Lasst hoch die Fahne des Propheten wehn;
versammelt euch zum heil’gen Derwischtanze!
Zu Narren soil man nur in Maske gehn;
die wahre Klugheit lebt vom Mummenschanze.
The irony only became clear years later. The British claim everything for themselves. They claim universal myths as their personal experience. Is it any wonder Europe became impatient with them? One can accept so much self-proclaimed piety.
To my astonishment, Rosie von Bek had no experience of the benefits and enjoyments of cocaine and I had the privilege of introducing her to this wonderful fruit of nature. She was astonished—Simply flabbergasted!—as she put it, by the way the drug amplified her imagination while it sharpened her senses. Now the subtlety of our intimacies became deeply intricate; we created arabesques of sensation and emotion, of peculiar and intellectual invention, almost abstract. While I gasped in Goethe’s German, she breathed the earth of Florentine Italy, of barbarous peaks moulding the fierce beliefs and desires of Albanian brigand chieftains, warmed me with the flame of limitless passion, driven to greater spiritual and sometimes physical risks by the coolness of my own responses. At least I did not fear flesh any longer. In our different ways we both experienced the same extraordinary spiritual union. We were a single, all-destroying creature—heat and cold, male and female, good and evil. New Homo sapiens, androgynous, omnipotent, eternal.
It was an impossible union and yet a natural one. Bismarck had known the beauty of such equilibrium, the balancing of masculine against feminine. Adolf Hitler, representing proud masculinity, and Benito Mussolini, representing the spiritual, feminine side of the fascist discipline. Left alone, I think they would have made perfection: German practicality married to Italian flair. Had they not been set, one upon the other, by petty rivalries the great dream would have flourished. There were certain personality problems between the two charismatic leaders, I will admit. But this is true of all brilliant marriages. They were on the move—too busy to make virtues of their differences. I think, perhaps, it was the same with me and Rosie von Bek. We were almost too strong for one another. In nature, such forces, such grand and noble opposites, sometimes need only a whisker’s touch to send both spinning helplessly from their orbits. While we remained aloft, without responsibilities or fears, we had our perfect universe. But eventually, the dreamer must look to the commonplace for his sustenance. If he resists his conscience’s demands he resists experience; he resists reality. He loses his grip. I was determined that this would never happen to me. Of course, I blame the Jews. It is in their interests to involve the world in abstractions.
Yet that blissful episode remains forever exquisite.
Many women have loved me. I have made love to many more. But there are only three women who are to me what my organs and my flesh are to me. What my own heart is to me. The first is Esmé, the innocent, wondering Esmé, my sweet sister, my little girl; the second is Mrs Cornelius, whom I loved for her sanity and her deep relish for ordinary life; the third is Rosie von Bek.
The light fell through the bars of the cattle-truck and made a pattern of black and white against the walls which stank of disinfectant. I am not the only human being alive today who cannot smell disinfectant without immediately fearing for his mortal existence.
Others flinch at the aeroplane’s whine or the car’s backfire. For me it is a public toilet at five in the morning. These stripes pursued me. Even in the basket they fell through ropes and guidelines to form bars across the yellow weave and trace Zion’s stars upon the Moorish carpets she had heaped there; a lattice of portent, it began to seem to me. Sometimes during the long, drifting days, I sat and read her Sexton Blake stories. These taught me about the politics of the Middle East as well as English domestic life. They introduced me to imperial complexities and gave me a quiet respect for those citizens of the Empire who shouldered their moral burdens. Here were the new Knights of the Round Table bringing enlightenment and Christian ethics to the dark places of the world. Rosie also had some old Italian film magazines, one of which showed myself and Gloria Cornish in Ace Among Aces and, in the same issue, advertised The Lost Buckaroo, but of course it was not then in my interest to point the films out. Sometimes I put down my Case of the Roumanian Envoy and merely stared at the patterns made by the sun through a net of lines and basket-work. Sometimes she and I would discuss their meaning. She insisted that I introduce her to the more doubtful pleasures of hashish and morphine. Happily, she did not respond well to the morphine and indulged only occasionally in the hashish, usually with tobacco after a meal. It was extraordinary to lean against the gondola’s brass rail with the sky and the desert at my back, to watch that beautiful woman, softly naked, cooking a delicious Albanian snack over the muttering engine, careless of any danger. I had never known a woman like her. Neither Esmé nor Mrs Cornelius were as careless of their comfort. I can close my eyes and smell the desert now. There is no comparison for that smell; almost sweet, almost alive. The heat of the African beast, the patient monster. I can smell her perfumed sweat, rose and cunt and garlic on her mouth, and I can smell my own cool manhood. I regained my skills and they were now informed with a subtler knowledge. I handled her as a musician his instrument, to celebrate its beauty and its sensual potentiality. Here I became again what I had always been but which I had been made to forget at Bi’r Tefawi. I was Ace Peters, star of the screen; Maxim Pyatnitski, inventor of the Dynamite Automobile, the Flying Wing, the TeleVision. And I was al Sakhr, the Hawk of the Sahara. I was whatever I would wish to be or had ever desired to be. My vision and my future were restored. I saw again my cities, gold and silver, white and ebony, thrusting into the blue pallor of a Saharan evening. I saw an orderly future, where justice and equality were the common expectation. I saw escape from the grey ruins of my Russian homeland, from the squalor of the Constantinople alleys, from the wretched poverty of an Alabama shanty-town or a Cairene slum. I described some of my ideas to Rose and she responded with enthusiasm. I must certainly come back with her to Italy. Her absolute faith was invested in Il Duce. He was a man of the people, a great-hearted poet-politician like his friend d’Annunzio, who had put his own army at the Leader’s disposal. He was also a sensitive, moved only by a hatred of poverty and misery. But he was finally a great realist. He understood that the Italians would never improve on their own initiative. They needed strong, but humane, leadership. She told me of an Italy encouraging the arts and sciences. ‘Il Duce calls us all to the service of his noble social experiment—everyone! The greatest writers, engineers, scientists and painters of our day are shoulder to shoulder in modern Rome.’ This was very like the opinion of the only clear-sighted American I ever met. When I knew him he was a journalist, then got a reputation as a poet. I understood nothing of that world. His championing of his fellow-poets was enough to put him in prison. I myself enjoyed the horrors of the Isle of Man. It does no good to speak for fairness and proper credit in this world.
I would, I said to her, very much like to journey some day to that new Renaissance court. She said she was sure I would be more than welcome. Only the best were attracted to Mussolini, recognising in him the same self-confidence, talents and audacity which had made them great in their chosen work. I imagined this marvellous court on a larger scale than Imperial Rome, with tall, airy white marble columns and gleaming floors, like pools, stretching into shadow. There we should all meet, intellectuals, artists, scientists and adventurers from every corner of the world, representing the nations and religions of the Earth, to exchange knowledge and ideas, to discuss in fluent discourse the means by which we should truly civilise the world.
That the experiment came to nothing, I said to the older Cornelius boy, was not the fault of the visionaries who began it. It was the fault of the blind reactionaries who conspired to stop it. There are few people in modern Italy who would not rather go back to the days of Il Duce, when they could be proud of their heritage, certain of their cause. The same could be said for Hi
tler, but the stories are not completely parallel. I am the first to agree: in some respects the Führer went too far. But were the French completely free from blame? What does ‘fascist’ mean, anyway? It means nothing but ‘law’ and ‘discipline’. Are chaos and licence, such as we have today, to be preferred? A Rolling Stone gathers no responsibility, I told him. It would be wonderful if we could all caper about in Hyde Park and howl like some Sudanese zealot and be given a million pounds for it! He could not reply.
Not merely stupefied by a spoon-feeding State, I said, but inarticulate as well. Rhetoric, I discovered, is no longer on the Holland Park syllabus. There is scarcely a school in London that retains it! We are losing the realities and the meaning of the past. Without them we shall never create the future we desire. Why must they always simplify? I told them—I embrace complexity. It is my meat and drink. But they had nothing for me. Shortly afterwards I opened my shop.
‘The desert,’ I told her, ‘teaches us the arts of compromise. Without them, we could not survive.’
‘But you would not compromise on principle, al Sakhr?’
‘The desert makes a principle of compromise.’ I smiled. ‘What can you control there, in the end? The rainfall? The wind?’
She was silent for a few moments after that, standing against the wickerwork, one hand on a rope, the other on the basket’s rail, wearing only her shoes to give her enough height to peer down over the flatness of what looked, from there, like a vast slab of concrete scattered with rubble. I saw it suddenly as the foundation of a gigantic temple and in that vision the scale of Atlantis was revealed to me! Only when I looked upon the monumental buildings of the new dictators would this vision be recreated! They knew the spiritual value of such architecture. This is what they shared with the cathedral-builders. What is wrong with offering hard-working people a little glimpse of perfection?
My aviatrix had lost her calendar and had only her maps and compasses. She knew that it was probably still July and it was certainly 1927. As to our distance travelled, we should soon come upon some good-sized settlement where we would, with proper caution, regain our bearings.
Some evenings, in the twilight, we would dance the Argentinian tango to the tune from the portable gramophone.
We had both grown a little weary and complained of a certain clamminess, doubtless caused by the steam. We longed for cool water, to bathe in and to drink. The heat was into the 120s. I spoke of the hamman and its luxuries; the baths the Moor gave to the Turk. There were certain establishments in Oman, I said, where men and women were encouraged to bathe together. This excited her and it seemed churlish to disappoint her imagination. I described the sensual delights of the steam baths, the nature of their attendants and their pleasures. It gave me a uniquely delicious frisson which had nothing in it of lust. The sensation grew stronger in me as she discovered fresh levels of sexual ecstasy and experiment. Only when we had begun to suffer the effects of the heat and of remaining aloft for so long did I think to ask her if they had put a time-limit on her expedition. I still barely understood the scientific purpose of her flight.
‘My dear sheikh, it becomes whatever I wish it to be. The balloon is a relatively small expense. All I have to do to justify the voyage to the Italian government is make a few notes, a few marks on the map and take a reel or two of film until I have enough for a lecture tour! Another first for Italy! A jolly cheap one, too.’ She had already had some success, she said, with a one-woman dhow voyage from Aden to Bombay. She had signed a contract with a Milan publisher who wanted her book about it. ‘It’s a peculiar way of making a living, but it enables me to travel with some security and to be almost guaranteed an adventure! The publicity I receive ensures my safety. It’s only bad luck that brought me down at Zazara. Anywhere else would have had a newspaper and a wire.’
Thought of that near-disaster brought a frown to her wonderful eyes which deepened as she cocked her head to listen. She sucked her index finger and raised it into the air. She rose suddenly, plucking her compass from its box and checking our position. I grew a little concerned. ‘What’s wrong, Miss von Bek?’ I wrapped my jerd about me and got to my feet. The basket shuddered. There was something unfamiliar about our movement.
‘The wind’s changing,’ she said. ‘We’re beginning to turn south.’ Hurriedly she got out her maps and spread them on the carpet. ‘This could be awkward.’
I saw immediately what she meant. If we were flying between Ghat (which lay some 600 miles inland from Tripoli) and Touat (some 600 miles from Casablanca) and the wind had indeed shifted south then Kolya’s bitter prediction might be about to come true. In fact we would be fortunate to land in Timbuktu, the forbidden city on the far side of the Sahara.
I had grown used to seeing the sun always setting directly ahead of us, of sailing always into the last of the day’s light, but now I saw the sun swelling orange above the horizon off to our right. Below raced a succession of slatey drumlins, too puny to be called hills, while ahead lay the waterless dunes of the deep Southern Sahara.
I became poignantly aware of Kolya’s wisdom and knew a wave of utter self-contempt. ‘Orl roads lead ter Rome, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘so yer might as well pick a comfy one.’ Unfortunately it seemed to me then that I had chosen the riskiest road of all.
That night we attempted to read the map by torchlight, from time to time peering over the side at the dunes or at the magnificent stars as we tried desperately to determine our position. The stars were displayed as sharply as an astrologer’s chart with every pin-point an identifiable individual, every configuration perfectly defined, but neither of us could navigate by them. We were hoping to see a good-sized settlement where we could land and risk someone taking another potshot at us. Such problems beset the first balloonists in Europe, who whenever they landed were set upon by local peasants. We at least had the advantage of our Gatling and a couple of loaded Webleys as well as my Lee-Enfield. I felt a pang when I thought of my friend. He had been a fool not to come with us, yet, just as he was suffering the consequences of his decision, I would soon no doubt be suffering the consequences of mine. At Rosie von Bek’s persistent prompting, and with the help of some sustaining sneg, there was nothing to do but return to our habitual pursuits, praying that God was sufficiently well-disposed towards us not to let us perish in that blazing waste.
I had taken to telling her strange tales of the desert. She demanded the most complicated details, forcing me to draw more than I should have liked on my Egyptian experiences. Yet, by turning those horrors into a form of fiction, I managed further to restore myself. The knowledge I had gained at Bi’r Tefawi could, by some odd alchemy, be put to my advantage. Her own motives were purely sensual, yet she enjoyed a fantasy which she might never have dared bring to reality if we had not drifted unremarked above the surface of the earth. Yet over the next two days the raw truth of our predicament grew harder to avoid. Rosie von Bek’s manner became increasingly nervous as she darted from side to side of the basket, checking the balloon’s functions, making certain that the engine was working. Unable to be of assistance, I continued, when not at her disposal, to absorb myself in the adventures of Sexton Blake, Detective. She chose to see my fascination as part of the stoic nature of the Bedouin, but since there was no action I could take The Union Jack soothed my mind, helping me ignore the unpleasant likelihood of our deaths in the desert. I was surprised that she saw no parallels between my anodyne and her own addiction to my verbal confections. It was not surprising that I should seek the consolations of Zenith the Albino or The Master Mummer after my surfeit of sensuality and terror, just as she had doubtless meanwhile satisfied her appetite for the adventures of the famous detective, his plucky assistant Tinker and their bloodhound Pedro pitted against a thousand deadly villains. Upholding the high standards of a benign imperialism, wherever his cases led him, even Blake could not live by idealism and romance alone, though I should make it clear there was not a trace of smut in those stories.
&nb
sp; My refusal to let anxiety take control of me was, it seemed, soon justified. I was about to begin Chapter Five of The Clue of the Cracked Footprint, featuring the international adventurer Dr Huxton Rymer at large in the Orient, when my companion raised a cheer like a schoolgirl at a hockey match. ‘The wind, my Sheikh! Al rih! It’s turning! We’re saved! Hurrah!’
Carefully, I replaced my Union Jack magazine in its locker and went to stand beside her. The wind had indeed changed, but had become erratic. The balloon was buffeted violently, then struck again and again. I noted the colour of the sky, the agitated sand below us. We were on the edge of some kind of storm. There came thunder from below the horizon and the sun turned a sickly yellow. The sand ran like mud. From where we looked, it might have been a flood. Rosie moved closer to me, her eyes agitated, her manner uncertain. ‘Is this something we should fear, my Hawk?’
‘We are always in the hands of Allah, sweet child.’ I had no notion of the cause of this phenomenon. For a while the basket began to swing like a pendulum, as if far above us somewhere was the face of an enormous clock. Then I realised we were not moving at all. We appeared to be frozen at the centre of a small whirlwind. Even as we watched, a spiral of sand rose around us and the breath was dragged from our bodies. The temperature dropped radically. We were both shivering. It was as if we were in the power of some fierce desert djinn furious at our invasion of his land. We found ourselves at the very Heart of Chaos.
Then, suddenly, it was as if we were being propelled through the muzzle of Verne’s gigantic cannon which fired the explorers from Earth to the Moon! Now the balloon was travelling rapidly upward, the warm air of our canopy acting, in the falling barometer, to draw us out of the storm like dew to the sun. We were all at once drifting in the safety of the upper atmosphere where, we discovered from our hastily consulted compass, we were travelling north. It was my turn to exclaim with pleasure! To the north lay Tangier, Algiers or Tunis! And north of these, on busy sea-routes, were the ports of Italy! We had been miraculously saved, as Rosie remarked, by nothing more than balloonist’s luck. So little was known in those days. The mapping of currents and pressures, examination of lighter-than-air crafts’ behaviour was scarcely a science then. Though we were the first to experience that desert phenomenon, we were by no means the last!
Jerusalem Commands Page 51
