by Gavin Young
Before we parted, Captain Musa gave me his address in Alexandria. ‘If you’re here again, please phone. Or if you need something…. We sail again in three days, back to Beirut and Limassol, the old round.’
It wasn’t his fault, the anarchy of Al Anoud. I don’t know where he is now. Perhaps he has gone to some better ship, or perhaps he is still with Al Anoud, holding the rais responsible, coping with the stabbings and slamming ragged cut-throats into irons. His employers might not like his frankness, so I have changed his name here, I don’t want to get him into trouble; he’s a good man.
*
By six thirty, we idled motionless among twenty-three other ships outside Alexandria harbour. The sea was a dingy grey, and the sun cast spokes of light between low, blackish clouds. It was quite cool.
By six forty-five Al Anoud began to move at a snail’s pace, jettisoning rubbish, cartons, cans, crates, rags, bits of food and paper to the seagulls’ delight. For a while the city was simply a long thicket of cranes, a silo, an oil flare, a cement factory and, beyond, the low outline of what is still a low-rise city. Soon the black and white light tower of Ras el Tin appeared and, inside it, Ras el Tin Palace, once King Farouk’s, basking in the fitful sun like an elaborate sand castle. Near the palace lay Farouk’s yacht, the Mahrousa, that sailed him into exile, distinguished by its desert-yellow funnel and sleek, pompous lines of forty years ago. A few submarines, a frigate.
We swung across the bows of a Greek freighter, the Aliakman Light, and began to trail a white Soviet cruise ship with red funnel and yellow hammer and sickle. The pilot came aboard, cautiously feeling his way along the ship’s rail. On his launch, the paint peeling, its canvas awning stained by sea and salt and rust, the helmsman raised both palms to the Al Anoud’s bridge and shouted, ‘Ma Salaama!’ then swung the wheel so that the launch veered away. ‘Sura’a kamila b’il amam!’ from the wheelhouse: ‘Full ahead’ for Alex.
*
By 11.00 a.m. I am in the centre of a milling mob in the vehicle hold of Al Anoud just behind the ramp down which we are to disembark. We wait like marines in a landing craft about to storm a beach. But the ramp is stuck. ‘Nezelu!’ the chief officer is yelling furiously. ‘Down with it!’ The heat is almost unbearable, and the hold is like the foul-aired belly of a sea monster. My metal suitcase seems about to tear my arm from its socket; it is hard to hold because of the sweat on my palms. The exasperated immigration officers who have done their duty aboard and want to return to Alexandrian docks begin to use elbows and feet to clear a path to the front. Around me, gap-toothed mouths reeking of beer scream, ‘Your mother’s c – – –!’ and ‘Up your arse!’ Over the heads of the mob Russian tourists on the rail of the ship that has berthed ahead of us point down at the amazing spectacle of Al Anoud preparing to disembark her mad mob of passengers. Most people around me seem to be carrying a hundredweight of baggage on their heads. ‘Pimp!’ a furious man yells at someone with a crate who lurches into him on the metal deck, which is slippery with oil and spilled packets of smuggled cigarettes. The last individual action I witness is that of a man in a turban furtively folding the metal top of a cigarette tin into a makeshift knife and stowing it away in the waistband of his trousers.
At last the ramp drops onto the quay with the noise of a bomb in a metal vault, and the howling human flood bursts down it as if the ship were sinking, carrying me along like a stick in a stream. At the immigration check, a hundred yards further on, I find my clothes literally are dripping. I might have been standing under a shower. A small puddle forms around my feet and amuses the customs man.
Seven
Gratefully I took the pen from the fingers of the receptionist at the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, signed my name in the register and dripped sweat onto the carpet. I was guided from the lobby to my room by a Nubian boy with a pearly grin and a fez, who operated a wondrously old-fashioned lift like an ornate, wrought-iron birdcage.
I was delighted to find that the Cecil, one of the most satisfactory of Egypt’s older generation of hotels, was still as it had been two years before, just after the riots, and more or less unchanged since the day I’d first seen it in 1954. My room had a high ceiling, and the tall, wide windows opened onto a balcony over a narrow street running down to the sea. Across the street I saw washing strung out on lines and, through a gauze curtain opposite, a woman in a scarlet dress lying barefoot on a bed. On my second day, there was a wedding party in the street, with much drumming on tambourines and hand drums, and chanting, clapping and ululating by the women. Every balcony in the street produced two or three spectators who called to one another excitedly.
But now, after a bath, a change into dry clothes, and a drink, the thought returned: how was I going to get through the Suez Canal?
The Egyptian who was the general manager of the Cecil surprised me by his youth; I am not sure why I expected his age to match that of the hotel. (‘Built in 1929. Architect: G. Lorca,’ a plaque on an outside wall said.) I wanted to make sure that there were no plans to pull the Cecil down, as the old Semiramis in Cairo had been for no reason a year before. I explained that I had been conceived in the Semiramis, though not born there. On the third floor,’ I told the general manager.
He smiled. ‘Then you have a special interest in these things. The rich developers who bought it could have kept the façade of the old Semiramis and done what they liked inside. In fact, that was the agreement with the government, as I understand it. But one night after work had started, the façade fell down.’ He raised a cynical eyebrow. ‘Odd, wasn’t it? So convenient for the rich developers. Here there’s no such threat for the moment. The Cecil is a government hotel and is usually one hundred per cent full. They tried to give me new lifts, but I said, “No, give me new machinery for the lifts, and even new handles on the doors, but the wrought iron must stay.” Do you see that big mirror in the lobby? I found that in pieces in the cellar. I had it cleaned and put back. It’s a hundred years old.’
*
Alexandria may be shabby, but it is still beautiful, and as much Mediterranean as Arab. The lines of stately balconies swell out over tram-lined streets like the elaborately half-draped bosoms of nineteenth-century European matrons. Everywhere are names like Rue Verdi, Pension Acropole, San Stefano Beach, Antoniadis Garden.
I bought a booklet called Alexandria Night and Day, and sat in a café next to the Cecil to read it. Drinking tea, I looked across at the statue of Saad Zaghlul, a pre-Nasser-era nationalist, in morning coat and tarboosh, on a high plinth, striding none too steadily (all his weight is on his back foot) toward the eastern harbour. A small boy wove his way slowly between the café tables carrying an armful of woolly toy cats, crying, ‘Awez biss-s-s-ss? Awez biss-s-s-ss? Who wants a cat?’
Over tea I looked down a list of names under the heading ‘Navigation Agencies’. I marked three of them, which should do for a start: Abu Simbel Shipping, Memphis Shipping Agency, Thebes Shipping Agency. Then I looked up the list of foreign diplomatic missions, with particular reference to the Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Both countries were represented in Alexandria. By now I had realized that, if a freighter was to be found that would take me through the Suez Canal, it would almost certainly stop somewhere in the Red Sea. Jedda was a probable port of call, Port Sudan another. Looking further down the map, there was Djibouti, for which I already had a visa. It would be unwise to risk a stop in Jedda without a visa of some kind, and the same might be true of Port Sudan. I had also calculated that, if worst came to worst, I might be forced to resort to a bus from Port Said to Suez, trains – if there were any – from Cairo down to Port Sudan, and there take a ship to Aden, Djibouti or the Gulf. This might prove difficult, but it would become impossible if I was held up at the Sudanese–Egyptian border for want of a visa.
First things first: the Sudanese consulate was nearest. On the seventh floor of a building on the seafront not far from the Cecil a policeman in dirty white sat outside an open door. I knocked and entered a newly painted apa
rtment completely empty except for a kitchen sink and a desk or two glimpsed through a half-open door. The smell of paint was strong. A tall Sudanese in a dark suit came through the half-open door. I asked, ‘Is the consul in?’
‘He’s in the Sudan. What is it about?’ He had a gentle voice.
‘A visa.’
‘Visas not here. Only from Cairo embassy.’
‘But I’m not going to Cairo.’
‘Only from Cairo.’
‘Why do you have a consulate here, then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said with a helpless shrug. ‘Only consul know, and consul is in –’
‘The Sudan.’
Downstairs, I found a taxi so festooned inside with pink and red plastic flowers, vivid green plastic leaves and toy plastic parakeets on swings that the driver peered through his windscreen like a hunter in the Brazilian rain forest. Perhaps he really needed the two toy compasses on the ledge above the dashboard to find his way. At any rate, he found it to the Saudi consulate and, when we got there, soft-talked a young policeman into allowing him to wait for me.
A mass of Egyptians were queuing at a small door for visas and work permits, or perhaps for laissez passers for the Mecca pilgrimage. I walked around to the front door and up short, grand steps. Two armed Egyptian policemen hardly more than sixteen years old waved half-heartedly at me, and I waved back to show I wasn’t a terrorist. Inside I found a big mock-baronial hall, beamed and panelled, which looked like a theatre set for Charley’s Aunt. A secretary showed me into the consul general’s office, where a portly, smiling Arab in an expensive suit said, ‘Please have a seat,’ in good English. I drew up a high-backed chair at his elaborate desk. ‘Excuse me just for one moment,’ he said and pressed a bell. A servant came in and the consul general said, ‘Tea or coffee?’ He made a few notes in a file with a gold pen, and another man came in, spoke deferentially to him, bowed and took the file away. The consul general wore a small silver-grey imperial on his chin and a silver watch strap on his wrist. On a wall hung a portrait of the late King Faisal, praying. It was painted from a perspective above and to the right of the kneeling monarch, and his face was partly obscured by a white silk headcloth, but Faisal’s ascetic features were unmistakable.
‘What can I do for you?’ Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, I explained my intention of travelling to the Orient by sea. I wanted to sail through the canal, I said, and naturally I hoped my ship would stop at Jedda. It might be necessary to change ships there, and I might need a week – at the outside – to find something to carry me on to the Gulf. Could he arrange a transit visa for me with little delay? I hadn’t much time.
With a smile, the consul general produced a form to be filled in triplicate. He needed photographs and my passport. His smile seemed to say that another hurdle was about to be safely overcome. But I misread it.
‘I’ll send your application by telex to Saudi Arabia,’ he said, and my heart sank. ‘I’ll give you an answer in one week.’
‘Couldn’t you give me a transit visa? Does it have to go to Saudi Arabia?’
‘Sorry, yes.’
‘Could you make it less than a week? Perhaps get an urgent reply?’
‘Two or three days, then.’ He made a note with the gold pen, and looked up sharply. ‘Where can I touch you?’
‘I beg your pardon – oh, at the Cecil Hotel.’
‘Very good. I hope tomorrow or the day after….’
I knew then that nothing would happen. I knew all too well Saudi Arabia’s appalling bureaucracy. In my mind’s eye I saw vividly the offices in Jedda or Riyadh full of indolent figures in white headcloths and ankle-length shirts, bare feet tucked up on the chairs beneath them, the tea glasses on desks stacked with papers, the nose-picking, the constant fumbling readjustment of genitals within the white cotton folds, the supercilious idleness of clerks with gold watches.
The consul general chatted on in a friendly manner. He had served in Geneva for five and a half years. I couldn’t believe that Alexandria meant promotion for him but, in these days of kidnappings and attacks on consulates, Alex might be safer than Geneva. He sat benignly in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase containing bound copies of L’Illustration from 1913 onwards. I knew I was going to have to struggle for my visa.
My taxi driver was waiting, and I directed him to the Abu Simbel Shipping Agency fifteen minutes away. Its offices were massive despite the narrowness of the street. I walked up wide stone steps into a high-ceilinged building, and into a Dickensian confusion. With its interior divided into innumerable cubicles and offices by glass and wood partitions, the place looked like a bank. People ran back and forth; men in robes carried trays of tea; telephones rang and clerks shouted into them. I leaned over a desk and asked a man, ‘Where’s the boss?’ He got up at once and obligingly led me through several small offices to a high open door. Through it I saw an even higher room, a large dark desk, a scattering of dark tables and heavy armchairs. As I entered a strong male voice shouted, ‘Fatima! Fatima!’ Two telephones were ringing on the desk, and a tall man with glasses, white sideburns and a trim white moustache instantly spoke into one of them, but he quickly banged it down to answer the other.
Finally he put down the telephone and said to me with great gusto and a sweeping gesture, ‘English, French, Arabic, Armenian – what language do you want? Now, sir, please take a seat by me here and tell me what I can do for you.’ He beamed, leaned over the desk, took my hand, shook it warmly, sat down again and handed me one of those visiting cards that look as though they are made from a wood shaving. His telephone rang again, and while he answered it I had time to read the card. It said:
I. I. Rashad, M.R.I.N.A. London
Master Mariner B.O.T. London
General Manager and Member of the Board
Abu Simbel Shipping Agency
‘Now,’ Captain Rashad said and offered me a cigar. Declining it, I told him my story. I told him about the Alcheon, Samsun and Al Anoud. He was interested, and it was soon obvious that, in so far as two almost constantly ringing telephones would allow him to do so, he was going to give my problem his serious consideration. He was friendly, he wanted to help and, although he was busy, he wanted to give me all the time he could; he seemed to have complete confidence in my story of sea travel to China for a book.
‘My father,’ Captain Rashad boomed, ‘was the first man to have four academic degrees from London, Mr Young. He was a landowner, a pasha. He was also a great friend of Dr De Valera of Ireland. He wrote a book, indeed, called An Egyptian in Ireland. Perhaps you’ve read it? Fatima!’ A rattle of typing in a room nearby stopped abruptly and an attractive secretary came in, took up a bundle of files and withdrew, smiling. The walls were dotted with calendars from shipping companies. There was a good print of a British three-masted clipper, the Swiftsure, 1326 tons. A large sign opposite the desk said in Arabic, in gold and chocolate brown: SUBR (Patience).
Captain Rashad explained that, under Nasser, his company, like many others, had been nationalized. Although he was well-to-do and a pasha’s son, ‘They wanted people to administer these things. Now I’m a government official, you may say, but I make all the decisions. I’m my own boss. I speak pure French, pure English’ – he did – ‘Arabic, Italian and Turkish. I am a very good singer. I can sing just like Nat King Cole, Dick Haymes, Bing Crosby. You remember Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy”? I sang it in a New Orleans restaurant last year, where some American shipowners took me. When I was a seaman I used to go to the London Lyceum Theatre and sing there in French, English and Italian. I won many prizes there when I was a third mate. It was my hobby. I knew all the London pubs at that time. Now my dear London is very changed. Too many Arabs there now.’ His big voice rumbled on happily; his eyes were round behind his spectacles. I liked Captain Rashad.
A decisive-looking man with a thick black moustache entered, picked up a Fabergé Brut deodorant spray from Rashad’s desk, squirted his moustache, and left. Ras
had didn’t seem to notice. He was meditating.
‘I have the impression, Mr Young,’ he said after a moment, ‘that it is advisable for me to give you a card to a very efficient man in Port Said – the most efficient man there. Because from Alex, I am sure, you will not find…. Fatima!’
When his secretary came in, Rashad said something to her in an undertone, and then turned to me. ‘You will have lunch with me at the Syrian Club. It will be a great pleasure for me. Does that suit? Now….’ He wrote for a while, then handed me a letter. ‘Please read this.’
Written on a plain sheet of paper, the letter, in capital letters, said:
Dear Ahmed Bey,
Greetings. May I present Mr. G. Yong [sic] from The Observer. He wishes to join a V/O as a passenger, destination Jeddah. I should much appreciate your giving all help to facilitate joining a ship. Much obliged.
Cap. Rashad
Fluffing out his white sideburns, Captain Rashad said, ‘Ahmed Bey Karawia is a most efficient man, as I said. You find him at the Aswan Shipping Company, Gumhuriyah Street in Port Said, right on the canal – anyone will show you. He is the commercial manager there.’
Rashad also gave me a letter to the manager of the Aswan Shipping Company in Suez, and another to an Egyptian assistant harbourmaster at Jedda, which he signed, ‘Your brother Ismail Rashad.’ Then, over gin at the Syrian Club, a small, plush 1920s house, he shook his head. ‘Oh, God, Jedda,’ he said. ‘In Alex the ships come into port, and first come first served. In Jedda the first one in is the one who pays the most.’ An Italian captain entered, spotted Rashad and raised his arms. Rashad embraced him, asked him to join us and introduced him: ‘This is Captain Roncallo, a good friend.’
We moved to the dining room and ate hot prawns. Rashad and Roncallo talked of the Red Sea; it was interesting because they hoped never to see it again and I was heading there.
