Jerusalem Commands: Between the Wars Vol. 3

by Michael Moorcock

  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, squat-ling in the sand and humming snatches of Gotterdammerung 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. T
hat 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.

  An intelligent camel is one of God’s greatest gifts. She is everything a man needs in the desert. And if she is beautiful, as my Uncle Tom, she is a perpetual reminder to us that we are no more nor less important in the sight of God than any of His creatures. As God’s creatures we always have some kind of kinship to the beasts - and they to us. The symbiosis, the deep friendship, between Man and animal is as beautiful as any human relationship, and as mutually useful. This is another thing one learns on one’s own in the desert. God does not forbid these things. The Bible abounds with examples of this love between Man and his cousins. Noah would have understood.

  In the desert nothing stands between Man and God save Man’s own self-deceit. Unless you acknowledge God’s dominion, you are destroyed. There are simple parables to be learned in the desert. One loses Self, but one gains the Universe. I pray for all souls, all innocent souls who are slaughtered in War. I pray they find sweet happiness in the presence of Jesus, our Saviour and God, our Father. Let them be released from the terrors and humiliations of this world and all its unjust torments. Let the forces of evil wage war amongst themselves while the Godly remain powerless to affect the cause of peace. What was Munich but the last hope of a good man in an evil world? In the end the British betrayed him.

  Kolya said religion was the last resort of rogues. Of course that can also be true. But what I would sacrifice to live in an age when God was our first resort and the Lord of Peace ruled our hearts and minds!

  I have almost given up hope of the New Jerusalem, as the English call it. Eventually, no doubt, Karl Marx will conquer the world, Sigmund Freud will re-interpret it, Albert Einstein will provide it with suitable physics, Stefan Zweig will give us its history, Israel Zangwill will furnish its literature and we shall no longer remember a time when Christian chivalry might have recreated Eden. Carthago delenda est. I think not!

  A wind brought up burning sand against which I veiled my mouth and eyes, finding it even more difficult to keep to my chosen direction. Her beautiful long lashes and elegant nostrils closed against the razoring wind, Uncle Tom was led up and down the dunes now furious with activity, as if a thousand wakened devils plagued our way. Every so often, through the sighing air, I thought I heard a ghostly Meistersinger or Kundry. I would pause and call, but I was never answered. My exposed skin was flayed. My camels, refusing to move further, folded themselves down into the sand. They would have perished, half-buried, if I had not wrapped their heads in cloth and yelled at them to rise, slashing at them with my whip, pleading with them to think of their own safety as well as mine. Then, unveiled, supremely self-contained, Uncle Tom rose at last to set an example. Soon the camels were placidly following Uncle Tom through the whirling fury of the storm. I think they now accepted that their fate was in God’s hands. There is a Berber saying: The great follow the ways of God. The would-be great follow the ways of Satan. There is considerable truth in this. I came to understand it on the beach at Margate in 1956 when I was, of course, 56 years old. I had just heard the news that the Allied Defence Force had struck to defend a Suez Canal seized by the warlord Nasser. Nasser now has no great support in the Arab world because the Arab wants a just king, not a democracy. Chief of all he wants a successful king he can worship as a manifestation of God on Earth, just as his Sumerian ancestors worshipped their leaders. Unsuccessful leaders, like Abd el-Krim or Raisauli are simply forgotten.

  Krim was first defeated the year I entered the Western Desert. As a result, all the scum who had flocked to his standard were scattered some fifteen hundred miles across the sarira and dunes, surviving by any means they knew. And most of what they knew involved murder and rapine, especially those Kurdish mercenaries who had been the first to flee. Like Trotsky, Krim had found it expedient to murder or betray some of his own lieutenants, to prove his loyalty to the French who sent him to Paris with his loot. But this is Arab politics. It is their culture. Some might say it is our culture, too. But our own half-conscious tribal customs are never entirely clear to us, I suppose.

  The English and Americans always amuse me with their denial that they display such unconscious tribalism. Only true citizens of the world like myself are relatively free of unexamined prejudices. Margate, I sometimes think, was my psychic Waterloo, just as Suez was Dunkirk for the British and the French. It was then I was stunned to realise that the English, after letting Persia seize their oil in 1951, had given up their responsibilities in the Middle East while America had failed to take up the burden. It was the fall of Constantinople all over again.

  Parched, down to a few sips of water and all that remained of a kilo of cocaine, together with a little morphine and hashish, I refused to crack. I would not let madness overtake me as it had my poor friend.

  A day later, as the storm subsided to a few streamers and dust-devils, I thought I heard distant thunder, rolling as it does, through echoing hills. The camels grew alert and joyful. Here was a promise of rain, or at least water. Sayed the Sudanese had told me that thunderstorms often followed sandstorms. Sometimes they coincided. Sometimes rain came. It was unlikely, I reasoned, that it would rain here, in the dunes, but in shaded limestone hills pools sometimes formed. I summoned my energy, sipped the last of my water, touched some cocaine to my raw gums and led my little caravan towards the sound of thunder.

  And there at last, just before sunset, I saw the pale blue horizon broken suddenly by a line of low, rocky hills over which a few wisps of cloud hung, as if glad of any company. I began to shake with joy. I even wept a little, yet was so conscious of losing water that I spread my tears over my face and neck before urging my camels down another dune. The hills were lost from sight, but I had taken their position from the setting sun and would know which way to go as the stars came out.

  So, with sun, stars and God as my infallible guides, I came at last to the Lost Oasis of Zazara. She was neither mirage nor legend. But I was not to drink her waters for many more hours.

  For a second time I heard rattling thunder from the hills but I paused, suddenly suspicious. From the distance I realised I had heard not a storm but a rapid exchange of rifle fire. My heart sank. Ahead of me some tribal conflict was in session. My arrival might,
in time-honoured fashion, make both sides decide to satisfy their honour by burying their differences, killing the stranger and dividing up his goods.

  For this reason I approached the hills as the Bedouin had taught me, making a wide arc until I could be sure that I could reach the hills without myself being easily seen. Frequently I paused to rest and listen, a bullet in my Lee-Enfield’s breech instantly ready to be fired as a warning to anyone who tried to attack. But obviously the warring parties were busy with their immediate dispute and had not noticed me. Every so often the gunfire would rattle again and then there would be silence, doubtless as the combatants licked their wounds and reconsidered their strategy.

  In other circumstances, I would have risked going on, but Zazara was on the Darb al-Haramiya which, all knew, led for thousands of miles back into the Sudan, down into French West Africa, to Chad, to Abyssinia, to Fezzan, Tripolitania, Algeria, Morocco and Rio de Oro. I was at another terminus and could go almost anywhere I wished. My only problem now was how to avoid being robbed and murdered. Once I had taken stock of the terrain I might be able to sneak into the oasis, water my camels, fill my fantasses and get out again while the factions were still occupied with their battle.

  By now half-crazy with thirst, my body having no patience with my mind’s disciplines, I yearned to run into those mumbling hills and seek the water the camels were already trying to sniff.