The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  The pyramids are on the edge of the city and from our hotel balcony their peaks cut through the urban horizon of the industrial suburb of Giza. I felt betrayed that this preview had stolen their mystery. These sacred wardens of the greatest Pharaohs seemed reduced to sandcastles. Nevertheless, go west towards a setting sun, turn your back to the grime and the tourist tack, hire a horse or a camel and approach them over a dune and the mystery is restored.

  Luxor had been our particular goal but Saudis, Japanese and others with more time to plan had filled all the planes, so Alexandria was second best. Advised to reserve train seats I selected a taxi driver from a clammering throng for his ability to understand the word ‘railway station’. Unfortunately, I had assumed that this multilingual capability would mean that he could read as well. I was mistaken; his eagerness to help simply added to the confusion. The railway tickets were about the size of a postcard, nicely designed in several pastel colours. The essential information was naturally in Arabic and to check departure time, carriage and seat number, no smoking etc. the comic gestures on both sides of the plate glass window emphasised the patience of an Egyptian and the thespian ambitions of an Englishman.

  The 0805 Turborini sped due north along rails arrow straight and across land pancake flat, parallel to a dual carriageway and beside fields of alfalfa, carrots and cabbages. There were bullocks, egrets, donkeys working irrigation wheels and huddles of breeze block farms each with flat roofs piled high with dried maize, papyrus, hay and sugar cane. Magpies fidgeted about the landscape and an unstable confetti of gulls whitened the furrowed ground. On board, the service of coffee was a local art form. Nescafé, powdered milk and sugar in equal proportions are whisked with a drop of water in a glass until creamy; filled to the brim with boiling water, this is then handed to the passenger who is left to juggle the scalding glass from hand to hand. In the town, the ritual is quite different; finely powdered coffee, cardamom, sugar and water are prepared to a consistency only slightly more viscous than treacle and then poured shoulder high into a thimble. Two of these sipped slowly produce a sleep-defeating buzz and a spring-in-the-step nirvana that brings energy for three more mosques and a carpet factory.

  Alexandria had nothing to offer of its romantic past. Even the Hotel Cecil and Café Pastrudis were uncompromisingly furnished with plastic pastiche. Lawrence Durrell placed Justine here, of course.

  ‘A city shared by five races, five languages and a dozen creeds. Five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar.’

  Now, one race, one language, one creed and a monoglot metropolis. But to the west there is one of the most eccentric restaurants of the Mediterranean. Fight your way through the grime and clatter of marine workshops, chandlery, anchor chains, vast bales of cotton and belching diesel lorries and there suddenly appears a castle. Bannered, battlemented with plaster knights, concrete cannons and a menagerie of stuffed monkeys, owls, flamingos and turtles, it is modestly called ‘Seagull’. Inside, many rooms cater for 1,000 customers amongst an extraordinary array of objects d’art, brocante, trivia, ephemera and the flotsam and jetsam gathered from the past elegance of a city now lost to the stuccoed drabness of countless identical high-rise blocks, rented to Cairenes seeking summer breezes. It is amusing, decorative and original but for a moment I found it disturbing. I heard the mocking voices of Justine, Clea, Olivia et al, and saw a figure in spats and patent leather wince at his domesticity displayed as a carnival and his personal possessions stripped of intimacy. There were whispers from an elaborate Victorian armoire, a hiss of ‘shame’ from a sepia portrait. Fortunately this nostalgic discomfort was given a sharp shove by the arrival of numerous salads – baby spiced aubergine, tahina, glutinous rice, chilli-hot okra and cucumber-cool yoghurt and then there was confusion as we were given a piece of paper with an Arabic numeral while an arm beckoned us to follow. Leaving the paper on the table, it was given back; we smiled, nodded and replaced it. After two more attempts, it was picked up by a patient waiter who led us from the dining room. Suddenly a saviour with soft and perfect English came to rescue us.

  “There is no menu, just fish – whatever has been caught in the last few hours. Please give your table number.”

  We chose from heads of sea bass, mullet and sardines that poked up through crushed ice like a Stargazy Pie; there were also octopus, calamari and shrimps.

  “Perhaps grilled on charcoal with garlic and a few spices?”

  Washed down with Stella beer, juices scooped up with warm pitta bread, that was reality. We left past parrots and pelicans, Nubians, Saracens and Mamelukes. At the road, a backward glance seemed to catch a slight figure in starched collar sipping from one of those thimbles of coffee and then a sixteen wheeler loaded with pig iron thundered by and a taxi had us in its sights.

  Weekend in Palm Beach

  February 1995

  ‘I did not understand the term ‘terminal illness’ until I saw Heathrow for myself’

  – Dennis Potter

  For a town as photogenic as Palm Beach – an oasis of respectability 100 miles (160kms) north of Miami – it is surprisingly difficult to find a picture postcard. With azure sea, palm trees, pelicans, elegant architecture and inhabitants, hedges trimmed to set square perfection and streets so spick and span one doubts if anybody has dropped a raspberry ripple or tossed an empty Budweiser in fifty years, a carousel of gorgeous views might be expected on every corner. But Palm Beach is as close to reality as Kubla Khan. Its main shopping street, Worth Avenue, is aptly named – unless you know how much you are worth there is nothing you are likely to be able to afford.

  However, there is an exception in The Church Mouse, the charity shop run by the Episcopalian Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea. Here Palm Beach bric-a-brac and cast-offs start at a price that most of us would consider appropriate for an heirloom and car spaces beside the shop are ‘Reserved for Donors’; I thought I had uncovered an illicit trade in spare parts for the aging population. Inside Betsy Mitzer, groomed and cool in crisp linen, explained, “We really prefer a good name on our clothes and anything for the home needs to be perfect. Items are often brought in by maids – they have little use for a designer cocktail dress.”

  The Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea is solid, anglo-saxon and turreted. It could well have been brought stone by hand-crafted stone from a shire county and bears an uncanny resemblance to St. Mary’s at Frinton-on-Sea. But while St. Mary’s had the tang of salt and mansion polish, the comfort of dusty corners and thistles in the graveyard, B-by-the-S was clinically litter free, close cropped, clean and orderly. Inside it was cool and a bronze plaque gratefully recorded the benefactor who donated the air conditioning. I was grateful too, as I was going to a wedding there and felt uncomfortable as I arrived in my city suit of winter weight worsted avoiding pony-tailed, satin-shorted roller-skaters weaving between the zimmers. The service had the familiarity of the James I edition but the ritual was different. Groomsmen, cravated and close cropped to a man, lifted a left elbow to escort each female down the aisle. I had a card that said ‘Pew 4 North’ and concerned that I might get the elbow treatment too, I crept down the aisle in the wake of a dinner-jacketed video operator taking a panoramic shot of the Gothic arches and stained glass. After a procession of groomsmen, bridesmaids, flower girls and ring bearer each proceeding singly to form a sort of matrimonial wall of grey morning coat and cream seersucker, things got underway with a baritone solo. Half an hour later, hymnless and sermonless, we were squinting in the bright sunlight with a radiant, newly married couple anxious to get on with the fun and swig down Mimosas in the swankiest, most restrictive establishment of all the Southern states, The Everglades Club. In this WASP enclave, my hosts, a prominent local lawyer and his fourth generation Floridian wife, had scored a notable first by inviting a prominent local lawyer and his fourth generation Floridian wife; but they were black. Never before had this colour bar been breached. Not for nothing was Florida the last state to allow a coloured defendant a def
ence counsel in Belafonte v the State of Florida in 1936.

  The Everglades Club lies at one end of Worth Avenue in dignified hacienda style, faced with coral blocks and clad in bougainvillea and poinsettia taking up 200 ft (60m) of some of the most expensive frontage in the world. Half the length of Bond Street, the Avenue starts at the ocean end with Cartier, Givenchy and Chanel and goes up from there. It stops at the Intracoastal Waterway where the marine equivalent of Lear Jet and Gulfstream float serenely indifferent to fishermen on the far side and poor side who are dangling a line for a supper supplement. These leviathans of gleaming white, trimmed with stainless steel and teak, rest on the swell, tied to land with umbilical cords of water, electricity, cable TV and fibre optics. Purposeful young men and women, uniformly bronzed and clad in well pressed cotton, daily polish inside and out in case the owner has a whim for salt and sea breeze.

  Some of these smoothies (those of steel and teak) are supreme examples of marine engineering. ‘The Other Woman’, taking up 145 feet (45m) of the marina, carried aft two motor yachts of seemingly ocean going capabilities. Hank Zwarse (I got him to write it down), the Lacoste clad, just-missed-the-America-Cup-trials, Ring-of-Confidence crew member arranging the potted philodendron at the bottom of the gang plank, told me that the cost of this opulence was $45m; enough to fill a decent sized cargo ship with rice and bound for Somalia.

  Turn towards the land and things are only a little more real. Police cars honk like pelicans (sirens would offend), rubbish bins are hidden in clipped hibiscus and aged skin is stretched as far as ambitions for youthfulness will allow. Tiffany’s has a mid-season sale (eighteen carat Snoopy brooches are on special offer) and The Banana Republic has cotton chinos down to $60. But there is not a black skin nor a coloured postcard in sight.

  Nambia and Botswana

  August 1995

  ‘Tourists know where they have been; travellers don’t know where they are going’

  – Paul Theroux

  There is only one corner on the 250 mile (400kms) single-track, dirt road across the Namibian Desert and I missed it. In an instant of terrible confusion stones rained on glass, rubber burnt, metal was forced against metal in teeth-aching desperation, and there was the clear-headedness that comes with adrenaline, pressure pumped by fear and then a huge, all-enveloping and total silence.

  We were alive and alone with a wreck of a car in a landscape stony and desolate to every horizon, under a sky where the evening star was already bright and with a temperature that would drop to freezing within the hour. Here were a father and daughter, two Capricornians, bizarrely stranded within a mile of the Tropic of Capricorn (we had passed the rusted sign a few minutes before), wondering at the clarity of the stars and thankful for the mercy of God. We lost no time in unpacking our bags and wearing everything they contained – three pairs of trousers, six shirts, a sweater and a sun hat. Then we divided a banana and three digestives for supper.

  Near to midnight there was a glint in the mirror from a small beam of light that rose and dipped as a vehicle approached down the undulating road like a lifeboat’s masthead in heavy seas. Suddenly it crested a brow, turned the fatal corner and lit up our two waving figures. A small rusty truck slowed to look, passed, stopped and reversed. From the cab stepped a swarthy, dungareed middle-aged man.

  “You have a problem?”

  His thick German accent could have been Gabriel’s. He took in the smashed windscreen, two tyres shredded on their rims and a radiator hanging loose.

  “You are British? Empty the car, put your luggage in the back and climb in the cab with Suzie while I find the spare wheel.”

  Suzie? We could see no one; a granddaughter perhaps? I opened the cab door and there was Suzie. The Germans breed Rottweilers, the Asians the Aveda and the Americans the bull mastiff; by some quirk of immigration and genetics, Suzie was a close cousin of them all. The wet lips of this huge hound were drawn back and quivering, her canines moist, her tongue glistening and her brown and bloodshot eyes were bright with anticipation as they stared straight into mine. She leapt at my shoulders, floored me in the dust and pinned me with paws the size of dinner plates. As she opened her mouth I gazed at rows of yellow teeth vanishing into a dark throat from which came a warm sticky breath, like wind blowing over the fires of Gehenna. Then, pausing only to ensure I was secured beneath her fourteen stone, her colossal tongue gave my face a wet and welcoming wash.

  The journey to Walvis Bay was reassuring to the mind but retributive to the body with Suzie grumpy at two strangers sharing her berth. Constant grunts, heaves, bad breath and worse from the other end had trimmed our gratitude to this slobbering mastiff. Hans, our saviour, said little but performed like a saint as he took us to his house that sat on the shoreline. In the garden, weird shapes of sinuous driftwood cast shadows in the moonlight and seemed like the roots of a giant tree; I expected a Hobbit or two to appear. Instead, there came round the corner an attractive woman wearing a green skirt, a red jacket and blonde plaits that reached almost to her waist. She was followed by a seal.

  Heidi had been crushing nuts for the apfelstrudel to be sold in her bakery the next day. The seal had been rescued as a pup, abandoned in the huge Cape Cross grey seal colony nearby and left to die with a badly damaged eye. It now had a home in a rock pool made by Hans and, as a treat from its fishy diet, had grown fond of pastry. While Heidi kneaded her dough and Hans sang lieder in the bath we listened to breakers pounding the West African coast, smelt the cinnamon and spices and regarded a one-eyed seal finishing an apple pie.

  The morning, made damp and grey by a saturating sea mist, later disclosed a clean, tidy, balconied, clap-boarded town of parallel streets, dapper people, cafés called Edelweiss or Schwartz Moran and shops selling Bavarian lager. Miles of flat sand with holiday cabins placed at precise intervals showed the attractions that summer would bring to breeze-seeking holiday makers from Windhoek and South Africa. At Cape Cross, the colony of 10,000 grey seals clamouring and grunting in an ammonia-stenched air attracted day sightseers and inland, the lead mines and railway museum of a previous colonising century appealed to those tourists who lasted into week two.

  Shamefaced we told our sad tale to the car hire people and endured their reproofs.

  “You left it where?”

  “It’s probably had its engine stolen by now.”

  “That’s the straightest road in Namibia.”

  But by the next day the little Golf had been rescued, re-tyred, patched up and cleaned up. After sending whisky to Hans and biscuits to Suzie, we set off at a more cautious pace with strudel and bratwurst in our tucker bag and a case of Becks in the boot.

  At the end of its journey from the highlands of Angola, the Okavango River (the third longest in Africa) comes to rest in myriad tributaries in northern Botswana forming the largest inland delta on earth. Where the river dies in the desert, a paradise is born. The intervening 50,000 islands, lush with palm, acacia, sausage tree and wild sage, host a huge animal population in search of food and water in the dry African winter. Along the streams and broader channels fringed with reed and the feathery heads of papyrus, birds continually fish and forage.

  “Stop that baboon, it’s nicked my knickers!”

  If you are travelling light (one worn, one washing, one waiting) and staying in the tree house of Oddballs Camp in the Okavango Delta, baboons are public enemy number one. Returning after a morning’s excursion we found our bags unpacked, our clothes scattered and the bed clothes more rumpled than an energetic Casanova could have achieved. Here was the realisation of childhood dreams 40 ft (12m) up a biloba tree, reed thatched and oil lamped with a few sticks of furniture and a huge bed. To the Swiss Family Robinson this would have been the Presidential Suite since the remainder of the camp simply offered a patch of ground in a grove of fig trees on which to pitch a tent. We were woken by the light of the dawn, the cry of a mockingbird and the squeals of excitement as a warthog mother and her four babies rootled around the base of this l
ofty hotel room. Nearby was a bar with a range of bottles that would rival The Ritz (no filter cigarettes since filters do not biodegrade), a levered machine for squashing cans and a large black cat. Next door, the kitchen produced tasty food cooked over charcoal, with fresh bread baked in a clay oven.

  Oddballs had a sister camp – Delta, separated by half a mile of grassland and served by the same airstrip. After two nights at Oddballs, having been double booked with a German lady with a vast bust, a bark of a voice and a worse temper, we were offered the luxury of the much more expensive Delta establishment which we grateful accepted. Ungenerously, we hoped that the baboons would make a special raid on the Wagnerian hausfrau.

  At Delta there were eight individual chalets of stout timber and reed walls, each with jumbo sized beds, cool linen (hot water bottles on request) and hot showers – my soap rested on a bleached kudu shoulder blade. Each new guest was made welcome by Bob, black, portly, with a watermelon smile under a Rajput moustache and Binky, the manager for four years, who presided over the whole establishment with the easy charm of a hostess at a country house party. Drinks were on a help yourself basis, dinner was around a great table of polished mahogany railway sleepers and on the sideboard there were jars labelled ‘Coffee’, ‘Earl Grey’ and ‘Birdseed’.

  A night in the bush was offered and we eagerly accepted this. Others were similarly setting off and we scoffed at the amount and range of equipment they drew from the store. Mattresses, pillows, stools, kerosene stoves and lights, canvas basins and mountains of blankets. We needed none of this excessiveness; the British know a thing or two about expeditions and a tent, a couple of tins of beans and a packet of biscuits would suffice. At dusk our mokoro poler cooked up an appetising meal for himself as we opened our cold beans and by midnight the cold had so chilled the day’s warm earth that we spent the remaining miserable hours clasped together like foetal twins as we sought each other’s heat.