Again, I found it remarkable how different were all these people, all of whom were conditioned and moulded by the desert. The Sahara is a pitiless wasteland of sand and rock relieved here and there by peaceful waters and waving fronds of blood-red flowers when the palms and cactus are in bloom, yet places of sanctuary are found even in the most run-down and overpopulated of the oasis townships. It is the basis of the desert nomad’s sense of order. Outside is threatening Chaos, uncertain Fate. Within the tribe, within the camp, within the family, within the tent, must be harmony. It is why the Moslem divides his world into Zones of War and Zones of Peace. Their architecture provides havens of tranquillity in the din of the city. They have developed a philosophy which seeks to accommodate the world’s realities, not abolish them. This is a fundamental difference between the Christian and the Moslem and especially between the Moslem and the Westernised Jew who has done so much to tinker with the great machinery of our existence. With his ‘social experiments’ and his theoretical physics, he has led us nowhere but to self-destruction. This the Arab understands; it is what informs his realistic assessment of his old friend, the Jew. Otherwise he has more in common with his Semitic cousin than he has differences. This is the only ironic amusement one can gain from the Arab’s superstitious notions of race. Those superstitions, to which he clings with proud insanity, are the rocks against which he dashes even his finest brains, all his ambitions, his yearning desires. Like the natives of New Guinea, he has developed a religion of self-destruction, of perpetual defeat. Sometimes, to me, this Arab seems noble in his quixotic combination of hard common sense and crazed hallucinatory vision. Perhaps Don Quixote has his most profound psychic origins in some Moorish desert where to survive you must also go mad.
These people are tender and kind-hearted. They care for one another. Finally, however, the desert allows room for too much abstract thought, especially when it concerns the outside world. Inevitably the desert gives you the mentality of a hermit, a great tendency to think in terms of broad and simple issues. The hermit comes in from the desert after ten years and he goes to the city’s central square. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘a message.’ The people gather around him. They send their friends to fetch other friends. They wait, patiently, but with mounting eagerness. And when they are all congregated there, in silent respect, he looks upon them and smiles. ‘Love one another,’ he says.
It could be that the city complicates issues. The city is a complicated organism after all, the finest creation of mankind. What human mathematics can describe a city? The city’s complexities mirror the complexities of God’s universe. Yet the nomad has a clarity of vision the city-dweller will never know. That is why our cities must fly; the best of both worlds.
‘It makes yer git everyfink art o’ proportion, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Like orl big spaces. It wos ther same when we went ter Dartmoor. Or up in Yorkshire. Ya git a littel bit o’ news an’ yer blow it up too much.’ It made me think again of the attitude towards Christians which, say, the Wahabi Arabs have, or indeed, how the Cossack perceives the Jew. Perhaps that was why I sensed such a feeling of belonging in the desert. Stippi or baria’d, the invariable view has much the same effect on the mind. As I discovered from the Bedouin, the less one sees of a supposed enemy, the more sinister he becomes. Then, of course, one’s imagination has done its work. You do not recognise your enemy when you see him. Not all Jews, for instance, are Communist Fifth-Columnists; not all Christians are hypocrites.
I told Kolya I thought the Sudanese had made sense. We should employ a guide. If not a Bisharin some kinsman of the Tuareg, perhaps? But he was adamant. ‘The trail is not known. The trail that leads to the trail has been lost. That is why Europeans have failed to locate it. When we find it we shall be establishing our own route. A secret which will give us a permanent advantage if we wish to do further business in this area.’ Then he showed me the map the Senussi had helped him draw. It could have been of anything. But he had longitudes and latitudes. ‘Once we reach Zazara, there is a well-defined trail again. More than one. Most of the rest, of course, lead to the interior. The slave roads come out of Africa, here and there, out of French West and Rio d’Oro, out of Abyssinia. Almost all black slaves go through Zazara now. From there they can go east to Cairo and the Hadjiz, to Iraq or Syria; west to Tripoli, Algeria and Morocco. The Romans no more invented the road network than they gave us mathematics. We owe both to the Arabs.’
It is true that the Arabs invented algebra. It is also true that Einstein used algebra to invent the nuclear bomb. A fine example of Arab and Jew working together. Nicht wahr?
And who was responsible for the triumph of the primitive decimal system over the subtle duodecimal? The Sumerians, first to celebrate the discovery of their own mental treasure-trove, gave us the flexible mathematics of the dozen, infinitely more manipulable and therefore infinitely better able to represent and examine the world. But it was the rationalising Jews with their tens of this and their tens of that, the Arab’s undivided finger, who found a way of narrowing and simplifying our achievements. This numerological imperialism earned its final great victory when Britain fell to that mathematical dullard, Monsieur Dix. Twelve groats to the penny, twelve pennies to the shilling and twelve shillings to the pound would have been ‘rationalisation’ enough! Without her ‘illogical’ currency, England was nothing. Use of such currency cultivates a subtlety of mind. The history of this century will record with cruel irony that our worship of Lord Rationality was our most ludicrous folly.
One must, I suppose, blame the French for this. In the hospital it was the same. That psychiatrist told me he was experimenting with cats. The human brain, he said, is like a computer. Oh, certainly! What he meant was he had found a model he could understand. So he promptly called the model Reality. I pointed out to him a simple truth, that the computer is the invention of Man. Man’s mind, however, is the invention of God; the former comfortably finite, the latter unfathomable in its infinite variety. And for that the double-six is a better representative than the half-score. We are spurning the heritage of our first great city-builders. God gave them twelve. We have since converted His gift to ten. With our present education standards we shall soon be asking for ‘one and one and one’ because we no longer know how to count to three. By means of these economies do we slip steadily away from Eden. Shall we ever begin the journey home?
We left our caravan at night, before the morning call to prayer. We were out of sight beyond the rocks as the dawn rose to reveal the flat daffa. This waterless and barren plain of unbroken brown monotony eventually gave way to dunes which stood like rollers frozen in time, a memory of when huge rivers had boiled down the shallow dales and everywhere had been green and rich and in these lush lands rose the cities of the people who came before Atlantis, who made laws and developed great arts and sciences and knew peace. Now, with all this unearned wealth, the Arab could easily make his homeland blossom again, see it grow rich with trees and grass, but of course he has made a virtue of his desert necessities. Now his ambition is to create further wastelands wherever he has the opportunity. I do not blame this on the Moslem religion. Persia does not waste her wealth on weapons. ‘But an Arab,’ as Captain Quelch would say, ‘genuinely loves a gun.’
That was why, I think, Kolya had hidden our Lee-Enfields within heavy bales of cloth. Under our robes and general Bedouin impedimenta we carried Webley’s revolvers with a dagger or two for outer decoration to show, as the Mozabites say, we had not taken the Woman’s Way. A man without weapons was looked upon with considerable suspicion by the Bedouin who, like the American cowboy, tends to wear a gun as a form of sexual identification. Some of the cowboy guns were so old, and in such bad condition, that they lived in terror of ever having to fire one. This was also true, I was told by Buffalo Bill’s nephew, himself a famous Circus Master, of the Old Frontier, where a knife, an axe and a bow remained, for many years, the only reliable weapons. Only the rarest of buckaroos sported a good Colts’ or a He
nry’s and was usually loth to employ it in any action which might mark it. Young Cody asked me to imagine how difficult it was for the Chief of Scouts to keep his buckskins, especially the white ones, so clean and bright on the buffalo trail. Constant changes were needed to ensure that the Dandy of the Plains was never dusty. And Custer took a valet with him, said Cody, to the Little Big Horn. Indeed, one legend spoke of the same valet surviving the massacre and attending his new master, Sitting Bull, on his famous Grand Tour of Europe. Wherever he went Texas Jack, for instance, would always take three wagonloads of outfits and a fourth wagon full of weaponry. Kit Carson, called Pe-he-haska (Golden Curls) by the Sioux, was known to have escaped at least twice from certain death with the aid of nothing but his manicure set. And, Cody had added, Jim Bridger’s Palomino was the best-groomed and sweetest-smelling pony in the whole Arizona territory. He had showed me pictures of all these people. It was true. I had never realised before what emphasis America’s great frontiersmen placed upon personal hygiene and smart appearance. Their spacemen are the natural successors to the plainsmen of yore. There is a lesson in this for those boys of today who come into my shop and complain because I have had an overcoat cleaned before I feel I can offer it for sale!
I had taken to Cody when I was still in Hollywood and he had promised, when we next got together, to introduce me to Pecos Bill’s hairdresser. Sadly, Fate intervened. I was driven, willy-nilly, into Egypt. The hairdresser, I discovered when Cody and I met again years later, had shortly afterwards been killed by a disappointed customer up in the Texas Panhandle.
One has only to see Mr Dirty Spaghetti Eastwood to see where standards are today! I think it was one of the ways we maintained self-respect in the desert. No matter how gruelling the day’s journey and how little sleep we had had during the night, we always maintained a smart appearance.
Neither plain nor dunes revealing the slightest sign of a trail, we proceeded only with the aid of Kolya’s inexpert compass while he forever bemoaned his inattention during his army orienteering instruction as a cadet and cursed the British for having no talent for map-making. We were now heading more or less due south, towards the Tropic line. By this means, Kolya believed, we were certain to find Zazara or, if not, one of the slave roads which would lead us to the oasis. Under my friend’s baffled guidance I had rarely felt as exposed and vulnerable. With new fatalism, however, I sat comfortably on my camel as she followed Kolya’s up and down the great frozen wastes of the red Sand Sea. For some reason my female had been christened ‘Uncle Tom’—actually Um-k’l-Thoum by Arabs, who cannot pronounce the letter ‘T’ any better than we can make that discreet throat-clearing sound they use in preference to the ‘k’ (and not so alien to a Russian as it is to a Briton). Still psychologically escaped into the Land of the Dead, I saw no sign of potential enemies in all the vast world around me. I had the tranquil satisfaction of my own company. I no longer had to caper and squawk to ensure my life. At first I was also glad to lose the burden of the five daily prayers; yet, paradoxically, after we had been moving across the dunes for a while and our pace had become steady, I began to miss the routine and discipline of the call to prayer and would gladly have resumed it. I now realised I had found a peculiar happiness and security with the caravans and felt homesick for them. I prayed our journey through the trackless Sahara would not be long, that we should soon meet another great caravan and travel with that all the way into the Maghrib. I asked Kolya if the Zazara were used only by slavers. ‘And drug-smugglers and gun-runners,’ he reassured me. ‘It will be good to give up a few of our prejudices for a while, eh?’
I protested I had not yet come to think of the people he described as my natural comrades. He grinned at this, remarking on the wonderful sense of piety in the ‘convent’ of Bi’r Tefawi. I knew instinctively that his sharp tongue betrayed, as they say, a soft conscience. I did not torment him further. My friend was of the Romanoff blood. It pleased him no better than I to consort with the riff-raff. We already had sufficient money, I said, to get a passage back to Genoa or Le Havre. From there we could return to America where I had a small fortune awaiting me. All Kolya could do was remind me that I was now a Spanish citizen, Miguel Juan Gallibasta, resident of Casablanca, born in Pamplona, and a Catholic. He pointed to the passport I had picked. I told him that I had preferred my American passport and would have been willing to take my chances. Free at last of the caravan’s security, we came close at that point to bitter quarrelling. Perhaps we allowed ourselves this release of tension knowing that to part now would increase considerably our chances of perishing. Frequently travellers died within a mile or less of the water whose location they had lost. I must admit, it did not seem to me to be an advantage to go from American to Spanish citizenship, especially since I had never set foot in my ‘home’ country.
How, I asked, would ‘Gallibasta’ prove himself ‘Peters’ back in Hollywood? Matters of identity were growing at once more complicated and less secure. The world looked up to an American film star. How could it make a myth of a Moroccan café proprietor? Kolya said that I was worrying over trifles. As soon as I presented myself back in the USA, with a tale of my capture, torture and escape, I would be a bigger hero than ever. My career was assured. I would be able to tour the country on the strength of my adventures. I said that I hoped my adventures would not be illustrated with film.
We were veiled, now, against a fine dust borne on an uncomfortably steady breeze. As yet we had to experience a full-fledged sandstorm. The Sudanese had warned that it was nearing the season of storms. Another reason, I suggested, for picking a different time to find the Lost Oasis. The Arabs adored such tales. Frequently books circulated among them—Where to find the Buried Gold of Egypt, The Sweet Wells of Nubia, and so on. They believed these much as Americans believed their National Enquirer or Australians their Sun. They told stories of men who had foolishly set off to look for these places. Even the Nazrini, the Sudanese had said, with their noisy machines, had failed many times to reach Zazara. I was conscious of the ghosts that must flock all around us, wondering how much the sand buried. How many souls had been driven like dew from the sun-withered corpses of men who had risked everything merely to prove the truth of a legend? I remembered the melting snows of Ukraine during the Civil War, that white purity hiding the evidence of a million tragedies, a million violent crimes. Perhaps now we rode over the final remains of all the travellers who had perished here in Africa, from the time of Atlantis to the present?
The ash of those dead Japanese drifts through Annaheim and settles on Pluto’s gigantic ears; the ash of Greeks and Egyptians and Arabs and Jews blows back and forth on Mediterranean winds; ash from the Congo and from India and China sweeps across the surface of oceans and continents. There is so much death, so many dead. Every breath we take carries human cells to our lungs, to our blood, to our brains. We can never be free of our ancestors. Perhaps the desert contains nothing else. I fell into the peculiar trance, that state between the sleep of ages and the alertness of the instant, when we come to contemplate the nature of existence and our fulfilment of God’s intentions. I blew the sand from my nostrils and spat, occasionally, on the ground. I hated to spit. I hated to lose even my urine or my sweat. I had an instinct to preserve any liquid, no matter how noxious, in the knowledge that it surely had good use in a waterless world. The dunes—great russet drifts in this part of the Sahara—glared in the heat of the day and little rivers of silver ran through them, always the mirage of water, to a point where by the time you actually saw water you had learned to ignore it. This, too, was how desert venturers met their end within very sight of the oasis. Once we passed a litter of camel and other bones, marks of a camp still in the sand, undisturbed for a century, perhaps, and a presentiment of our own slow death. Again I thought of the mummified corpses, the thoroughly preserved bodies of all those others who had sought Zazara and never found it. Why should we be favoured, when God had determined that the Zwaya’im and the Tebu’um, who were nat
ive to this region, had perished in the same quest?
My other fear, perhaps a more practical one, considering Kolya’s orienteering abilities, was not that we should become irretrievably lost in the desert but that we might turn in a curve and encounter to our embarrassment just the caravan we had quit with such discreet grace. Our discretion, accepting full responsibility for our decision, would have been admired by our companions. They would be suspicious, however, if we returned for no clear reason. I had begun to concoct a suitable tale involving overwhelming Tuareg attack when Kolya interrupted my train of thought with the somewhat unoriginal observation that we might, for all intents and purposes, be traversing the sands of Mars. From my reading of Mr Wells, I said, even the Martians had no great desire to live on their home planet! Why had we to remain any longer than necessary in an environment in which no sane man—or monster—would choose to spend more than a day of his life?
Everything I said amused my friend. Eventually his laughter became so frequent and so loud I suspected he had been too long exposed to the sun and the monotony. Soon I realised that my poor friend had lost his grasp on his reason, that he had probably been insane for some while. Ironically I had linked my fate with that of an obsessed lunatic!
By the fifth day even the few distant bluffs had either disappeared or proved themselves far from unique. We roamed a trackless wilderness and all we knew for certain was the position of the sun and our relation to it. With Kolya cackling and roaring from his uneasy seat on his camel, breaking off occasionally to whistle a few bars from Lohengrin or Tannhäuser while my own sweet Uncle Tom growled and snapped with re-invigorated foul temper, as if she sensed we should never see water again, I once more reconciled myself to death.
Jerusalem Commands Page 45
