by Ted Simon
After a week of waiting there is still no mail from London. I cannot bear the inaction any longer. Tomorrow I'll go to the border, right or wrong. An English technician tells me the border is a military one.
'They have very itchy trigger fingers. Shoot first and ask afterwards. Poof! One more Sunday Times man gone.'
I feel as though I'm going to the front, rather than crossing a frontier. Kerim tells me that there are some interesting ruins on the way to Tobruk. 'Roman. Very good.' I decide to take the shortest route to the border and do my tourism on the way back. I am quite convinced that in a few days I shall be back in Benghazi.
The road follows the coast a while and then rises gently into the hills of Cyrenaica. This is the part of the coast closest to Greece and Crete, where the Greeks and Romans gained their first foothold in Africa but I knew little and cared less about antiquity at the time.
The air was fresher and the land more fertile. There were farms all around and many small peasant huts. A man walked out of a hut and, three steps from his threshold, swept his robe up over his hips and squatted in a single, surprisingly graceful movement. Only afterwards did I realize what he had been doing.
'Good God,' I said aloud. 'So close to his own doorstep?'
The way wound among outcroppings of crusty white rock, enfolding pine woods, areas of scrub and gorse, patches of soft springy grass, and streams with reedy banks. The landscape felt familiar and drew me irresistibly. I found a particularly luxurious looking patch of grass shielded from the road by a row of low thorns and set up the tent there. No question, that land felt like mine, and I was entirely at home in it.
The moon was full and I realized for the first time that I had started my journey under a full moon exactly a month before. That night the moon seemed more brilliant than I had ever known it, and night was simply a reflection of day in a silver mirror. I ate and drank and smoked and wrote, doing all those things with great pleasure, and then lay down in the tent convinced that the day was over. As I lay, drowsily waiting for sleep, a male voice drifted across, seeming to come from the road. I heard a dog bark. The voice replied. They were moving along, but instead of fading the voice grew stronger.
By now I was fully awake, trying to locate the position of the intruder and track his movements. Not for the first time I thought how hopelessly vulnerable I was, practically naked and inside this small nylon envelope. For a while there was silence, but I was increasingly nervous for I had heard nothing to suggest that he had moved away. Suddenly the voice broke out again, but very close this time and loud, singing a lusty song. This was too much for me. I scrambled into my clothes and prepared to struggle out of the tent, but as soon as I put my head out, my fears dissolved in astonishment.
I was surrounded by sheep. I looked out on a sea of silver fleece, a hundred animals or more. Not one sound had I heard to mark their approach. Well beyond them, further away than I had thought and perhaps even unaware of my presence, stood two figures.
If everything in that light seemed to be painted in silver, their robes appeared to have been woven of the metal. Their faces were in shadow, but they carried their silver raiment with the majesty of kings. A window flew open on the past, on half-baked impressions left by Bible tales and Christmas carols which I had discounted then as silly fables and superstitions. Such things had no place in the crowded streets and classrooms of my childhood. They were only possible here, under this sky, in this light and on this land. This was Bible country, and on a night like this one could believe.
I walked over to the shepherds and exchanged the Arab greetings I had learned. We could do no more. We smoked a cigarette together peacefully and after ten minutes I returned to the tent and slept.
During the hours before dawn the temperature fell below zero and I woke to find the dew frozen on the ground. The shepherds were still there, and now they were as remarkable for their poverty as they had been for their grandeur. Their faces were ugly and dulled by ignorance. Their robes were transformed from silver cloth to sacking. They were huddled on the ground, miserably cold, two ill-favoured and pathetic peasants gazing in awe at the paraphernalia I was struggling to pack with frozen fingers. I would have made coffee for them, but there was no water left. The contrast between day and night inspired no lofty sentiments in me at the time. It was too cold for that.
I shared my last cigarettes with them and left. At the next town I realized that I was not on the road I had meant to take, but was heading willy-nilly for the antiquities. An hour later I was at Cyrene.
I meant to pay only a token visit. Roman ruins, I felt, were a bit too close to home, and my mind always seemed to be travelling several thousand miles ahead of my body. The entrance to the site was a wonderful gateway of honey-coloured sandstone soaring above me. I entered and found myself in a vast forum, rows of columns reaching out beyond anything I could have imagined possible, and between the columns tantalizing glimpses of more marvels in every direction. I was alone in a great Roman city, certainly the only sightseer there. At one time I saw some robed women in an amphitheatre, but they fled at my approach. I spent the day wandering, entranced, among pools and patios, gymnasia,
temples, and in and out of the homes of ordinary Roman citizens. In one part an Italian archaeologist was involved in restoration with some workmen, but they seemed to belong more to the city's past history than to the present. Later in the afternoon the bubble burst for ten minutes when a party of very superior air force commanders swept round the ruins at the speed of flight, with their uniformed photographer bursting blood vessels to break the record for exposures per minute. He was using flash in that blinding sun which meant that he was only interested in their faces, and I thought that summed up their trip very well, Just faces.
I finished the day on the lower level of the city, with the Mediterranean spread out below me. As the sun itself faded the light seemed to spring out of the stone, and the city glowed before falling back into the night. I knew that these experiences, the shepherds, Cyrene, were striking deep into me, that each day's events seemed to intensify the following day, and yet I had barely grazed the edge of my first continent. At the hotel I ate a meal with two French salesmen taking time off for a side trip. They were pleasant to talk to, informative about Arab deficiencies, but they seemed to me to have left their imaginations at home in Paris. Did I seem as ordinary, as uninspired to them? They were used to Africa, of course. It struck me that everywhere in the world I would meet people to whom being there would be an ordinary, everyday event. Was my journey really nothing more than a state of mind?
I slept out again that night, on the coast just beyond Marsa Susa, and I knew next morning that I would have to reach the border that day. By lunchtime I was already in Tobruk, a dry bone of a city, splintering and powdering in the sun. I met an Irishman in the street. He worked for the 'Aisle' Institute, where he taught English (or Irish) to Libyan oil men. He was earning £500 a month, a fortune in those days, and with his savings he was buying an apartment in Rome, another one in Ancona and a farmhouse in Ireland. He asked me in for lunch with his Italian wife and small children. She hated the Arabs, and said her children couldn't play with their children for fear of catching skin diseases.
T can't say I care for them myself,' said the Irishman. 'They seem to regard all Westerners as exploiters. But it wouldn't be so bad if they didn't treat us like Martians in the streets.' They invited me to sleep there on my way back. I didn't know if I would. I felt rather sorry for them. These were nice people who seemed to have missed the point somewhere, but then I didn't have to live their lives.
I set off with the maximum of nonchalance to do the last seventy-five miles, knowing I couldn't get through, but unable to forget what a fantastic triumph it would be if I did.
The first check-point appeared about an hour before sunset, time for me to get back to Tobruk before dark. There was no gate, only a small portable cabin. The guard looked at my passport, and the sheaf of Arabic documents, extracted
the currency control form and handed the rest back to me with a grin. He slid the barrier back and said 'Bye-bye'. Obviously he was having his little joke. I laughed too, and went on to the real frontier. A small queue of taxis was lined up ahead of me a few miles further on. I joined the queue, but a soldier spotted me and waved me to the front. He took my passport into the office with him and brought it back with the visa cancelled. I began to get very excited and a little alarmed at what might happen when the Egyptians sent me back. Because surely they would send me back. I looked at the visas again, idly, and the ground suddenly seemed to slide away from under me. The Egyptian visa had an extra bit tacked alongside it, reading the wrong way on the page. In all the times I had looked at the passport I had somehow failed to notice it. The message was direct and shattering. It read: 'Access to the U.A.R. via the coast of N. Africa & Salloumis not permitted.' Part of it was almost obscured by the thick border of the principal visa stamp, but even so, if you were looking for it you could not miss it.
Well, either the Libyans had missed it, or they were playing me a sinister trick. There was only one thing for me to do, and that was to go on as though I hadn't seen it either. The gate swung open, and I went through, swallowing hard.
A hundred yards or so further on was something that looked like a railway station, with three platforms, and two tracks for incoming and outgoing traffic, but first came another barrier. Always I was waiting for the hand that would rise before me and bar my way. Again I was waved on.
'You can go through.'
'What? All the way?'
'Yes, you can go.'
The station was in a ferment of activity. The platforms were piled high with mounds of carpets and cushions in plastic bags, being guarded or argued over by men dressed in every kind of robe and headgear and an army of officials in crumpled khaki. I rode straight through it all and out the other side. The guard at the gate there was about to let me through, when a voice shouted: 'No. Stop. Come back please.'
The guard pointed back and mumbled something. I turned to see a small roly-poly man with a shiny unshaven face, smiling at me through his whiskers.
'Come please,' he said. 'We cannot ignore the formalities. Can I see your passport please. You are going to Cairo? Welcome to Egypt. Now we must see the Captain.'
I brought out my newspaper cutting, almost a full page of the Sunday Times with a photograph of me, the bike and all my gear spread out around it. I talked about my journey as though the future of Egypt I
depended on it, and did everything to distract attention from the visa. Even so, I was surprised by the enjoyment it seemed to give them.
T will do everything to help you,' said Roly-Poly. 'Would you like some tea?'
With a glass of clear tea, sweet and delicious, in my hand, feeling like Alice in Wonderland, I confronted the first of the Eight Mandatory Obstacles between me and Egypt. The first man read my visa several times, paying particular attention to the 'No Entry' qualification. He seemed to see nothing there of interest. Number two was the police. They read the visa again, but upside down, and then filled out a small form torn raggedly off a sheet of duplicating paper, having great difficulty with the XRW 964M. Numbers three and four had to do with the papers I had brought from Libya. There were several rapid exchanges of documents, and already I was having difficulty holding on to them all. At one point I lost sight of the first paper from the police.
'Is it important?' asked Roly-Poly.
'Well, I don't know.'
'It is not,' he said firmly. 'Never mind,' and swept me on to change my money at number five, to pay for licensing the bike at number six. Then back to number three for an argument about the customs carnet, and on to number seven where the Libyans discharged it. Finally, in an office well away from the crowd, a police officer sat behind the most venerable set of ledgers I had ever seen. They had been thumbed so often that their corners had been rounded off, and the paper was the colour of the desert. They lay right along the length of his table like blocks of eroded sandstone, and I had no doubt that it was on these that the future of Egypt really depended.
He filled out my carnet and handed me two heavy metal number plates. 'Finished,' he said.
'Finished?' asked Roly-Poly. 'Have you thanked the Captain?' 'I always thank everybody,' I replied, naively. He burst into laughter.
'Now,' he said with special emphasis, 'can I help in any other way?'
I fumbled towards my pocket and then decided against it. Why should I assume he wanted a 'gratuity'? I thanked him sincerely and turned away. His contented expression did not falter.
I went to the bike. I simply could not believe it. My heart had been in my mouth and was still there, pumping hard. I folded all the pieces of paper I had been given into my passport. Because the jacket had no pockets, I laid the passport on top of some waterproof gloves in one of the side boxes. I locked the box. I found some wire and tied both plates on tight at the back of the bike. All the while I was expecting to hear someone shout, 'Hey! You. Just a minute.'
I got on the bike, very deliberately, tickled the carburettor and kicked it over. Then I rode slowly through the gate into the town called Salloum. I delayed the moment of triumph as long as possible. Salloum was small but treacherous in the night. The road was narrow and bad, and there were cows roaming about loose. Ticking like a time bomb I rode downhill through the winding street, and then, abruptly, I was out in the open spaces again and I could hold my ecstasy back no longer.
I roared and sang and jiggled with delight. I was in Egypt, and everything was different, the moon, the stars, the temperature, the smell of the air, all seemed to be subtly Egyptian. It was a wonder I stayed on the bike, I was so pleased with myself, and fully convinced that it had been some special quality I possessed that had achieved the impossible, back in Salloum. It felt like a personal conquest. Now for Cleopatra . . .
So sure I had been that I would not get into Egypt that I had not once considered where I would head for if I did. I had not even thought about petrol. The headlights on the map showed a pump at Sidi Barani, fifty miles along. I seemed to arrive there in no time at all. There was fuel, but nowhere to stay. The town, if there was one, had melted into darkness.
Eighty-five miles to Mersa Matruh. Nothing. I felt I could ride to Cairo if necessary.
Ten miles short of Matruh I saw some painted oil barrels across the road, with a hurricane lamp burning on one of them. Light shone from the doorway of a little hut. I slowed down and a soldier approached me. He laid his left arm across his right wrist and opened his right hand, palm upwards, in the sign that meant: papers!'
I stopped, unlocked the box and brought out the passport. An older man in pyjamas and fez came out of the hut.
'Please wait,' he said. 'It will be ten minutes only.'
I heard a manual telephone cranking and lit a cigarette. After a while a third man came out and got into a black car parked beyond the barrier. As he started the engine and drove off the man in pyjamas hurried over to me.
'Follow that car, please,' he said urgently. 'They will clear you in Matruh if you hurry, but they are just going to close down.'
I was infected by the slight sense of panic and rushed off. The car was doing over seventy miles an hour and I had some difficulty catching it.
Then, for the second time that day, the bowels of the earth slid open beneath me. I reached back with my right hand. The lid of the box had been blown off. Expecting to put the passport back I had not locked it again. I stopped immediately. The wallet had gone. I looked at the mileage indicator. It could have happened anywhere in the last six miles.
The wallet contained driving licences, vaccination certificates, a credit card, photographs, currency and an address book. Losing it seemed like an overwhelming disaster. Two cholera shots, a yellow fever shot and a smallpox vaccination would have to be done again. There were addresses I might never recover. The cash, the credit card, were extra layers of defence stripped away. But how far could I get without
a driving licence?
Slowly I drove back, on the wrong side of the road, searching but numbed by this sudden reverse in my fortunes. I had ridden nearly four hundred miles that day, and the weariness hit me then. I tried to think clearly. The gloves should have been the last objects to fall, and as they were quite bulky I hoped to see them where a black wallet might not show.
For a mile I saw nothing. Then I saw light ahead, and the murmur of engines running. I came across two taxis, one coming, one going, stopped alongside each other with their interior lights on. One driver was in the middle of the road, a tall bearded man in white robe and turban. He stood in the space carved out of the darkness by the car lights, and seemed very much in command of that space. I wanted to stop and ask whether he had seen anything, but he waved me on peremptorily. His hand was raised in a threatening way and he stared at me fiercely. I felt too weak to resist, and rode on.
I went on searching vainly until I got back to the police post. A truck was coming through, and the police commandeered it to help me search in the much brighter illumination of its headlights. After a while I found the lid of the box. Then the truck driver spotted the first glove, and soon after I saw the second one. The wallet should have been between the lid and the gloves. I went up and down several times but found nothing.
I was in a state of despair out of all proportion to the disaster. Weariness, the end of a long day, me alone with the bike at midnight in a strange country at war; that was part of it. From Mark Antony to Charlie Brown in one thoughtless moment. I snatched at the lesson. As always I felt I could endure my tribulations if there was something to be learned from them. Euphoria leads to Thoughtlessness. That's how fortunes are told. So okay. No more mindless chasing after cars. Is that all?
