The dust became grit, blowing steadily onto our lacerated faces. Every time I ventured to voice some trepidation Kolya would bark with laughter, informing me we were still in Senussi territory; the Tuareg would not dare attack us here. I would have welcomed a Tuareg, or anyone able to lead us back to a familiar track. Kolya said we were Bedouin now and must think like Bedouin, putting our souls into the hands of Allah. He reminded me that this was what Wagner had done and roared out some chorus from The Ring. Allah, I declared under my breath, I would trust rather more readily than my poor, singing fool. I should have stayed in Khufra and waited until I found a caravan heading towards Ghat, I thought, but I knew in my bones the best I could hope for without Kolya’s protection would be to become a Senussi slave. (The Senussi were known to be fair, though strict, and tended to adhere to the Koranic system of punishments. Their slaves were known, therefore, for their honesty as well as their plumpness.) I remained grateful to Kolya for his rescue of me from Bi’r Tefawi, but his characteristic over-confidence, a result no doubt of his aristocratic upbringing, was an increasing source of dismay. I gave up attempting to debate these matters with him. He bellowed some phrase from The Flying Dutchman. Since he automatically kept goading his mount forward, I let my camel follow him, though I began to regret this when he later took to composing long alliterative verses in Old Slavonic and sang snatches of folksong, or Greek liturgy, availing himself freely of a sudden supply of drugs which he had not previously revealed to me. No doubt he planned to sell these at Zazara or some other mythical oasis. On the first night we lost a sheepskin of water as two of our pack camels crushed against one another. We still had several more skins and a couple of tin fantasses slung over our camels’ humps, hidden under our equipment and trading goods. We could survive for at least a week. But the event depressed me. No man on earth can go without water for more than four days whereas a camel, far from plodding into infinity, can never be trusted to survive! Some will trudge for weeks, even years, seemingly the sickliest of animals, giving no hint of weariness; others, young, healthy and pretty, might decide to fall down and die for no apparent reason, their hearts suddenly stopped. My own belief is that the camel, a noble and independent beast by nature, has always been resentful of his rôle as carrier of Man and his goods. One of the few important choices he can still make for himself is his time of death.
Through days of relentless blue, under a sun which increasingly demanded obeisance, under a night of extraordinary, comforting darkness, in which the stars became identified, each an individual, whose intensity changed with the hours, over dune upon dune and rocky pavement or parched wadi, we trudged due west into the widest and least-travelled stretches of the Sahara, moving steadily away from any charted or inhabited region, so that we might indeed have accidentally crossed to some incompatible planet!
Ironically, I had ceased at last to be afraid. The desert, our animals, the sky, all had become marvellous and beautiful to my eyes, for I had discovered that composure of spirit which is the mark of every desert gentleman. Karl May described it. I was at one with Death and with God. My fate was already written by Allah. I trusted to the moment. I relished the moment. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades. I was reconciled to my destiny. I had won a kind of immortality. And Anubis was my friend.
TWENTY-TWO
IN THE DESERT God came to me again and I no longer feared Him. We had suffered together, He said. Now He brought me comfort. I had not realised how thoroughly I had learned the habit of prayer, of giving myself up to my creator, of keeping faith in His plans for me. I was convinced that I was lost, that we must die in those endless dunes, but we trudged up one after another, losing our footing in the soft sand. God straightened my shoulders and cleared my eyes. He gave me back the dignity which that other abomination, that quintessence of falsehood, had stolen from me.
The back window of my flat looks out upon a great pollarded elm, protected by city isolation from the Dutch disease which destroyed his rural relatives. He stands like a triumphant giant, his head lowered, the bark of his oddly muscular arms gleaming in the misty sunshine, knotted fists of gnarled wood lifted like a champion’s while another thick branch juts from below like a petrified prick. This benign monster stood there, much as he does now, a hundred years ago, before the speculators thought to evict the gypsies and pig-farmers, to get rid of the tanneries and race-track, to clear the way for respectable middle-class London expanding into confident new comforts and sentimentality, begging a suburban tree or two be spared for old times’ sake.
Now the enduring elm is for me God’s most immediate symbol and evidence of my own belief in our ultimate redemption. In the desert, as one dies, it is easy to understand how one might worship the Sun, coming to believe it the manifestation of God, beginning that profound progress towards the conception of God as a unity. Nowadays it is not difficult to sympathise with the ancient Slavs, those Franks and Goths who worshipped God in the form of a tree. What is better? To worship God in the form of a Bank? Or even to worship Him in the form of a Temple? I speak, I suppose, as a kind of devil’s advocate. But I have never hidden my pantheistic sympathies.
In the city, sometimes, there is only the church or the public building in which to find peace to pray, but the Bedouin can create a tranquil sanctuary virtually from nothing. I have warned Christendom for many years of how Islam carries the barbarous blood of Carthage into the very veins of Europe and America. Yet I am no hater of the desert Arab. In his desert, the Bedouin is a prince, a model of gentlemanly dignity and manly humility. However, in the deadly element of some oil-founded sheikhdom, the traditions of absolute certainty by which he has survived (prospering only through blind luck) will make him everyone’s enemy. The noble Bedouin becomes a paranoid aristocrat. The great traditions of the Senussi, which brought law to the Libyan Desert, bring only bloodshed and chaos to Cairo. Jews and Arabs both are never entirely comfortable with political power. It is what makes them such dangerous enemies. Today it is fashionable to sneer at the philosophy of apartheid, as if it were a simple matter of black and white. For years the Arab practised it successfully. He had no problems until he himself began to break his own rules. The young today use those words like blunted weapons. They have no idea of the convictions lying behind them.
Until I arrived here I had not known that the British urban peasant is as stuffed with superstition, misinformation, prejudice, raw bigotry, self-deluding self-importance and low cunning as any inhabitant of a Port Said souk; he can also be quite as good-hearted, sociable, ferocious in word and kindly in deed as his Arab counterpart.
In Aristotelian terms, as I told the older Cornelius boy, about the only thing distinguishing the Briton from the Berber is that the Berber washes more frequently. But he is unteachable. Last week he admitted he had never heard of G.H. Teed, who knew more about the British Empire than Kipling! The boy despises his own heritage. Such shame, I told him, is useless. Britain could be a great imperial power again. He laughed at me. He guffawed in the face of his country’s finest traditions. Only in a truly decadent country would such irreverence go unchallenged. He says he does not hate me, only what I represent. Myself I represent I say, and God I represent. Is that what you hate? It is a mystery what he finds amusing. Mrs Cornelius has hinted more than once that his father was insane. It seems extraordinary that I was only forty when he was born. Two lifetimes.
Mrs Cornelius insists I was just as obnoxious at their age. I somehow cannot see that.
Saa’atak muta qadima, as they say in Marrakech. She is very defensive of those children and yet they are a tremendous disappointment to her. They showed a few seconds from Ace Among Aces on the television a few weeks ago. There we were in the same scene, Max Peters, Gloria Cornish and Lon Chaney—a moment of exquisite camaraderie, of poignant memory. I telephoned Granada to ask if they would let me watch the whole film. They said it came from America. I got the name, something like When Hollywood Was King, but I never heard.
There are many people in Hollywood now who suppress the truth about silent pictures. If they did not the public would soon begin to question their talent, their creativity! We are allowed only to laugh at the past or to forget it. This is how they control us. They put joke music in place of dramatic music. I know their strategies and obfuscations. They respect no one. The silent film was a rare art form. The talkers encouraged lazy directors, second-rate actors, just as big budgets were to ruin television. There is something to be said for the discipline of limitation. It was disgusting what they did to Griffith and the rest of us.
The reason I never continued my movie career was because I left Hollywood a silent star but returned to a world where American English had become the only language permitted an actor. And the Zionists say they care nothing for Imperialism. They took control of everything. Their ambitions are reflected in their films. Look at Hollywood’s devotion to Kipling. Kipling’s books are loved second to the Bible by Texans. The Jew is the arch-chameleon. The Arabs will tell you the same. One only has to look at the BBC. It is controlled by Jews.
I was talking only the other day to Desmond Reid, the scriptwriter, in Henneky’s. He works there. He agrees with me. ‘Lefty faggot yids, mate!’ His words, not mine. He writes the thrillers. I think he was with Dick Barton, Special Agent. He says I help him with his ideas. Reid was the first professional writer to suggest I order my memoirs for publication. Although he did all the Sexton Blakes in the 50s he never knew G.H. Teed personally. Apparently Teed died in hospital suddenly of a tropical disease before I arrived in England. Teed, I told Reid, was my soul’s ease during some of my most trying years. Teed knew a thing or two about world politics. Unlike ‘King Kong’ Wallace, who wrote against Jews and Anarchists but was probably a secret Zionist and a Mason, George Hamilton Teed possessed the world traveller’s sophisticated understanding of English values and of the Englishman’s responsibility always to exemplify those values.
Reid says it is no longer permitted to voice such honest, common-sense opinions nowadays.
His own television work suffers, he says, from that kind of censorship. The belief that we have a free press is a nonsense, he says. In many aspects Nazi Germany had a freer press than contemporary Britain.
Our picture was in the Film Fun. They said it was Richard Dix and Elizabeth Allen, but that was the remake. Dix never could grow a moustache. It is typical—they care nothing for their history. I have the clipping. I showed it to them. It’s the fine photography and crashes that provide the thrills—Variety. Peters and Cornish are never less than adequate. ‘Oh, let the past bury the past!’ Sammy, that fat fryshop Romeo, hangs around Mrs Cornelius and claims to be an old friend from Whitechapel. (This is what the British call ‘tolerance’ and the rest of us call moral torpor. Through such somnambulism are empires thrown away.) Why does she let him come round? The man has no mind, no soul. Morality must change, I am the first to agree, to suit our conditions. The morality of the Bedouin Arab is as valid to him in his deserts and watering-holes as the morality of the Japanese samurai or the Russian Cossack in his native sphere. Morality, I say, is specific. Virtue is general. To speak for a New Morality is not to speak for Chaos but to recognise Change. I am over seventy and even I understand that. Perhaps experience has taught us what these spoon-fed hippies can never learn.
This is certainly not the British Empire I was brought up to admire.
In caverns deep beneath the dunes and sarira a hundred empires might have come and gone leaving behind no more than a mystery, a few scraps of language, perhaps the trace of a legend, a crumbling pillar. It grew vividly clear how frail were human aspirations and I was sure that very shortly our mummified corpses would add a further numinous stratum to that shifty geology.
Since rescue was unlikely I became doggedly fatalistic, reconciled, like the Bedouin, to my end. This is how some of us survive. Others, when there is little water and they are lost with the nearest human settlement weeks away, retreat, as a saving state of mind, into raving madness: the very alternative Kolya had taken. He now assured me we were on course for Zazara but refused to let me see the compass. ‘There’s no point in your confusing the issues, Dimka dear.’ Anyway, he said, we had passed beyond the material state and would soon enter the golden limbo which lay before the gates of Heaven. We had nothing to fear. He forced more of his excellent cocaine on me. He had at least a kilo.
Soon the only sane company I had was my grumbling camel, Uncle Tom. Kolya continued to develop his obsessions with the theory that not only was Wagner heavily influenced by Arab music but that the composer had been at least a quarter Bedouin. ‘We know he experienced his own spiritual struggle in the desert.’ He hummed a snatch of Parsifal. It is always depressing when a good friend is gripped by such paranoid banalities.
Although we were still not quite out of water, Kolya was drinking and splashing with complete abandon. He claimed that the cocaine which sustained us improved in direct proportion to the amount of liquid consumed. I was only glad that he was at least equally generous with the camels, who were now considerably fitter than either of us.
By now, Kolya, constantly sniffing cocaine and putting himself to sleep with morphine, was red-eyed and pale under his tan. He no longer shaved, or cleaned himself. He defecated quite cheerfully wherever and whenever the urge came, squatting in the sand and humming snatches of Gotterdämmerung to prove some lunatic point.
‘Thus he sings of a new order, Dimka dearest. How Love, not Power, shall rule the world! Idealism and music combined. We shall worship not some sectarian Old Man, but a universal, all-embracing, all-loving Being! Would you call that genius Pagan? No! His love of God displayed his Senussi heritage! He returned to his desert homeland and found the truth he sought. But he refused Christian piety and rejected Jewish sentimentality as readily as Arab zealotry. That, Dimka sweetheart, is why he looked back to the great gods of a mutual past. Forces which refuse to be limited by modern theology! Dismiss these elements if you will—but they are what informed Wagner’s astonishing subtleties of technique, his extraordinary use of narrative and Leitmotif that made him the unmatched innovator.
‘In the desert Wagner learned the truths our people were in danger of forgetting. He longed to know who his father really was. He became Parsifal, that most pure and holy of knights. He became Saladin, that most godly of leaders. He was Igor as thoroughly as he was Siegfried, Arthur and Charlemagne and El Cid. Our great common heritage, our Mediterranean inheritance, was reborn through Wagner. And why? Because he returned to the womb of our culture. That place where race met race and created the chain-reaction which has not yet stopped. Al Fakhr, they called Wagner. The Wise One. The Old Gods pass away and it is time for Man to rule. But is he ready for the responsibility? Can’t you hear the echo of the Bedouin drum, the Moorish guitar, in Wotan’s final aria? And he knew his Jew. Like his ancestors, Dimka, he knew his Jew. But this did not make him a bigot.’
I refused to argue with him. My friend was obsessed. A more superstitious person might have thought a djinn had taken possession of Prince Nikolai Petroff, but I could recall no moment when this would have been possible.
It was now my turn to weep for my mad friend. Indeed, in that infinity of uncaring sand, with only the pulsing globe of the sun or the cold light of the stars for company, I moaned for him. I shrieked for him. I implored Heaven to bring him back to his senses. I sobbed and I wailed. I begged whatever deity that heard me to answer my prayers. But my imploring wails were addressed to the vast, unhearing heavens. At times like these I envy the atheist. They deny God’s existence. Yet sometimes, as then, it occurs to me that while God most certainly exists, He might not in any way comply with the benign image we have made of Him. We are forbidden to make God in our image—for God is most definitely not Man. God is God. Yet, all the same, God might take no more interest in us, His creation, than a cat who grows bored with her kittens. That God cares for us is our presumption. That is what we call Faith. That is the hope we
cling to. Such thoughts did little to relieve my sadness, my anxiety, and my wails grew louder.
One morning Kolya was gone, leaving his camel and all his goods behind. He had, as the Bedouin say, ‘walked into the desert’. I called to him. I knew the folly of leaving this spot where he could at least follow his own footprints back. I waited a day, calling out his name until my own parched throat could summon little more than a croak, even with the kindly sustenance that cocaine, in moderation, can bring. He did not return. Once I thought I heard a snatch of The Flying Dutchman but it was doubtless a trick of the desert. I mourned for him as I stared around at an horizon consisting only of glinting brown dunes, unchanging blue sky and merciless sun. I had never felt so lonely and yet I remained free from fear. Although I was concerned for my friend, who had, after all, saved my life, I was at that moment deeply glad to be free of the Bedouin Wagner.
I had enough water for three days, but Kolya had taken the compass with him. All I could do was arrange my camels so that one followed another, take note of where the sun rose, and head west in the hope that I would stumble at least upon a bi’r, a place in the sand where I could dig for water. I took one of the Lee-Enfields from its oiled paper and fitted in a clip of ammunition. I had always been a good shot, but had little experience of single-handedly fighting off, say, a horde of attacking Gora. As long as I goaded Uncle Tom, using the long camel-whip Kolya had left behind with everything else, the other camels, lacking a dominant male, would follow their herd instinct and fall in behind her. I had little difficulty leading them over the dunes, nor was it difficult to hobble them at night. They seemed as thoroughly aware as I of our danger and our need to keep together. Uncle Tom I rewarded with her favourite treat—a plug of ‘Redman’ chewing tobacco I had purchased in al-Khufra.
Jerusalem Commands Page 46
