by Brian Moore
Following the Aga’s prancing stallion, they entered the city of tents. Their escort riders reined in and waited as Deniau’s party rode through the confusion and noise of the encampment. Men, women and children ran out, clustering in a circle at the entrance to the Aga’s ceremonial tent as the visitors were ushered inside.
Inside the tent they were invited to seat themselves on a large carpet. Coffee was served and Emmeline remained in the rear of the group, largely ignored by the Aga and his sons as they offered pipes of tobacco to the male guests. After a half-hour of smoking and coffee drinking the Aga clapped his hands. Servants pulled wide the flaps of the tent and Emmeline saw, approaching, a procession led by two men carrying what seemed to be furled banners. But when they entered the tent she realized that the long poles they held aloft contained, not banners, but sheep roasted whole. The sheep bearers were followed by fifteen men, each of whom carried a dish which was to be a part of the feast. Roast fowls, different sorts of couscous, sweet cakes, dates and other dishes which she could not identify were placed before them as a head cook unspitted the sheep, arranging them in a great heaping dish which he and his assistants laid before the Aga and his guests.
In the midst of these festivities Emmeline thought of the sight she had just witnessed, the riders of the fantasia, their rifles held high, their pride in their horsemanship, their triumphant warrior stance. Into her mind came a memory of the grands boulevards of Paris, those immense straight thoroughfares where, some months before, thousands of soldiers marched past the Emperor in a celebration of his Crimean victories. On that day, she had seen the might of France’s army: gun carriages, cannons, regiments, foot soldiers, cavalry; flags and standards held high to commemorate wars fought and won against other great powers. In the spring that military might will send these Arab horsemen crashing to the ground like toy soldiers swept off a game board. In the spring, this Aga now courting Deniau and my husband will become the victim of a magician’s tricks. And what if my husband had not come here, what if these people’s belief had not been shaken by Henri’s ‘miracles’? What if Bou-Aziz could ignore them, call for a holy war and, with it, drive us from this, their land?
Deniau, leaning towards her, offered a strip of the roast mutton from the heap of meat. ‘It’s delicious,’ he said. ‘You must try it. I told you this would be a feast.’
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I have no appetite.’
‘You are not ill?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? We travelled with your husband’s servant. I believe we ate the same food and drank the same water. I don’t want to alarm you but we are still at risk.’
‘I am not ill,’ she said. She leaned forward, dipping her fingers into the heap of meat, and, as she had seen the others do, tore off a strip and began to eat it. ‘You see? You don’t need to be alarmed.’
‘Good. It’s delicious meat, don’t you think?’
As he said this, smiling, he turned from her to speak in Arabic with a young caid sitting on his left. It was, she knew, a subtle dismissal. Now that he had succeeded in his mission of bringing her husband to Africa and putting him through his performing tricks, this devious, handsome diplomat need no longer woo the magician’s wife. In a few weeks when we sail on the Alexander, he will remain here, planning, scheming, listening to his spies. A year from now he may not remember my Christian name.
As the luncheon proceeded, again she was largely ignored. And in her aloneness, shut out of the talk, she remembered Deniau’s warning. Cholera. It was, of course, something she had thought about, something frightening, but which in the guilt and grief of Jules’ dying, she had dismissed. Now, the memory of his wasted dehydrated body, his pinched face, the cheeks a bluish tint, his rapid breathing, his inaudible voice, the stench of excrement, the tearing retching noise as a drool of vomit spilled over the sheets, these sights, these sounds came back to her under this richly canopied tent, filled with voices, laughter and bowing servants offering a surfeit of food. It was as though Jules, no longer buried under a heap of dirt in the Jesuit cemetery, had come through the opened tent flaps to walk among the celebrating sheikhs and Frenchmen, the spectre at this feast whose deathly hand might at any moment touch her, Lambert, Deniau or Hersant. We are all at risk.
‘Did you hear that?’ Lambert said, leaning over to her.
She started in surprise as though she had been asleep. ‘No. What?’
Lambert turned to Hersant. ‘Would you mind telling my wife what you just told me. Interesting. Very.’
Hersant, who sat on her right, said in a confidential tone, ‘The Colonel says that just before our luncheon the Aga told him that yesterday evening in Milianah the assembled sheikhs held a conclave and agreed that, despite your husband’s performance, if Bou-Aziz decides to proclaim himself the Mahdi, all of them, in fact all of Algeria, will rise with him. But the Aga, who is one of the very few leaders who doubts that Bou-Aziz is the Mahdi, told the Colonel that, from now on, each day he hesitates to declare himself he will lose an important part of his support. For that reason we must keep the pressure on. Tomorrow, we will invite the sheikhs to a feast at which your husband, the guest of honour’ – he turned to Lambert – ‘will astonish them with – what will you do?’
‘Sleight of hand, making things appear and disappear, conjuring, of course, but done in a spirit of friendship.’
Hersant laughed. ‘Friendship? Any trick you perform from now on will merely enhance your reputation as a familiar of the devil. Which is what we want. But I must say, yesterday, watching you on stage, I thought if you’d worn a burnous and were bearded like an Arab, you, not Bou-Aziz, would be their Mahdi.’
Suddenly, unthinkingly, Emmeline said, ‘Nonsense! That old man is holy. You know it the moment you are in his presence.’
‘Holy?’ Captain Hersant seemed amused. ‘My dear Madame, these marabouts are charlatans, every one of them, self-proclaimed saints in a religion which, frankly, is childish nonsense. Really, you mustn’t romanticize them. You wouldn’t if you knew them as I do.’
But at that moment, the Aga rose, clapped his hands and spoke to his guests. It was, Deniau said later, a speech of welcome, but also a signal that the luncheon must end. It was the hour of mid-afternoon prayer.
Half an hour later, after a round of farewells, an escort of ten riders, clad in the red burnous of the Aga’s goumiers, led them past the staring crowd of tent dwellers out on to the road to Milianah, passing distant hills of a brownish mauve colour, pitted with myriad crevices. Soon they were riding past plantations of date palms and gardens intersected by walls of dried mud. Ahead on the mountain slope Emmeline saw a village with high-walled houses, their roofs marked with a design of clay bricks, their flat terraces looking over courtyards and gardens full of fruit trees. As they passed by the road leading up to these habitations, Deniau reined in his horse and pointed to a blue-domed building a little way from the village. Behind this building the mountains stretched, range upon range, menacing in their barrenness, melting at last into the fading blue of the sky.
‘That’s his zawiya.’
‘His what?’ Lambert said. ‘Who are we talking about?’
‘Bou-Aziz. That’s where he lives, and teaches his pupils. Zawiyas are a sort of marabout seminary and in my opinion they’re more dangerous than any army the Arabs can put in the field.’
‘What will he decide, I wonder?’ Hersant said, smiling. ‘Is he thinking of changing his name?’
‘To Muhammad b. ’Abd Allah!’ Deniau sang out mockingly, shouting towards the distant blue-domed building.
Hersant, laughing, echoed the cry. ‘Muhammad b. ’Abd Allah!’
The Aga’s Arab escorts, listening to this, stared at each other in wild surmise.
That evening, at dinner, she said to Lambert, ‘This lunch for you tomorrow, they won’t need me. I am de trop at these affairs. I think, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go riding instead.’
‘Would that be safe?’ He turn
ed to Deniau. ‘What do you think?’
‘Perfectly safe,’ Hersant said, smiling at her. ‘Who would dare to lay hands on the devil’s wife?’
The sergeant in charge of the livery stable remembered her from yesterday and at once saddled for her the roan mare she had ridden on her journey to Bou-Allem’s feast. She had risen shortly after sunrise, dressing while Lambert slept, and in a state of agitation, afraid that he would waken and question her, left hurriedly without writing a note. As she rode out of the stables, she heard the muezzin’s call from the minaret of a nearby mosque and moments later she passed a group of men, heads bowed, kneeling in the dirt of the narrow street. She spurred her horse, trotting in and out of the maze of market stalls which led to the main gate of Milianah. Once through the gate she forced the roan mare into a canter. The road ahead was empty but minutes later she heard behind her the clanking of bells and, turning, saw three Tuareg riders, their faces half masked in the fashion of their tribe, advancing on her, whipping their giant racing camels as they came up on her and passed her, the iron harness bells worn by the great beasts clanking at every step, their riders high on Tuareg saddles adorned with woollen tassels, the long camel necks swaying as, with undulating strides, they vanished in a cloud of dust.
Again she was alone in the silence of this vast plain, the sun above her hot as a stove, its heat seeming to singe her garments. And then, ahead she saw the bleak range of mountains, the cliffs of pitted rock rising against the sky, a landscape so barren that for some minutes she rode on uncertainly, believing that she had taken a different track from the day before and had lost the direction of the village and the zawiya. But soon she sighted the wall of the cemetery which lay beside the road and coming closer saw inside the wall a field of strangely shaped stones marking hundreds of anonymous graves. Above the cemetery a narrow track divided in two, a few hundred yards from the village. She took the left fork and rode up to the gate of the blue-domed zawiya. Entering a courtyard she saw a small group of young men, seated in a circle, reciting a monotonous chant which seemed to be a prayer.
Emmeline slipped off her horse’s back and stood, tense and uneasy, until, from a darkened archway, an old man, barefoot, wearing a ragged robe, emerged and signalled her to follow him. She was led through an inner courtyard and into a small shaded room where, seated on the ground on a sack of folded wool, she saw the marabout’s daughter who at once rose and took her hands, saying in her precise conventional French, ‘Welcome, Madame. I am Taalith. My father has trained me to help him in his work. You wish to see him?’
‘If I may?’
Still holding Emmeline’s hands the marabout’s daughter drew her down to sit beside her on the folded sack. Emmeline was, as before, moved by the sight of her body, frail as a child’s under the burnous and veils, her face wasted, her voice hoarse yet gentle and welcoming.
‘Today, my father is meditating. If you will be so kind, tell me what it is you wish to say to him.’
For a long moment Emmeline did not speak. Like a soldier who has crossed a no-man’s-land and stands on the rim of enemy lines, hands raised in surrender, she felt a sudden ending of the tension, the anger, the shame which had led her to come here. The marabout’s daughter seemed, like her father, to possess baraka, that mysterious gift which Deniau said was a holiness, an expression of divine grace, a gift which made those in her presence feel at peace. These people are not my enemies. If I speak now it’s not to betray my country or Henri, but to tell the truth, to right a wrong.
‘It is about my husband,’ she said. ‘He does not possess supernatural powers. Everything he showed you here and in Algiers is a commercial illusion, a magician’s trick. I can explain these things to your father. And I can tell him why these things were done and what is the true purpose of our visit.’
The marabout’s daughter leaned towards Emmeline and took hold of her hands. ‘It was good of you to come. I will tell him what you have told me. If you please, wait here.’ The marabout’s daughter rose and went out of the room.
Moments later an Arab servant entered carrying a tray with coffee and a glass of water. He smiled at her, said something in Arabic, then withdrew. Outside, she heard the endless chant of the young men in the courtyard. Behind those voices was a world of silence as though their praise of God rose into the heavens in total submission to divine will. Never in France, in cathedral, convent or cloister, had she felt the intensity of belief everywhere present in the towns, villages, farms and deserts of this land. It was a force at once inspiring and terrible, a faith with no resemblance to the Christian belief in Mass and sacraments, hellfire and damnation, sin and redemption, penance and forgiveness.
Everything comes from God.
Now, waiting to see if the marabout would come, the sense of peace she had felt in being here was replaced by despair. As of this moment she no longer belonged in the world of Tours, Paris and Compiègne. And yet she must return to it. There was no other choice. For this world of total fervour, of blind resignation, was one she neither could, nor would, wish to enter.
After some time she heard voices in an inner room. Three men wearing the high turbans of marabouts came from that direction, entered the chamber where she was seated, stared at her in silence, then went out into the courtyard where they broke into urgent whispered speech. And then she heard a dragging footstep. Bou-Aziz, leaning as always on the arm of his daughter, came into the room, greeting her with a gentle smile and some words in Arabic which his daughter did not translate. The marabout then sat on the bare floor. His daughter sat beside Emmeline on the folded rug. The marabout spoke again, his eyes on Emmeline, waiting as his daughter translated.
‘My father thanks you for your visit. I have told him what you said and now he asks if you will tell him why you have come here.’
‘Because I am uneasy at what has happened,’ Emmeline said. ‘If I keep silent about the truth of these events, I will be guilty for the rest of my life.’
The marabout nodded and made a whispered response. ‘My father thanks you for that answer. Now, please tell him what you wish to tell.’
On the journey here from Milianah she had rehearsed what she might say but now, the planned words forgotten, she began by telling the secret of the heavy box and the substitution of the false bullets. ‘My husband is a professional entertainer. He is celebrated throughout Europe for his illusions and his inventions. But his feats are the result of scientific skills and endless practice. They are not miracles. In Europe, magicians are not thought to be possessed of supernatural powers but to be skilful deceivers. My husband is the greatest of these and that is why the Emperor sent him here.’
‘And why was he sent?’ the marabout asked.
She hesitated. And then she said it out, telling of Deniau’s belief that greater ‘miracles’ performed by her husband would discredit Bou-Aziz and any claim he might make to be the Mahdi and so buy time until the spring, when Louis Napoleon’s armies would sail from France to complete the conquest of Algeria.
As she spoke, she must pause while Taalith translated. During these pauses she felt herself tremble, her throat dry, her heart beating against the wall of her body. But then when it was time to go on, these weaknesses abated and she spoke, impassioned as never before in her life. When she had finished, again she felt weak and febrile, drained of emotion, as though her confession had not been voluntary but forced from her by some other will.
The marabout leaned towards his daughter and spoke for some time in a half-whisper. Taalith nodded, then said, ‘My father asks if your husband knows that you are here?’
‘No. No one knows.’
‘My father says in that case what you have told him today will remain in this room. It will not be necessary for him to betray your confidence to anyone. He and he alone must decide his course of action. But what you have told him will help him discover God’s will in this matter.’
When Taalith finished speaking the marabout rose and came towards Emmeline, taking
her hands in his, smiling and bowing his head in farewell. He turned and left the room.
Taalith then said, ‘Are you hungry? Do you wish to eat? Would you like to rest for a few hours before returning to Milianah?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I must go back.’
Taalith rose from the folded sack and stretching out her hands drew Emmeline to her, briefly clasping her in an embrace. Emmeline felt under the burnous a body fragile as that of a small bird, soft, yet bony, a body now racked by a hoarse and ominous cough. Taking her hand, Taalith led her through the rooms which gave on to the courtyard. Outside, the circle of praying students finished their chant and at once began again. Emmeline’s horse, reins slack on its neck, stood in the shade of an archway, its tail switching to beat off a cluster of flies. Again Taalith pressed Emmeline in an embrace and stood, small and frail as a child, waving farewell as Emmeline rode out.
Under the implacable sun, on the empty, dusty desert road, Emmeline, confused, feeling, despite Taalith’s embrace, alone and rejected, rode slackly, allowing her horse to slow to a walk. Almost two hours later, when she at last reached Milianah, the Zouave sergeant at the sentry post told her that the luncheon for the sheikhs was almost over. ‘Monsieur Lambert should be back very shortly.’
She went up to her rooms, ordered a tub of bath water and lay soaking in its coolness. What had the marabout meant when he said that no one would know what she had told him? This morning, on her way to the zawiya she had resolved that if she told the truth to Bou-Aziz she would not hide what she had done from Henri. For she knew that while she was acting out of a sense of shame and anger, she was not doing this solely to right an injustice, but also in some way settling scores: with Henri for his callousness in the matter of Jules’ death and with Deniau for the arrogance of treating her like his puppet. But now it seemed possible that this morning’s action, at once the bravest and the most shocking thing she had done in her life, might not bring the anger and retribution she had been prepared to accept. Now, if she hid the truth from Henri, whatever decision the marabout would make might never be blamed on her. But was the marabout to be trusted? It was true that in his presence she had felt that mysterious sense of sainthood, but what did she really know of these people and their beliefs? Their faith was not more spiritual than Christianity, but it was stronger, frightening in its intensity, with a certitude Christianity no longer possessed.
