asked at the gate for the Consul, I was told he would not be available until the next day. When I asked if they had any news of a Count Nikolai Petroff the concierge scratched his head and let his jaw hang in a pantomime of idiocy which was the local way of bringing a line of enquiry to a halt. I told him I could not come back tomorrow morning, that I would be working, but this failed to impress him. Eventually I returned to the centre of the town to ask after my friend at the smaller pensions until an English police sergeant, who had been chatting with the Greek proprietor of a small rooming-house behind the Telegraph Office, had a joke with me about looking for a Russian spy, at which point I realised I was in danger of betraying my friend. I decided instead to seek Sir Ranalf Steeton’s help and refrained from visiting every steamboat moored at the various quays along the corniche. By now it was dark and most of the shops had closed. There was some sort of curfew the British insisted upon, although the cafés and more respectable places were allowed to remain open, their candle-lanterns and oil-lamps casting a wonderful glow across the little alleys and cobbled squares. A sort of lazy tranquillity settled upon the town and by ten o’clock the tourists were gone and the only white faces belonged to a few soldiers on leave. The cafés remained full of local men and I chose one of the cleanest whose view of the street went down as far as the corniche and the green glow of the river. I ordered coffee of the thick, sweet Turkish type, and forced myself to relax, to watch. But Kolya still did not pass by. Reluctant to get into conversation, I was nonetheless eventually joined by two fluent Egyptian English-speakers, in well-cut suits and neat tarbooshes. They were from Alexandria, with business in Aswan, and had a scheme to reproduce the ruins of Luxor in a special park in Cairo, ‘for those tourists without the time to go up the Nile’. This scheme has been initiated since in Italy and Greece, but the Egyptian Government, such as it was, never displayed much initiative in encouraging local enterprise. They preferred merely to talk, to engage in empty rhetoric blaming all their ills on the British as earlier they had blamed the Turks. Suez was the last attempt of a British government to follow the urges of idealism rather than expediency, but the Egyptian had to extend the blame to a more general conspiracy of ‘imperialists’. Their flirtations with the Bolsheviks were, I suppose, inevitable. But these people make and break alliances faster than a Borgia prince—faster, indeed, than Adolf Hitler, whose example they all once sought to follow. That was never a quality of Hitler’s I admired.
These well-bred natives assured me they were more interested in public works than personal power, yet to join the Wafd you had to be interested in power. ‘Once they have challenged the British successfully, they will challenge the King and his ministers and eventually set up their own dynasty. Confrontation is all they understand. We need more politicians of the English sort, whose chief interest is in public hygiene, street lighting and decent burial for the poor. Dull fellows, perhaps, but usually effective, what?’ This was Mr Ahmed Mustafa. With his companion, Mr Mahareb Todrus, he had spent two years in England—’for languages and business’. They believed themselves very decently treated, they said, and were gratified to discover that most English people of the better class could easily distinguish an Egyptian from a nigger. They were fortunate in that they were well-connected. Their uncle Yussef was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace and Ten Downing Street and, of course, this gave them an entrée into the very best Belgravian society. ‘Trade is a great demolisher of the class system, don’t you think?’
What, they asked, was my own business in Luxor? It was twofold, I said. I was here to meet a friend, a tall Slavic gentleman, perhaps given to Arab dress. I was a writer and actor with a film company beginning work here tomorrow. They were impressed. ‘Is it a thriller? Do you know Sexton Blake?’ They already knew Steeton’s name and were flattered to have the ear of someone like myself who could perhaps advise them on their own rather insignificant projects. They supposed they too might also be considered a branch of the theatrical profession. I said I would be happy to help them on some other occasion. My priority, that evening, however, was to find my friend. At this these two good-hearted souls determined to help me. Realising the advantage of companions who could speak fluent English, Arabic and perhaps certain local dialects, I accepted, although it was already beginning to nag at my conscience that Kolya might have a reason for not wishing to be seen by me. As we departed the first of several bars, I told my acquaintances that it would probably be best if we left our quest for another time, but they were by now insistent. With that attitude of daring only Muslims possess when reaching a hand towards alcohol, they had downed several glasses of the local brandy. It occurred to me, even then, that no other religion so clearly reflects the prejudices of a single neurotic semi-barbaric bigot. One only achieves ‘submission’, it appears, by means of ‘repression’. Or is submission what they secretly seek, all of them, by means of challenge and confrontation, like a sado-masochistic marriage? Islam is the religion of a people fundamentally addicted to defeat. And we all know how dangerous such a religion is when a well-meaning power makes the gestures of compromise rather than threat. I have written to the Foreign Office about this. The world would be a very different place today if France and Britain had held to their original plans over Suez. The fellaheen do not much notice the faces within the uniforms.
The drunker my native comrades became, the darker and danker the bars they sought out. I think they were trying to find a particular kind of brothel, but it was not clear to me what they wanted. They assured me, however, that Count Petroff was bound to be in such a place. Europeans, in particular, liked these establishments. People, they said, would be less cautious of me if I asked its location. They themselves might be mistaken for officials. The bar was never discovered. It was almost dawn when I came suddenly to my senses. I had not only been stupid but selfish in spreading Kolya’s name all over Luxor. My companions were by now completely incoherent and although I knew we were somewhere on the outskirts of the town, it should not be hard to get back to the corniche and the Winter Palace. If necessary I would stop the nearest kalash. Those horse-drawn taxis are still, I hear, a basis of
Egyptian city-life. The streets were lit only by the faint pearl of the approaching dawn, and chiefly populated by dogs and cats who emerged every night in bestial pantomime of the human day. I could imagine them bickering and bartering and howling over some rotten scrap, some fly-fouled morsel in imitation of rituals their masters performed over a piece of fresh-cast junk or some wretched donkey splattered in mud to disguise its disease. Yet these night-time denizens were altogether better-mannered and none tried to bar my way. At length, I recognised the spire of a mosque in the sky ahead. I could not be far from the Temple of Luxor where I could find my way back to the hotel. Perhaps Kolya was hiding in a Moslem musrum. What deep disguise had my friend adopted so that he could pass at will into forbidden sanctuaries of the Faithful? I was growing sleepy and my eyes were blurred. The various concoctions imbibed with my Egyptian friends were taking their toll. My legs were weak and inclined to directions of their own, but my brain was still in control and I set a determined course for the mosque, even scaling a high wall in order to keep my bearings rather than go round it and risk losing sight of the only building I recognised. I got over the wall with ease and found myself in a cubist moonscape. As the dawn turned to pale blue I saw that the crazy angles were formed by blocks of masonry left by everyone who had ever systematically destroyed the place in search of building materials, treasure, or immortal glory. As I stumbled over the blocks I made out the taller pillars of the temple itself and stepped, I thought, on firm ground to trip instead and fall forward with a loud cry of pained surprise onto a broken pillar lying where Time or some passing vandal had left it. Echoed through the temple, my cry was transmogrified into a strange, almost sweet note of mingled innocence and grief, as if a child mourned its imminent death. This version of my own voice sent a terrifying shudder through me. My heart began to beat rapidly as panic came, and I scrambled to my feet and ran up a long avenue of shadowy sphinxes towards a gate which I vaulted while a drowsy nightwatchman shouted after me in outraged Arabic. The dawn was now shading to pink across the river and the palms grew from black to the deepest green while birdsong surged from the town’s every cranny. The water grew paler and richer, its colours seen through a subtle mist where water-birds hunted and shouted in the stillness, where two or three white sails already bent to the faintest of cool breezes. The steps of the Winter Palace were transformed to some dream of ancient wonder. I heard the muezzin begin the calling of the first prayer. I would come to know it by heart. Allah akhbar, Allah akhbar. Ash’had an la ilah illa ‘llah we-Muhammad rasul Allah. Ash’had an la ilah ilia ‘llah we-Muhammad rasul Allah. Hay’y ila s’salat hay’y ila l-felah. Hay’y ila s’salat hay’y ila l’felah. Es-salat kher min en-num. Es-salat kher min en-num. Allah akhbar. Allah akhbar. La ‘llah illa ‘llah. Prayer is better than sleep. There is no god but God. I might have argued with the first sentiment as I entered the hotel in time to see all my colleagues, even Esmé, arrived and ready to take their breakfast. Reminded of my professional duties, I had time to return to the boat, bathe, change my clothes, equip myself with plenty of Professor Quelch’s finest cocaine, return at some speed to the hotel and even take a cup of coffee and a piece of toast before we all departed, in high excitement, for the ferry which awaited us at the hotel’s private quay.
As we selected places on the polished oak bench seats under the launch’s awning, Esmé came to settle her warm little body against mine. She was at her sweetest this morning and did much to dispel my mood of fatalistic gloom at the dawning realisation that I was to begin work in enormous heat having failed to get even a moment’s sleep. ‘I hope you did not miss me, darling,’ she said. I felt a pang of guilt. I assured her that, of course, I longed for her, but sometimes duty took precedence over personal needs. She frowned for a moment before she shrugged and began to sing a little song she had learned in Paris. For some reason this caused Mrs Cornelius to raise her eyebrows as she nodded good-morning to us on her way to the back of the boat where, she said, she could stretch out a bit and get the best of the morning sun before it threatened to touch her. The sun, in those days, was a serious threat to the complexion. It is only in recent years, with the rise of the Beach Bunny in a mongrelised Los Angeles, that the Tan has become a sign of health, wealth and sexual prowess. I wonder why the Americans got rid of the Mexicans in the first place when they now spend their leisure trying to make themselves look indistinguishable from them! This is what I mean when I say standards are slipping in every sector of human life. I remember when Watts was a pretty little village of neat lawns and flowers. Now, I understand, it is a warren of burning tenements with every available space filled with bizarre sculptures in place of trees, where negroes lope, hyped on heroin and rock and roll, performing primaeval rituals of puberty and manhood, of magic, and hunting and murderous revenge. It is hard to believe it could alter so much in a matter of twenty-five years! I spoke to an American I met in the Portobello Road. His opinion was that the slaves not only should not have been freed but did not want to be free. The worker bee, he told me, dies if it cannot work. The negro goes mad. He was, I gather, a famous writer and editor in his own country. He was over here for a Convention, he said. This was in 1965. I do not know what kind of Convention. Perhaps a Convention of Sane People! That would be an original idea. But we know they had no effect so far upon the world.
It seemed that Esmé had also had a poor night, perhaps pining for me. I felt sorry for her. While I had embarked on a harebrained personal chase, she had been working to help our company. Did Mrs Cornelius appreciate how much all our fortunes depended upon my little girl? I remember that the ferry ride was conducted in a mood of general conviviality, especially since our crew was growing increasingly more anxious to complete their work and get back to Hollywood. They had had enough, they said, of the local colour. Most had had bouts of dysentery. Professor Quelch made some dry joke about ‘crossing the River of Death’ while Seaman, who was better read in Egyptology than the rest of us, looked about him and asked where ‘Turnface the Ferryman’ had got to. I believe he referred to Sir Ranalf. We were all in high spirits as we disembarked and mounted the donkeys which were to take us to the valley of the Tombs. Helped by courteous boys we mounted the little animals, surprised to discover that their saddles were relatively comfortable. Suddenly we were trotting up a long, dirt road into a low line of hills, the burial caves of the pharaohs and their favourites. It was already warm. I was glad of my wide-brimmed straw hat, my dark glasses. We had not gone half-an-hour, with the dust of the road beginning to rise like mist behind us, obscuring our view of a distant line of tourists, before I had the urge to remove my jacket, but decorum disallowed me from taking it off until I saw others doing the same. Behind us the Nile had become a path of grey silver through the red-brown clay, through the dark yellows and the untidy clumps of green, of rocks and palms, while Luxor was a ghost on the far shore, distance as usual undoing the damages of time. My little girl, prettily sidesaddle on a donkey more her size than mine, seemed entirely at her ease, jogging at the rear, chatting to Professor Quelch, while Mrs Cornelius rode beside me, a billowing cloud of white linen and lace. A sunshade over one shoulder, a gloved hand upon her donkey’s pommel, she could not maintain her ill-temper but shrieked with pleasure every time the donkey’s hooves struck an uneven part of the path. ‘Y’d pay an effin’ fortune for a ride like this at Margate!’ But she admitted she would be relieved when we got to what she was insisting on calling ‘Tooting Common’. His long legs brushing the ground, Wolf Seaman bounced moodily in her wake, glancing at his watch and looking up at the sun, while the rest of the crew trailed back along the path, commenting on the scenery and waving away the occasional group of children who appeared from nowhere to offer us reed fans, straw scorpions, huge living lizards harnessed with string or the usual figures of Bast and Osiris. I began to think the whole area hid a troglodytic city, a warren of caves where these children skulked and their goods were manufactured. Could that barren landscape deceive the eye an
d support human life in subterranean tunnels? Was all of Egypt living, literally, with its dead? But I knew this to be fanciful. The villages were behind us and to one side. That was where the bony children originated. Everything else here was dedicated to Death and the Netherworld. How careful had these people been to ensure their immortality! How vulnerable, in the end, that immortality was proven! When the day came for the souls of the dead to return to their bodies, there would be nothing for them to occupy but the temporal forms of huge German Hausfraus in sturdy cotton walking-suits or slender French homosexuals in the latest Paris cut. One could imagine them feeling a certain amount of confusion.
The Valley of the Kings is itself a somewhat disappointing sight. It was, after all, picked for its isolation rather than its beauty. It is a wide, shallow wadi in the walls of which, over the centuries, tombs were bored and into these tombs had been placed the mummies of kings, some of which survived until the twentieth century when, with our more sophisticated methods, we succeeded in disturbing the rest of what were probably the last untroubled dead. Cook’s and the Egyptian Society had built sets of iron or wooden stairs to some tombs so that the thousands of tourists who came here every year to peer, without much interest, at what the looters had spared (mostly wall-paintings) and giggle or gape at the oddness of it all, might save themselves even the discomfort of a modest scramble. There were only a few tourists here before us, most of whom belonged to Thackeray’s German Touring Group which had pitched its tents overnight, perhaps in the delicious hope that the spirits of Tutenkhamun or Horemheb might be tempted to return to earth by the smell of canned frankfurters and sauerkraut. These Germans did not look as if they had seen ghosts and as we approached were finishing a hearty selection of breakfast meats. O.K. Radonic, who was our best German-speaker, went up to explain what would be happening, asking merely that they did not stray into camera-shot. I noticed that many of the campers had been looking rather sullen and actually cheered up at his news, taking rather more interest in our Company than in the ringing tones of Miss Vronwy Nurture who addressed them, in clear, precise schoolroom English, on the lineage of the Egyptian God-Emperors. Even in Germany, that bastion of culture, there are those who would rather watch a modern movie crew at work than absorb the wisdom and revelations of ancient stones or admire the beauty of an unnamed artist whose skills were dedicated only to an unearthly posterity.
Jerusalem Commands Page 34
