‘Six thousand hours of flight and three thousand missions. What was it, forty bombing flights a day!’ The Pasha exclaimed all this in terms of the warmest admiration. ‘I read it in Le Temps. Forty bombing flights a day!’
‘And still Abd el-Krim and his Riffians were able to bring those planes down. Sharp-shooters lying on their backs in rows and firing in concert! Aeroplanes make no real difference to warfare, in my opinion. Only to civilians.’ Mr Weeks was a confessed admirer of the rebel chief. ‘How many squadrons did you have out there? Fourteen? It was folly. The British had equally disastrous experience bombing the Kurdish villages in Iraq. The aeroplane can never be an independent agent of warfare. It should no more operate on its own than should artillery. In the end it’s always up to the infantry. Or,’ he admitted, after due consideration, ‘sometimes the cavalry. I doubt if the French would have had a war in Syria at all if it hadn’t been for their indiscriminate bombing in the first place. The Times said so quite clearly. Destroying villages, of course, gives the enemy scores of homeless recruits.’
I began to laugh at this. ‘Come now, Mr Weeks. You’ll be telling us next that the airship is an invention of the Devil!’
He shrugged and held up his hands, trying to smile as he dropped the subject. His hatred of every kind of flying machine was well known.
‘However, the aeroblane is effective,’ pronounced the Pasha suddenly, silencing us. He paused to take some stuffed sweetmeat from the tray his slave offered him, ‘as Mr Weeks says. As artillery is effective. Did you know, Mr Weeks, that much of our family’s bower was founded on the ownershib of one Krubb cannon?’
Mr Weeks had told me as much, but he feigned ignorance.
‘A gift from God,’ said the Pasha. ‘With that one excellent German gun—’ a further acknowledgement of Schmaltz’s somewhat tender feelings ‘—we were able to bacify rebellious tribesmen, unite the whole region as one beoble and imbrove our friendshib with the French.’ He smacked his lips. He dipped his fingers to be washed and dried. ‘But there are certain barts of the South which even a Krubb cannon cannot reach, where we are still irritated by unregenerate outlaws and rebels who make cowardly raids into our lands and then skulk away again. We discussed this frequently with General Lyautey, that great man. In Tangier and in Baris.’ El Glaoui nodded in deep self-approval. ‘He told me that if I wanted an air force I should not ask the French for one. It would be imbolitic. But if I were to build my own small fleet, merely a squadron or two, no one would steb in my way.’ He looked into the middle distance as if his eyes already rested on his gleaming battle-birds, ready to carry the flame of a great new Moorish civilisation, an empire which, arm-in-arm with the French Empire, would civilise the whole of Oriental Africa. I recognised a man of vision as thoroughly as he recognised me. I felt like leaping to my feet and swearing that, in a year or two, I would give him the air power that he craved. I would give him more than that. I would give him nomad cities, moving slowly across the dunes on their mighty tracks. I would give him roads burned into existence by fusing the sand with heat-beams, just as my Violet Ray had fused the stones of Kiev. At that moment, our eyes met. He smiled, a little dazed. I would give him Utopia.
I became immediately loyal to this shared vision. I was in no doubt that it would soon begin to materialise and, once my ideas were in full realisation, I would be invited to Rome.
The conversation turned to other matters and I was left with my own optimistic thoughts. Only once did I become aware of anyone’s attention on me. I looked through the lumping shadows of the firelight, through the smoke and the little wisps of mist which came up from the valley. Rose von Bek was observing me from under her long lashes even as she pretended to listen to her new lover. It was as if I had whetted her curiosity for a second time. I think she was beginning to see me for the man I was, rather than the fantasy she had created. I half-closed my own eyes before I returned, steadily, her stare. The Pasha, absorbed in some weighty philosophical discussion with Count Schmaltz and Mr Weeks, paid us no attention. Only François Fromental threw me an amused glance as he settled himself deep into his cushions and drew luxuriously upon a good Havana.
Ma sha’ allah! Ma teru khush ma’er-ragil da! A ‘ud bi-rabb el-fulag! A ‘ud billah min esh-shaitan ev-ragim!
A little later I heard my name called. ‘Mr Peters! Ace!’ The young Frenchman was reaching across and shaking my arm. I opened my eyes.
I realised with a shock that I had, for an instant, been travelling again in the Land of Dreams.
It was not until the next day that I had my third vision of paradise—the great palmeries of Marrakech, filling the verdant mesa surrounded by the Atlas’s noble crags and, at their centre beneath the pure blue sky, the Red City, the city which only Timbuktu rivalled as a mysterious legend, crenellated walls rising above the surrounding palms and poplars; the city who had given a whole nation her name and given the word Moor to the world. Dreaming Marrakech, as old as romance, as sweet as forbidden wine, says Wheldrake.
I stood in awe, that evening, and wondered how any Moor could ever turn his back on such unique beauty.
El Glaoui joined me, reaching almost delicately to touch my shoulder. ‘Mr Beters, I want you to helb me build the future—here in Marrakech.’ It was impossible to refuse him. At that moment I forgot my dreams of Hollywood and returned, with rising spirits, to my true vocation.
My cities will be filled with gardens. Surrounded by a halo of golden light they will rise above the earth and settle upon the mountains like proud hawks. And the first of these shall be Marrakech.
I must admit I had expected nothing like the reception I received as we rode into Marrakech. Bit by bit a crowd formed, chattering and pointing at me, and when I cheerfully waved back a great gasp went up, then an ululation of sheer joy.
Glad to ride beside me at that moment, El Glaoui grinned. ‘You must be used to this, Mr Beters, wherever you go. I feel very small fish beside you.’
I do not think he was entirely pleased as the cheering increased and I heard the name ‘Bookh’aroo!’ on all their lips. By some peculiar fluke I was adored in Marrakech as Valentino was adored in Minneapolis. Lieutenant Fromental was almost drunk with reflected glory. ‘One day,’ he proclaimed excitedly, ‘they will know about you in France. You will be as famous, my dear friend, in Paris and Marseilles as you are now in Meknes and Fez!’ I had no other option but to wave and salaam as, with horribly aching muscles, I tried to control my lively horse. And so we passed through the walls of Marrakech and only Rose von Bek took no notice of my fame.
TWENTY-FIVE
NARCOTICS POSSESS none of the curative properties of the white psychedelics. By these I refer not to hippy pleasure trips on LSD but to the mind-expanding and mind-focusing properties of pure cocaine. These boys and girls today know nothing of cocaine. They have never sniffed it. They have had the illusion of pleasure on lavatory cleaner and baby laxative and they presume to condescend to the man who has imbibed ‘the woman-drug’ with the great and famous of the twentieth century—and by this I mean no innuendo to our present rulers and their families. I speak my mind when I have to, but otherwise am well known for my discretion. I learned the virtues of silence in Egypt and Morocco. To these people ‘free speech’ is synonymous with ‘blasphemy’.
At a Moorish court self-discipline becomes a question of survival. I learned the old, mediaeval virtues, and began to understand the meaning of Chivalry. I had travelled in Time. On such ancient understandings were the codes of the Black Hand founded, as I have reason to know. The so-called mafia were in their own world the old forms of Law pitted against the new, just as today the Arab is pitted against the institutions of democracy.
At Talouet, the seat of his family’s original power, El Hadj T’hami Ben Mohammed Mezouari el Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, had already proposed his plan to me, even before we reached the capital. The great mediaeval pile had been filled, almost like Hearst’s strange fantasy, with a mixture of Moorish treas
ure and expensive European furniture, with unselected objets d’art. The castle housed much of the Pasha’s great collection of concubines, at least half of whom, it was said, were French. Staffed by his huge Nubians, the palace was never completely silent.
He had been irritated, he said, by an unpleasant little Frenchman of the worst class, a man called Lapin—a Communist journalist with some profession to the Law. He was in league with an old enemy of the Glaoui, a certain discredited kai’d called El Hakim, who had enlisted this turncoat to bring suit against the Pasha. El Hakim’s supporters had even brought Lapin a newspaper in which he uttered every kind of calumny against the Pasha and his family. One of the accusations which El Glaoui found especially rankling was that none of his wealth was put back into the region. Nothing was spent on cultural projects or scientific schemes. If the Glaoui was truly enlightened, Lapin had argued, why did he not encourage scientific and social progress in his realm? In response to this the Pasha pointed to Mr Mix, employed to record the cultural and varied rule of the great Pasha and his world ‘for bosterity’. He had founded a film industry in Marrakech which would ultimately be the rival of Hollywood. And now an aeronautics industry. Nothing could be more modern. Every day his city became a second Los Angeles. Suddenly, from advising on defences, Mr Mix was commissioned to draw up plans for a series of solid English public works, ‘Like the lavatories,’ commanded the Pasha, ‘in Leicester Square.’ Other guests were recruited. Count Schmaltz’s advice, concerning discipline and the chains of command appropriate to a modern standing army, was also sought, though the German, like Miss von Bek, was only the Pasha’s guest.
All this he had elaborated as we stood together on the roof of his kasbah’s tallest tower, looking across the ragged peaks of the High Atlas, listening to the rushing of the Oued Mellah, and staring out across the surrounding semi-desert towards the true Sahara we had so recently left behind. I had never seen such vividly coloured mountains as these. The rock itself was radiant with dark greens and yellows, with luminous cerise and mauve, with deep reds and blues, slabs of stone sometimes merging with the undulating meadows of wild flowers all pulsing beneath the heat of a royal-blue sky. I remember thinking how different this landscape was from everything I had yet seen, how the desert contained a world of contrasts and variation as distinct as anything in Europe. As the sun dropped down over the crags and their shadows lengthened until it seemed they must engulf the castle itself, El Glaoui had spoken of his love of this land. This, he said, not Marrakech, was his true capital; he thought of the place as home, for which he experienced the deepest sentiment. If he had his way, he told me, he would spend far more time here. I had been introduced to half-a-dozen cousins and brothers-in-law (though not the resident Vulture himself, who was tactfully absent) and could remember none of them. They were not an especially remarkable family save for the direct branch. It was then he had asked me to work for him, to build him an air fleet. I told him I would give the matter great consideration. That night two Circassian houris of the most subtle and astonishing skills were sent to me. My lusts remained unavailable to me, but I appreciated my host’s thoughtfulness. At the time I believed this was something of a guilty gesture on his part, given his interest in Miss von Bek, but I would later learn that ‘guilt’ was not a word in any of the Pasha’s vocabularies.
He had asked me my opinion of Lieutenant Fromental: I said diplomatically that he seemed a pleasant enough young man.
‘He is here to spy on me,’ El Glaoui had murmured with a small smile. ‘He is a secret communist, I think.’
Privately I felt this an overly strong response to Fromental’s Christian humanism, but I held my tongue. I had no will to self-destruction. I am, I have often said, no martyr.
Perhaps it is a little late, even for a new messiah? Sometimes I say to Barnum the Jew, you people might have the right idea. Can things get any worse? Where is this messiah you tell us hasn’t arrived yet? He cannot answer. He will be waiting for his messiah when the rest of us are two feet under, but no doubt he will be standing on my shoulders.
‘I blame the whole thing on the death of the family,’ says Barnum. He is particularly upset because of his girl, who Mrs Cornelius warned him about when she was six.
‘The death of the family,’ I said, ‘is probably our only hope.’ But then I think I knew something about what ‘family first’ means. For my own part I continued to put my faith in the great political ideals we developed throughout the nineteenth century. Nietzsche is not entirely to be trusted on this. It is to those nineteenth-century values we should return, not seek some ideal anarchy. ‘Who would wish to live in your Utopia?’ I asked him. Your mother! Anyone else? Some families should be dispersed at birth! I met H.G. Wells in Marrakech. He still had some notion of gigantic crèches as the answer but I suggested it would be simpler to remove, as it were, the father factor. Let the father always be anonymous. This amused him. ‘There are a lot of chaps I know, including me, who’d drink to that,’ he said. ‘Now I know what we have in common!’ Illustre Abraham; procréateur fanatique du Mythe sacrificateur. Herbert Wells had no time any longer for practical science and his social notions were often unsound, but as an inspiration to my generation he had enormous influence. Stalin counted him a close personal friend. Only Mr Mix, I recall, never took to him. But I had grown used to the man’s odd changes of mood. He had developed a chip on his shoulder, I think. Generally he refused to exchange more than a few sentences with me but occasionally would be as amiable, as solicitous, as in old times. I began to suspect he was the slave of some wretched drug.
He would frequently disappear with his camera and his ill-matched crew of Berber donkey-boys and Jewish street-arabs up into the mountains, or would go back to Talouet. In that brooding family fortress of the Clan Glaoua high above the Salt River, the chiefs still gathered in times of crisis to decide the fortunes of the tribes who remained in the Atlas and gave the Glaoua fealty, who had not, in the Berber’s droll saying, exchanged their rifle for a mule.
The Berbers referred to themselves by their clans much as the Scots did and, from my own reading of Rob Roy, their social system and leisure pursuits were almost identical, save that the Moroccans did not at that time have an implacable industrialising ruling power bent on driving them forever into submission, to make them bend before the firm yet not unkind hand of progress. Mr Mix had become something of an enthusiast of these clansmen (‘Berber’ being simply a corruption of the Greek ‘barbarian’) and spent an inordinate amount of time with notebooks recording their dialects and folk practices. I wondered if he did not have some misguided notion that this mysterious people were his ancestors. I suggested it: he denied it. Employed as El Hadji T’hami’s personal film-maker, he said, it was his business to record the glory and variety of the Pasha’s realm. Having no interest in the fine distinctions of one tribe’s scarifications compared to another’s, I realised how these customs must give him a better sense of his own past.
I had also begun to understand that Mr Mix’s discretion came chiefly from his not wishing to embarrass me in front of the other white men. This was typical of my friend’s sensitivity and I let him know that I thoroughly appreciated what he was doing. When we were alone, he resumed the old, easier manner of our comradeship. Yet even here he seemed to nurse some sort of resentment. More than once he suggested that I get on the first train to Casablanca and go from there to Italy where, he said, I really belonged. They needed me there, he said. At first I took this for a warming concern for my well-being. But then I began to realise that in certain respects he was trying to get me away from Marrakech. No doubt he feared that my authority as a spokesman for Hollywood was rather greater than his own. Yet he continued about his film-making unhindered by me, while the Pasha seemed perfectly content to use him for recording special occasions and for help with the foreign press when they required interviews or newsreel footage. Effectively, Mr Mix had been elevated to the position of press attaché to the Pasha, as well as
Court Recorder. I was still unsure, in those early days at Court, exactly how Mr Mix had come by his appointments while now yearning for the railroads of home. As to my own fortunes, I joked to Lieutenant Fromental, I was now both Court Engineer, Jester and Royal Plane-maker.
Marrakech is the most exquisite of all Moorish settlements. She is a timeless city, the colour of her red marigolds and green palmeries, of bloody milk and a sky as flat, as tranquil and as blue as any perfectly painted Hollywood firmament. Her days are full of the smells of beasts, mint, saffron and musk, of henna and fresh-picked oranges, of mounded carrots and leeks and a dozen different mysteriously gnarled husks, of tea and sweet sherbet and boiling couscous, of roasting sheep and goat-stew, of honey and coffee and the dyer’s wells, of heavy tobacco smoke and the thick, tempting whiffs of kif, of sour milk and sweet flesh, of heated mud in the summer and sour dampness in the winter, when the clogging open drains are flushed away and even the Frenchman’s sewers cannot take the sudden flood. Marrakech is one of the magic cities of the Earth, a busy, modern Maghribi metropolis, where automobiles and camels argue on equal terms for right of way through her narrow lanes. Marrakech, at any season, is superbly beautiful. In the spring she is at her finest, with great snow-capped mountains visible on every side, and her mile upon mile of palm groves making a lush deep emerald setting for a city nestling like a glowing ruby at the heart.
She is beautiful in the rain, when her trees and shrubs are dark with the weight of water and her walls begin to glisten; she is beautiful in the summer when her rich, raw colours bring a hint of the desert. She was founded in the year William the Conqueror made London his capital. Even when the harsh sandstorms rush into her streets like some relentless harka, and for weeks at a time it is almost impossible to move without feeling blinded and gagged by that steady tide of red dust, even then there is a wildness to her scenery, a certain nobility in the way in which her stately palms and sturdy people take their battering. Unless your imagination has died it is impossible not to love her. More than Paris, she has the ability to seduce and hold the traveller within the comfort of her massive battlements. For Marrakech is, of necessity, a walled city. It is a few years, not decades, since her ramparts stood between her people and relentless savagery. Perhaps it is true that here, not out in the desert, I found Temptation and succumbed. El Glaoui’s charm and Marrakech’s magic combined to divert me. Both provided the illusion of scientific progress. El Glaoui was a generous employer. I was introduced to levels of luxury I had never dreamed of. I had the honour, the position, the goodwill—everything the Pasha’s power could put at my disposal. Everything I had ever desired.
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