The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  They were safe in the crowds. The press held him up. To the clack of mallets and music he drifted off into reverie.

  Here in Cairo they are specialists in wasting time, he thought. In retrospect the games and stories of the night revolted him. He remembered Emmanuel saying to him, ‘In the eastern lands the heat and the idleness breeds among their inhabitants leisured and lethal fantasies.’ All of a sudden he realized what was odd about the figure lying in the grass in the Dawadar’s garden. It was dead. And what was familiar. It was Emmanuel.

  Then he stood alone in Bayn al-Qasreyn. He was surrounded by the crowd, but the crowd slept. Its million eyes were closed. The crowd slept standing, kneeling and sitting. Cairo had stopped. Even the drop of water falling from the water-seller’s jar hung in the air, suspended by lethargy. Balian gave the water-seller a nudge. The man stirred uneasily in his sleep and murmured something, but he stayed asleep. Balian moved through the slumberous avenue and falling light, tiptoeing lest he disturb the sleeping throng, heading towards the Citadel. Nothing disturbed them. Crossed pikes, held by nerveless hands, barred the gates of the Citadel and Balian pushed his way past them. At the summit he looked back and saw the city suspended between one act and the next in timeless catatonia. He advanced to the throne room. In the throne room the abandoned postures of the courtiers proclaimed to the creeping Englishman the vulgarity of sleep, defenceless and ignorant.

  He tiptoed up to the throne and reached for the crown on Qaitbay’s head, intending to take it for himself, when a voice of thunder reverberated through the somnolent halls: it’s all mine now!’

  And a giant hairy hand reached for him, swept him off his feet and raised him over the Citadel. Balian found himself gazing up at the eyes of the Ape of Melancholy.

  ‘Now you have seen them all asleep,’ it said. ‘They aged without maturing. They wanted to laugh and I made them laugh, but they were a futile people.’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘Were. ’ The hairy hand set him down on a dusty and ruined road. ‘While you idled your time away with enchanted dreams and stories and they slept, millions of years have passed and Cairo has died. Shall these stones speak?’

  Balian shook his head mutely.

  ‘The stones will speak.’ The guttural voice reverberated in the desolation. ‘Nothing has been utterly destroyed. If you will dig deeply enough, you shall discover the origins of Cairo’s millennial hysteria. A city is like a mind. The sources of its fall are detectable in past images and words, fragments of columns and half-effaced inscriptions. If you will dig, you shall discover the roads that turn in upon themselves, stone basilisks and gorgons and, everywhere, the arabesque—crystalline patterns of stucco foliage, organic life turning to death—creeping over the buildings like poison ivy. Here the ruins and the causes of those ruins coexist.’

  Balian, walking on the dusty horizon, felt panic. ‘I want to go back.’

  ‘Of course you shall.’

  And so he did, up from the level of the Ape to encounter yet again the sleep-walking funambulist, Karagoz, Shikk and Saatih, Barfi and Ladoo and, finally, Zuleyka. To Zuleyka he observed, ‘All my terrors come from never knowing where I shall wake up.’

  He awoke in the cellar. Blood marked the end of his passage like a red full-stop.

  ‘—determined that if he could not have him, then nobody should, the magician cast the severed limbs of the boy over the Sultan’s battlements.’ His mouth now ringed with white foam, Yoll was still talking, but it was Cornu’s re-entry into the cellar that had awoken Balian. Cornu’s scabbed white fingers rested with apparent affection round Yoll’s neck. Then they squeezed. Like a rabbit hypnotized by fear, Balian watched Yoll’s strangulation. The eyes stared and the face turned blue. He would have gone to Yoll’s rescue but, seeing that Bulbul and the friar did nothing, he did nothing too.

  When it was all over Cornu faced Balian challengingly. ‘I had to do it. He was a sick animal, truly he was. The Ape had him, and the Ape is the creature of the Father of Cats.’

  From under his hood the friar winked at Balian. Balian was too shocked to respond.

  ‘This time he would have talked himself to death,’ Cornu continued, ‘and held you with him in his thrall, but I have work for you all. The time is imminent. “Watch ye therefore; for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at eve or at midnight, or at the cock crowing or in the morning.” ’

  ‘You have work for me?’

  The fierce eyes regarded Balian. ‘In a sense. I wish you to go to the Father of Cats and submit yourself to his treatment. ’

  ‘I don’t want to go back there.’

  ‘You hardly have any choice. Sooner or later the Father or Vane will catch you. The hunt is up. You may tell the Father of Cats that we have examined you and set you free; that may give him something to think about.’

  The friar was laying out Yoll. Bulbul continued to write. Balian climbed out of the cellar’s darkness into twilight. It was deep night by the time his escort brought him to the House of Sleep. He knocked on the door as loudly as he could, grazing his knuckles, and, since no one answered his knocking, fell to sleep at its foot. The escort left him lying there.

  19

  The Treasures of Cairo

  I wish that the Leper Knight had minded what he was about when he strangled me. It is a maxim among the Qasasyoon that dead men tell no tales and it is unfortunately true that the death of the narrator in the midst of his own narration poses special problems. No one has ever challenged the ruling of the Qasasyoon on this point. Death disqualifies a man from membership of the Guild.

  To return to what I was saying when I began this whole story (and I did not intend it to be the story of my death), of late, when I have retired to bed early to read and then to sleep, unaccountable fears have kept me awake. Unaccountable but not indescribable—and in retrospect not so very unaccountable. Now I shall describe the fantasy that held me red-eyed and sleepless on my couch. It was as follows.

  The lids grow heavy, the head falls back, the dull book falls from my grasp, the eyes close. The breathing settles into a slow deep rhythm—and then seemingly stops. In the morning when I do not rise at my accustomed hour (usually the cry of the dawn muezzin wakes me) some anxious friend like Bulbul or, more likely, my sister Mary enters and tries to rouse me, shakes me and, finding that I do not respond, listens to my heart and then to my breathing. Both seem to have stopped. The first cry goes out and my face is wet with someone else’s tears. Then the ululations of mourning, the funerary rituals, the huddled group looking down on my shrouded figure. Handfuls of dust are cast upon my body, then spadefuls. The sun disappears.

  And only now do I awake and feel the weight of the damp earth pressing upon me. Yes. Buried alive! My screams are muffled in the intense confinement of the space. My bloody hands burst free from the winding cloth and claw at the earth with their nails. Oh, who is the man who, envisaging all this, can resign himself to sleep easily? And where is the man who has received a sure guarantee that he will not awaken thus?

  Who, indeed, has a guarantee that he will awake at all? That idle phrase ‘he passed away easily in his sleep’... Closely contemplated, what could be more terrifying than to die from sleep, to die without being conscious of it? But these are deep matters. What I wished to say was that a vividly conceived and morbid fantasy led me to cling to wakefulness. Sometimes whole nights would pass in the company of these imaginings, so that I would rise and leave the house even before the call of the muezzin cut the dawn, and I would walk to the Zuweyla Gate, where I would join the Persians for their first breakfast.

  More, it was in the insomniac darkness before the dawn that I meditated on further schemes to instruct my audience—a warning about the dangers of wet dreams, a debate on whether it would be better to have the Arabian Nightmare and not know it or on the other hand to be dead and know it, a visit to Cairo’s unique and revolutionary poultry farm, a presentation of Yoll’s Great Touchstone—the possibilities seemed
endless. Concluded now. Who could have seen that my most morbid and far-fetched fantasy would come true? Not I, certainly. Ifeared but I did not believe my fears. Almost true. I find some consolation in the fact that strangulation, not sleep, preceded my passage to the grave.

  But I digress. Inevitably I am somewhat distracted by my end. The story, though, is not yet concluded. Patience. Patience comes from God; haste comes from Iblis, the Devil. The man who is in a hurry will miss the treasures that Cairo contains...

  The Father of Cats had gone out that night to the great open space before the Zuweyla Gate. There he had waited for hour after hour. Some time before dawn the temperature dropped sharply, and the entertainers abandoned their booths to gather round a communal bonfire. In the intense cold the steamy breath issued out of their mouths like dead souls. They watched the Father of Cats with an impassivity verging on hostility. Conjurors can never feel anything but mistrust for a magician. The Father of Cats stamped around in circles, trying to keep himself warm.

  At last the black man appeared. Habash was not running any more but staggered dispiritedly towards his cage. As he approached, the Father noted that a patch of his head was darkly matted with blood. He observed also that although Habash was muzzy and confused, he was no longer dreaming. Above all, he saw with delight that Habash carried a book in his hand. The Father smiled benignly.

  ‘I see that you have returned battered but triumphant.’ He hesitated. Habash had ignored his congratulations and pushed past into the cage. He flopped down on to the straw. Disorientated and drained of all energy, he looked thankful to be in a cage again. The Father followed him in anxiously.

  ‘What happened? Who attacked you? Where did you find the book?’

  ‘I am not sure. It is difficult to remember. I was running through the city looking for your book. An old woman waylaid me and promised me the book if I would do as she said. She led me into a garden. There was a lady, who said that I should sleep with her, and an ape...’

  ‘Ah no, not the ape and the lady in the garden again! But at least you have the book...’

  The Father of Cats prised the tightly sewn manuscript volume from Habash’s grip. Something odd about it caught his eye. Incredulously the Father read the dedication on the back: ‘This treatise is humbly offered by his Excellency the Dawadar to the Sultan of Sultans, Qaitbay, in the hope that he who rules over the lands of Egypt and Syria and over the hearts and eyes of his subjects with his silver hairs and ageless beauty will... ’ The Father of Cats turned to the front of the book to read its title, The Key of Embellishment and the Way of Adornment for the Slaves of the Sultan and the Swords of the Faith.

  ‘You idiot! This is not the book.’

  ‘How should I know that? I can’t read.’

  ‘Something has gone wrong. What has gone wrong? We must find out what has gone wrong. You must have another drink and sleep again.’

  Habash eyed the cup dubiously.

  ‘Don’t be afraid. I’ll only question you this time.’

  Habash drank and lay back. Meanwhile the Father threw up his hands in stagey despair and declaimed, as if he were intent upon impressing invisible powers, ‘I have been thwarted, but I’ll find it somehow!’

  Habash slept, and as his sleep deepened his breathing became stertorous. It was time to begin the questioning.

  ‘Is there a spirit of the Alam al-Mithal who is ready to speak and answer my questions through the lips of this poor benighted slave of mine?’

  ‘I am. ’ The voice was so faint that the Father had to put his ear almost to Habash’s lips.

  ‘Tell me then who took my book?’

  ‘If dreams wished themselves to be remembered, they would be remembered. If they wished to be understood, they would be understood. The book has been reabsorbed into the Alam al-Mithal. It has ceased to be a book about the dream and has become a dream about the book. Such is paradoxical sleep.’

  ‘But I wrote the book!’

  ‘It was dictated to you in seances. With automatic hand you transcribed the whisperings of the Alam al-Mithal. We study those who study us and we take back what is rightfully ours.’

  ‘My book! My life’s work!’ The Father wrung his hands. ‘You fraud! You bluffer! Your schemes run deeper than that.’

  The Father ceased wringing his hands and the voice continued. ‘The Chinese box too will be reabsorbed ultimately. You are like your cats. They like to bury their excretions. You hide and hoard your treasures in the House of Sleep, but all are vulnerable. In fact, even at this very moment thieves have entered the House of Sleep. I suggest that you drop this matter of the book and hurry home now to save what you may.’

  ‘I thank you, and may I ask to whom I am indebted for this advice?’

  ‘Why don’t you enter the Alam al-Mithal and find out?’

  The stertorous breathing stopped and Habash dropped into a softer, natural sleep. The Father turned and hurried away.

  A ragged figure lay sleeping across the entrance to the House of Sleep. The Father of Cats turned the body away from the doorway with his foot and hurried in, full of uncertain anticipations.

  Earlier that night Barfi and Ladoo had come over the roofs into the House of Sleep. They presented a curious appearance, having oiled their bodies and then coated the surfaces with dust before they set out. Even then, in the small hours of the night, there was a considerable amount of activity in the place: gongs sounded; slaves with torches passed from one level to another; two cats were fighting in the courtyard. Barfi and Ladoo looked down on it all with some dismay. At least in the night, however, they had some chance of shrinking into some dark corner where the torches could not penetrate. Having reached the edge of the roof, they swung themselves over and down into the upper cloister.

  Suddenly everything was silent. The cats’ fight ended in a flurry of screeching; the tremor of the gongs died; and the slaves disappeared into the cellar. No, almost silent. There was the stridulation of the crickets and both Barfi and Ladoo wondering if it was the other’s heart that he could hear beating. There was no moon and only the faintest glimmer of dawn light. Holding hands, they edged their way through the darkness. The geography of the house was mysterious. Barfi tugged at the latch and eased the first of the doors open. In an instant the adventure seemed over. Something hit him in the face, the door swung back with a thud and there was a furious scrabbling in the corner. But for an instant only. They had disturbed a bird trapped in the room. Barfi turned back and pulled the door shut on the otherwise empty room. Then they could hardly hear the flutter of its wings and soon even that faint noise ceased abruptly. That first room was the worst. In one of the other rooms a man lay asleep wrapped up in a carpet. Otherwise the rooms were empty save for boxes of jumble and the odd heap of bedding. It would be necessary to extend the range of their explorations.

  It was a cardinal principle with Ladoo that they would discover treasure when they least expected it. He therefore devoutly tried to empty his mind of all expectations, and as he crept and fumbled his way in the dark hunting for treasure he tried not to think of treasure. The mental gymnastics involved took his mind off the terrors of the house to some extent. But still he trembled, even though at times he was so successful in his programme of unawareness that, in the midst of ransacking a chest, he would pause and struggle to remember what it was that he thought he was doing there.

  Barfi’s thinking was similar, though transposed into a different key. If finding treasure was simply a matter of random searching, then any fool could find hidden treasure. Barfi had observed, however, that the public places of the city were filled with hungry fools. Thought was therefore necessary. Now, treasure would not be hidden in the least likely place in the house, for, as Barfi realized, the least likely was in a sense the most likely. So treasure hunters as cunning as himself, having rejected the least likely place, would turn their thoughts to the second least likely place. So a man as cunning as the Father of Cats would avoid such an obvious spot also. On the
same grounds he would avoid the third least likely spot. Fearing cunning and astute men, as he and Ladoo undoubtedly were, the Father of Cats would, stage by stage, be reduced to hiding his treasure in the most obvious place of all—which was in a sense the least obvious place. Or was it? So Barfi, as he searched the rooms with Ladoo, was filled with similarly profitable thoughts.

  Occasionally they conferred in whispers, whispers so soft that they could hardly hear one another. This was rarely to exchange sensible suggestions and more often to raise some new image of fear that had occurred to one or the other. Ladoo looked for he knew not what and Barfi searched in places he considered neither particularly likely nor unlikely. Barfi imagined that in the next big chest that they opened they would find the Father of Cats hunched, glaring up at them with accusing eyes. Ladoo was scared witless at the thought of putting his hand unawares on one of the cats that he knew swarmed in the house. Yet the search continued. Such is the power of the dream of money.

  Into another room: a splintered box and dust-covered rags lay across the floor. Barfi and Ladoo eyed the debris with hope. Vane’s skill and luck as a tomb robber was famous throughout Cairo.

  ‘A sarcophagus from the days of the idolatrous Egyptians—and look,’ pointing to the shrivelled human form partly buried by the wood, ‘a corpse!’

  ‘There is money for us in this body. It is soaked in jew’s pitch. ’ They prodded it gingerly. ‘This where mummy powder comes from. We can sell it.’

  ‘Are you telling me that these disgusting remains will fetch a high price?’

  ‘Yes, such things are highly prized by the apothecaries. The jew’s pitch dries round the body and its varnish preserves the liquors of life within the body. It is eaten by those who can afford it, to extend their life and for their health generally.’