XV

 

They were to stay like this for many weeks now, the actors: as if trapped once and for all in postures which might illustrate how incalculable a matter naked providence can be.  To Mountolive, more than the others, came a disenchanting sense of his own professional inadequacy, his powerlessness to act now save as an instrument (no longer a factor), so strongly did he feel himself gripped by the gravitational field of politics.  Private humours and impulses were alike disinherited, counting for nothing.  Did Nessim also feel the mounting flavour of stagnation in everything?  He thought back bitterly and often to the casually spoken words of Sir Louis as he was combing his hair in the mirror.  'The illusion that you are free to act!'  He suffered from excruciating headaches now from time to time and his teeth began to give him trouble.  For some reason or another he took the fancy that this was due to over-smoking and tried to abandon the habit unsuccessfully.  The struggle with tobacco only increased his misery.

      Yet if he himself were powerless, now, how much more so the others?  Like the etiolated projections of a sick imagination, they seemed, drained of meaning, empty as suits of clothes; taking up emplacements in this colourless drama of contending wills.  Nessim, Justine, Leila - they had an unsubstantial air now - as of dream projections acting in a world populated by expressionless waxworks.  It was difficult to feel that he owed them even love any longer.  Leila's silence above all suggested, even more clearly, the guilt of her complicity.

      Autumn drew to an end and still Nur could produce no proof of action.  The lifelines which tied Mountolive's Mission to London became clogged with longer and longer telegrams full of the shrewish iterations of minds trying to influence the operation of what Mountolive now knew to be not merely chance, but in fact destiny.  It was interesting, too, in a paradoxical sort of way, this first great lesson which his profession had to teach him; for outside the circumscribed area of his personal fears and hesitations, he watched the whole affair with a kind of absorbed attention, with almost a sense of dreadful admiration.  But it was like some fretful mummy that he now presented himself to the gaze of Nur, almost ashamed of the splendours of that second-hand uniform, so clearly was it intended to admonish or threaten the Minister.  The old man was full of a feverish desire to accommodate him; he was like a monkey jumping enthusiastically on the end of a chain.  But what could he do?  He made faces to match his transparent excuses.  The investigations undertaken by Memlik were not as yet complete.  It was essential to verify the truth.  The threads were still being followed up.  And so forth.

      Mountolive did what he had never done before in his official life, colouring up and banging the dusty table between them with friendly exasperation.  He adopted the countenance of a thundercloud and predicted a rupture of diplomatic relations.  He went so far as to recommend Nur for a decoration ... realizing that this was his last resort.  But in vain.

      The broad contemplative figure of Memlik squatted athwart the daylight, promising everything, performing nothing; immovable, imperturbable, and only faintly malign.  Each was now pressing the other beyond the point of polite conciliation: Maskelyne and the High Commissioner were pressing London for action; London, full of moralizing grandeurs, pressed Mountolive; Mountolive pressed Nur, overwhelming the old man with a sense of his own ineffectuality, for he too was powerless to grapple with Memlik without the help of the King: and the King was ill, very ill.  At the bottom of this pyramid sat the small figure of the Minister for Interior, with his priceless collection of Korans locked away in dusty cupboards.

      Constrained nevertheless to keep up the diplomatic pressure, Mountolive was now irradiated by an appalling sense of futility as he sat (like some ageing jeune premier) and listened to the torrent of Nur's excuses, drinking the ceremonial coffee and prying into those ancient and imploring eyes.  'But what more evidence do you need, Pasha, than the paper I brought you?'  The Minister's hands spread wide, smoothing the air between them as if he were rubbing cold-cream into it; he exuded a conciliatory and apologetic affection, like an unguent.  'He is going into the matter,' he croaked helplessly.  'There is more than one Hosnani, to begin with,' he added in desperation.  Backwards and forwards moved the tortoise's wrinkled head, regular as a pendulum.  Mountolive groaned inside himself as he thought of those long telegrams following one another, endless as a tapeworm.  Nessim had now, so to speak, wedged himself neatly in between his various adversaries, in a position where neither could reach him - for the time being.  The game was in baulk.

      Donkin alone derived a quizzical amusement from these exchanges - so characteristic of Egypt.  His own affection for the Moslem had taught him to see clearly into his motives, to discern the play of childish cupidities underneath the histrionic silence of a Minister, under his facile promises.  Even Mountolive's gathering hysteria in the face of these checks was amusing for a junior secretary.  His Chief had become a puffy and petulant dignitary, under all this stress.  Who could have believed such a change possible?

      The observation that there was more than one Hosnani was a strange one, and it was a fruit of the prescient Rafael's thought as he quietly shaved his master one morning, according to custom; Memlik paid great attention to what the barber said - was he not a European?  While the little barber shaved him in the morning they discussed the transactions of the day.  Rafael was full of ideas and opinions, but he uttered them obliquely, simplifying them so that they presented themselves in readily understandable form.  He knew that Memlik had been troubled by Nur's insistence, though he had not shown it; he knew, moreover, that Memlik would act only if the King recovered enough to grant Nur an audience.  It was a matter of luck and time; meanwhile, why not pluck Hosnani as far as possible?  It was only one of a dozen such matters which lay gathering dust (and perhaps bribes) while the King was ill.

      One fine day His Majesty would feel much better under his new German doctors and would grant audience once again.  He would send for Nur.  That is the manner in which the matter would fall out.  The next thing: the old goose-necked telephone by the yellow divan would tingle and the old man's voice (disguising its triumphant tone) would say, 'I am Nur, speaking from the very Divan of the Very King, having received audience.  That matter of which we spoke concerning the British Government.  It must now be advanced and go forward.  Give praise to God!'

      'Give praise to God!' and from this point forward Memlik's hands would be tied.  But for the moment he was still a free agent, free to express his contempt for the elder Minister by inaction.

      'There are two brothers, Excellence,' Rafael had said, putting on a storybook voice and casting an expression of gloomy maturity upon his little doll's face.  'Two brothers Hosnani, not one, Excellence.'  He sighed as his white fingers took up small purses of Memlik's dark skin for the razor to work upon.  He proceeded slowly, for to register an idea in a Moslem mind is like trying to paint a wall: one must wait for the first coat to dry (the first idea) before applying a second.  'Of the two brothers, one is rich in land, and the other rich in money - he of the Koran.  Of what good are lands to my Excellence?  But one whose purse is fathomless....'  His tone suggested all the landless man's contempt for good ground.

      'Well, well, but....' said Memlik with a slow, unemphatic impatience, yet without moving his lips under the kiss of the crisp razor.  He was impatient for the theme to be developed.  Rafael smiled and was silent for a moment.  'Indeed,' he said thoughtfully, 'the papers you received from his Excellence were signed Hosnani - in the family name.  Who is to say which brother signed them, which is guilty and which innocent?  If you were wise in deed would you sacrifice a moneyed man to a landed one?  I not, Excellence.  I not.'

      'What would you do, my Rafael?'

      'For people like the British it could be made to seem that the poor one was guilty, not the rich.  I am only thinking aloud, Excellence, a small man among great affairs.'

      Memlik breathed quietly through his mouth, keeping his eyes shut.  He was skilled in never showing surprise.  Yet the thought, suspended idly in his mind, filled him with a reflective astonishment.  In the last month he had received three additions to his library which had left in little doubt the comparative affluence of his client, the elder Hosnani.  It was getting on for the Christian Christmastide.  He pondered heavily.  To satisfy both the British and his own cupidity.... That would be very clever!

      Not eight hundred yards away from the chair in which Memlik sprawled, across the brown Nile water, sat Mountolive at his papers.  On the polished desk before him lay the great florid invitation card which enjoined his participation in one of the great social events of the year - Nessim's annual duckshoot on Lake Mareotis.  He propped it against his inkwell in order to read it again with an expression of fugitive reproach.

      But there was another communication of even greater importance; even after this long silence he recognized Leila's nervous handwriting on the lined envelope smelling of chypre.  But inside it he found a page torn from an exercise book scrawled over with words and phrases set down anyhow, as if in great haste.

      'David, I am going abroad, perhaps long perhaps short, I cannot tell; against my will.  Nessim insists.  But I must see you before I leave.  I must take courage and meet you the evening before.  Don't fail.  I have something to ask, something to tell.  "This business"!  I knew nothing about it till carnival I swear; now only you can save....'

      So the letter ran on pell-mell; Mountolive felt a queer mixture of feelings - an incoherent relief which somehow trembled on the edge of indignation.  After all this time she would be waiting for him after dark near the Auberge Bleue in an old horse-drawn cab pulled back off the road among the palms!  That plan was at least touched with something of her old fantasy.  For some reason Nessim was not to know of this meeting - why should he disapprove?  But the information that she at least had had no part in the conspiracies fostered by her son - that flooded him with relief and tenderness.  And all this time he had been seeing Leila as a hostile extension of Nessim, had been training himself to hate her!  'My poor Leila,' he said aloud, holding the envelope to his nose to inhale the fragrance of chypre.  He picked up the phone and spoke softly to Errol: 'I suppose the whole Chancery has been invited to the Hosnani shoot?  Yes?  I agree, he has got rather a nerve at such a time.... I shall, of course, have to decline, but I would like you chaps to accept and apologize for me.  To keep up a public appearance of normality merely.  Will you then?  Thank you very much.  Now one more thing.  I shall go up the evening before the shoot for private business and return the next day - we shall probably pass each other on the desert road.  No, I'm glad you fellows have the chance.  By all means, and good hunting.

      The next ten days passed in a sort of dream, punctuated only by the intermittent stabbings of a reality which was no longer a drug, a dissipation which gagged his nerves; his duties were a torment of boredom.  He felt immeasurably expended, used-up, as he confronted his face in the bathroom mirror, presenting it to the razor's edge with undisguised distaste.  He had become quite noticeably grey now at the temples.  From somewhere in the servants' quarters a radio blurred and scratched out the melody of an old song which had haunted a whole Alexandrian summer: 'Jamais de la vie'.  He had come to loathe it now.  This new epoch - a limbo filled with the dispersing fragments of habit, duty and circumstance - filled him with a gnawing impatience; underneath it all he was aware that he was gathering himself together for this long-awaited meeting with Leila.  Somehow it would determine, not the physical tangible meaning of his return to Egypt so much as the psychic meaning of it in relation to his inner life.  God! that was a clumsy way to put it - but how else could one express these things?  It was a sort of barrier in himself which had to be crossed, a puberty of the feelings which had to be outgrown.

      He drove up across the crackling desert in his pennoned car, rejoicing in the sweet whistle of its cooled engine, and the whickering of wind at the side-screens.  It had been some time since he had been able to travel across the desert alone like this - it reminded him of older and happier journeys.  Flying across the still white air with the speedometer hovering in the sixties, he hummed softly to himself, despite his distaste, the refrain:

 

                                                     Jamais de la vie,

                                                     Jamais dans la nuit

                                                     Quand ton coeur se démange de chagrin....

 

      How long was it since he had caught himself singing like this?  An age.  It was not really happiness, but an overmastering relief of mind.  Even the hateful song helped him to recover the lost image of an Alexandria he had once found charming.  Would it, could it be so again?

      It was already late afternoon by the time he reached the desert fringe and began the slow in-curving impulse which would lead him to the city's bristling outer slums.  The sky was covered with clouds.  A thunderstorm was breaking over Alexandria.  To the east upon the icy green waters of the lake poured a rainstorm - flights of glittering needles pocking the water; he could dimly hear the hush of rain above the whisper of the car.  He glimpsed the pearly city through the dark cloud-mat, its minarets poked up against the cloud bars of an early sunset; linen soaked in blood.  A sea-wind chaffered and tugged at the sea-limits of the estuary.  Higher still roamed packages of smoking, bloodstained cloud throwing down a strange radiance into the streets and squares of the white city.  Rain was a rare and brief winter phenomenon in Alexandria.  Presently the sea-wind would rise, alter inclination, and peel the sky clear in a matter of minutes, rolling up the heavy cumulus like a carpet.  The glassy freshness of the winter sky would resume its light, polishing the city once more till it glittered against the desert like quartz, like some beautiful artefact.  He was no longer impatient.  Dusk was beginning to swallow the sunset.  As he neared the ugly ribbons of cabins and warehouses by the outer harbour, his tyres began to smoke and seethe upon the wet tarmac, its heat now slaked by a light rain.  Time to throttle down....

      He entered the penumbra of the storm slowly, marvelling at the light, at the horizon drawn back like a bow.  Odd gleams of sunshine scattered rubies upon the battleships in the basis (squatting under their guns like horned toads).  It was the ancient city again; he felt its pervading melancholy under the rain as he crossed it on his way to the Summer Residence.  The brilliant unfamiliar lighting of the thunderstorm recreated it, giving it a spectral, storybook air - broken pavements made of tinfoil, snail-shells, cracked horn, mica; earth-brick buildings turned to the colour of ox-blood; the lovers wandering in Mohammed Ali Square, disoriented by the unfamiliar rain, disconsolate as untuned instruments; the clicking of violet trams along the seafront among the tatting of palm-fronds.  The desuetude of an ancient city whose streets were plastered with the wet blown dust of the surrounding desert.  He felt it all anew, letting it extend panoramically in his consciousness - the moan of a liner edging out towards the sunset bar, or the trains which flowed like a torrent of diamonds towards the interior, their wheels clattering among the shingle ravines and the powder of temples long since abandoned and silted up....

      Mountolive saw it all now with a world-weariness which he at last recognized as the stripe which maturity lays upon the shoulders of an adult - the stigma of experiences which age one.  The wind spouted in the harbour.  The corridors of wet rigging swayed and shook like the foliage of some great tree.  Now the tears were trickling down the windscreen under the diligent and noiseless wipers.... A little period in this strange contused darkness, fitfully lit by lightning, and then the wind would come - the magistral north wind, punching and squeezing the sea into its own characteristic plumage of white crests, knocking open the firmament until the faces of men and women once more reflected the open winter sky.  He was in plenty of time.

      He drove to the Summer Residence to make sure that the staff had been warned of his arrival; he intended to stay the night and return to Cairo on the morrow.  He let himself into the front door with his own key, having pressed the bell, and stood listening for the shuffle of Ali.  And as he heard the old man's step approaching, the north wind arrived with a roar, stiffening the windows in their frames, and the rain stopped abruptly as if it had been turned off.

      He had still an hour or so before the rendezvous: comfortable time in which to have a bath and change his clothes.  To his own surprise he felt perfectly at ease now, no longer tormented by doubts or elated by a sense of relief.  He had put himself unreservedly in the hands of chance.

      He ate a sandwich and drank two strong whiskies before setting out and letting the great car slide softly down the Grande Corniche towards the Auberge Bleue which lay towards the outskirts of the town, fringed by patches of dune and odd clusters of palm.  The sky was clear again now and the whitecaps were racing ashore to bang themselves in showers of spray upon the metal piers of Chatby.  At the horizon's edge flickered the intermittent lightning flashes of distant warships in a naval engagement.

      He edged the car softly off the road and into the deserted car park of the Auberge, switching off the side-lamps as he did so.  He sat for a moment, accustoming himself to the bluish dusk.  The Auberge was empty - it was still too early for dancers and diners to throng its elegant floor and bars.  Then he saw it.  Just off the road, on the opposite side of the park, there was a bare patch of sand-dune with a few leaning palms.  A gharry stood there.  Its old-fashioned oil-lamps were alight and wallowed feebly like fireflies in the light sea-airs.  There was a dim figure on the jarvey's box in a tarbush - apparently asleep.

      He crossed the gravel with a light and joyous step, hearing it squeak under his shoes, and as he neared the gharry called, in a soft voice: 'Leila!'  He saw the silhouette of the driver turn against the sky and register attention; from inside the cab he heard a voice - Leila's voice - say something like: 'Ah! David, so at last we meet.  I have come all this way to tell you....'

      He leaned forward with a puzzled air, straining his eyes, but could not see more than the vague shape of someone in the far corner of the cab.  'Get in,' she cried imperiously.  'Get in and we shall talk.'

      And it was here that a sense of unreality overtook Mountolive; he could not exactly fathom why.  But he felt as one does in dreams when one walks without touching the ground, or else appears to rise deliberately through the air like a cork through water.  His feelings, like antennae, were reaching out towards the dark figure, trying to gather and assess the meaning of these tumbling phrases and to analyse the queer sense of disorientation which they carried, buried in them, like a foreign intonation creeping into familiar voices; somewhere the whole context of his impressions foundered.

      The thing was this: he did not quite recognize the voice.  Or else, to put it another way, he could identify Leila but not quite believe in the evidence of his own ears.  It was, so to speak, not the precious voice which, in his imagination, had lived on, inhabiting the remembered figure of Leila.  She spoke now with a sort of gobbling inconsistency, an air of indiscretion, in a voice which had a slightly clipped edge on it.  He supposed this to be the effect of excitement and who knows what other emotions?  But ... phrases which petered out, only to start again in the middle, phrases which lapsed and subsided in the very act of joining two thoughts?  He frowned to himself in the darkness as he tried to analyse this curious unreal quality of distraction in the voice.  It was not the voice that belonged to Leila - or was it?  Presently, a hand fell upon his arm and he was able to study it eagerly in the puddle of soft light cast by the oil-lamp in the brass holder by the cabby's box.  It was a chubby and unkempt little hand, with short, unpainted fingernails and unpressed cuticles.  'Leila - is it really you?' he asked almost involuntarily, still invaded by this sense of unreality, of disorientation; as of two dreams overlapping, displacing one another.  'Get in,' said the new voice of an invisible Leila.

      As he obeyed and stepped forward into the swaying cab he smelt her strange confusion of scents on the night air - again a troubling departure from the accepted memory.  But orange-water, mint, Eau de Cologne, and sesame; she smelt like some old Arab lady!  And then he caught the dull taint of whisky.  She too had had to string her nerves for the meeting with alcohol!  Sympathy and indecision battled within him; the old image of the brilliant, resourceful and elegant Leila refused somewhere to fix itself in the new.  He simply must see her face.  As if she read his thoughts, she said: 'So I came at last, unveiled, to meet you.'  He suddenly thought, bringing himself up with a start, 'My God!  I simply haven't stopped to think how old Leila might be.'

      She made a small sign and the old jarvey in the tarbush drew his nag slowly back on to the lighted macadam of the Grande Corniche and set the gharry moving at walking pace.  Here the sharp blue street-lamps came up one after the other to peer into the cab, and with the first of these intrusive gleams of light Mountolive turned to gaze at the woman beside him.  He could very dimly recognize her.  He saw a plump and square-faced Egyptian lady of uncertain years, with a severely pock-marked face and eyes drawn grotesquely out of true by the antimony-pencil.  They were the mutinous sad eyes of some clumsy cartoon creature: a cartoon of animals dressed up and acting as human beings.  She had indeed been brave enough to unveil, this stranger who sat facing him, staring at him with the painted eye one sees in frescoes with a forlorn and pitiable look of appeal.  She wore an air of unsteady audacity as she confronted her lover, though her lips trembled and her large jowls shook with every vibration of the solid rubber tyres on the road.  They stared at each other for a full two seconds before the darkness swallowed the light again.  Then he raised her hand to his lips.  It was shaking like a leaf.  In the momentary light he had seen her uncombed and straggly hair hanging down the back of her neck, her thoughtless and disordered black dress.  Her whole appearance had a rakish and improvised air.  And the dark skin, so cruelly botched and cicatriced by the smallpox, looked coarse as the skin of an elephant.  He did not recognize her at all!  'Leila!' he cried (it was almost a groan) pretending at last to identify and welcome the image of his lover (now dissolved or shattered forever) in this pitiable grotesque - a fattish Egyptian lady with all the marks of eccentricity and age written upon her appearance.  Each time the lamps came up he looked again, and each time he saw himself confronting something like an animal cartoon figure - an elephant, say.  He could hardly pay attention to her words, so intent was he upon his racing feelings and memories.  'I knew we should meet again some day.  I knew it.'  She pressed his hand, and again he tasted her breath, heavy with sesame and mint and whisky.

      She was talking now and he listened uneasily, but with all the attention on gives to an unfamiliar language; and each time the street-lamps came up to peer at them, he gazed at her anxiously - as if to see whether there had been and sudden and magical change in her appearance.  And then he was visited by another thought: 'What if I too have chanced as much as she has - if indeed this is she?'  What indeed?  Sometimes in the distant past they had exchanged images of one another like lockets; now his own had faded, changed.  What might she see upon his face - traces of the feebleness which had overrun his youthful strength and purpose?  He had now joined the ranks of those who compromise gracefully with life.  Surely his ineffectuality, his unmanliness must be written in all over his foolish, weak, good-looking face?  He eyed her mournfully, with a pitiful eagerness to see whether she indeed really recognized him.  He had forgotten that women will never surrender the image of their hearts' affections; no, she would remain forever blinded by the old love, refusing to let it be discountenanced by the new.  'You have not changed by a day,' said this unknown woman with the disagreeable perfume.  'My beloved, my darling, my angel.'  Mountolive flushed in the darkness at such endearments coming from the lips of an unknown personage.  And the known Leila?  He suddenly realized that the precious image which had inhabited his heart for so long had now been dissolved, completely wiped out!  He was suddenly face to face with the meaning of love and time.  They had lost forever the power to fecundate each other's minds!  He felt only self-pity and disgust where he should have felt love!  And these feelings were simply not permissible.  He swore at himself silently as they went up and down the dark causeway by the winter sea, like invalids taking the night air, their hands touching each other, in the old horse-drawn cab.  She was talking faster, now, vaguely, jumping from topic to topic.  Yet it all seemed an introduction to the central statement which she had come to make.  She was to leave tomorrow evening: 'Nessim's orders.  Justine will come back from the lake and pick me up.  We are disappearing together.  At Kantara we'll separate and I shall go on  to Kenya to the farm.  Nessim won't say, can't say for how long as yet.  I had to see you.  I had to speak to you once.  Not for myself - never for myself, my own heart.  It was what I learned about Nessim at the carnival time.  I was on the point of coming to meet you; but what he told me about Palestine!  My blood ran cold.  To do something against the British!  How could I!  Nessim must have been mad.  I didn't come because I would not have known what to say to you, how to face you.  But now you know all.'

      She had begun to draw her breath sharply now, to hurry onward as if all this were introductory matter to her main speech.  Then suddenly she came out with it.  'The Egyptians will harm Nessim, and the British are trying to provoke them to do so.  David, you must use your power to stop it.  I am asking you to save my son.  I am asking you to save him.  You must listen, must help me.  I have never asked you a favour before.'

      The tear- and crayon-streaked cheeks made her look even more of a stranger in the street-lights.  He began to stammer.  She cried aloud: 'I implore you to help,' and suddenly, to his intense humiliation, began to moan and rock like an Arab, pleading with him.  'Leila!' he cried.  'Stop it!'  But she swayed from side to side repeating the words: 'Only you can save him now,' more, it seemed, to herself than to anyone else.  Then she showed some disposition to go down on her knees in the cab and kiss his feet.  By this time Mountolive was trembling with anger and surprise and disgust.  They were passing the Auberge for the tenth time.  'Unless you stop at once,' he cried angrily, but she wailed once more and he jumped awkwardly down into the road.  It was hateful to have to end their interview like this.  The cab drew to a halt.  He said, feeling stupid, and in a voice which seemed to come from far away and to have no recognizable expression save a certainly old-fashioned waspishness: 'I cannot discuss an official matter with a private person.'  Could anything be more absurd than these words?  He felt bitterly ashamed as he uttered them.  'Leila, goodbye,' he said hurriedly under his breath, and squeezed her hand once more before he turned.  He took to his heels.  He unlicked his car and climbed into it panting and overcome by a sense of ghastly folly.  The cab moved off into the darkness.  He watched it curve slowly along the Corniche and disappear.  Then he lit a cigarette and started his engine.  All of a sudden there seemed nowhere in particular to go.  Every impulse, every desire had faltered and faded out.

      After a long pause, he drove slowly and carefully back to the Summer Residence, talking to himself under his breath.  The house was in darkness and he let himself in with his key.  He walked from room to room switching on all the lights, feeling all of a sudden quite light-headed with loneliness; he could not accuse the servants of desertion since he had already told Ali that he would be dining out.  But he walked up and down the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets for a long time.  He smelt the damp unheated rooms around him; the blank reproachful face of the clock told him that it was only just after nine.  Abruptly, he went over to the cocktail cabinet and poured himself a very strong whisky and soda which he drank in one movement - gasping as if it were a dose of fruit salts.  His mind was humming now like a high-tension wire.  He supposed that he would have to go out and have some dinner by himself.  But where?  Suddenly the whole of Alexandria, the whole of Egypt, had become distasteful, burdensome, wearisome to his spirit.

      He drank several more whiskies, enjoying the warmth they brought to his blood - so unused was he to spirits which usually he drank very sparingly.  Leila had suddenly left him face to face with a reality which, he supposed, had always lain lurking behind the dusty tapestry of his romantic notions.  In a sense, she had been Egypt, his own private Egypt of the mind; and now this old image had been husked, stripped bare.  'It would be intemperate to drink any more,' he told himself as he drained his glass.  Yes, that was it!  He had never been intemperate, never been natural, outward-going in his attitude to life.  He had always hidden behind measure and compromise; and this defection had somehow lost him the picture of the Egypt which had nourished him for so long.  Was it, then, all a lie?

      He felt as if somewhere inside himself a dam were threatened, a barrier was on the point of giving way.  It was with some idea of restoring this lost contact with the life of this embodied land that he hit upon the idea of doing something he had never done since his youth: he would go out and dine in the Arab quarter, humbly and simply, like a small clerk in the city, like a tradesman, a merchant.  Somewhere in a small native restaurant he would eat a pigeon and some rice and a plate of sweetmeats; the food would sober and steady him while the surroundings would restore in him the sense of contact with reality.  He could not remember ever having felt so tipsy and leaden-footed before.  His thoughts were awash with inarticulate self-reproaches.

      Still with this incoherent, half-rationalized desire in mind he suddenly went out to the hall cupboard to unearth the red felt tarbush which someone had left behind after a cocktail party last summer.  He had suddenly remembered it.  It lay among a litter of golf-clubs and teenish raquets.  He put it on with a chuckle.  It transformed his appearance completely.  Looking at himself unsteadily in the hall mirror, he was quite surprised by the transformation: he was confronting not a distinguished foreign visitor to Egypt now, but - un homme quelqonque: a Syrian businessman, a broker from Suez, an airline representative from Tel Aviv.  Only one thing was necessary to lay claim to the Middle East properly - dark glasses, worn indoors, in winter!  There was a pair of them in the top drawer of the writing desk.

      He drove the car slowly down to the little square by Ramleh Station, quite absurdly pleased by his fancy dress, and eased it neatly into the car park by the Cecil Hotel; then he locked it and walked quietly off with the air of someone abandoning a lifetime's habit - walked with a new and quite delightful feeling of self-possession towards the Arab quarters of the town where he might find the dinner he sought.  As he skirted the Corniche he had one moment of unpleasant fear and doubt - for he saw a familiar figure cross the road further down and walk towards him along the sea-wall.  It was impossible to mistake Balthazar's characteristic prowling walk; Mountolive was overcome with a sheepish sense of shame, but he held his course.  To his delight, Balthazar glanced once at him and looked away without recognizing his friend.  They passed each other in a flash, and Mountolive expelled his breath loudly with relief; it was really odd, the anonymity conferred by this ubiquitous red flowerpot of a hat, which so much altered the outlines of a human face.  And the dark glasses!  He chuckled quietly as he turned away from the seafront, choosing the tangle of little lanes which might lead him towards the Arab bazaars and the eating houses round the commercial port.

      Hereabouts it would be a hundred to one that he would ever be recognized - for few Europeans ever came into this part of the city.  The quarter lying beyond the red lantern belt, populated by the small traders, moneylenders, coffee-speculators, ships' chandlers, smugglers; here in the open street one had the illusion of time spread out flat - so to speak - like the skin of an ox; the map of time which one could read from one end to the other, filling it in with known points of reference.  This world of Moslem time stretched back to Othello and beyond - cafés sweet with trilling of singing birds whose cages were full of mirrors to give them the illusion of company.  The love-songs of birds to companions they imagined - which were only reflections of themselves!  How heartbreakingly they sang, these illustrations of human love!  Here too in the ghastly breath of the naphtha flares the old eunuchs sat at trictrac, smoking the long narguilehs which at every drawn breath loosed a musical bubble of sound like a dove's sob; the walls of the old cafés were stained by the sweat from the tarbushes hanging on the pegs; their collections of coloured narguilehs were laid up in rows in a long rack, like muskets, for which each tobacco-drinker brought his cherished personal holder.  Here too the diviners, cartomancers - or those who could deftly fill your palm with ink and for half a piastre scry the secrets of your inmost life.  Here the pedlars carried magic loads of variegated and dissimilar objects of vertu from the thistle-soft carpets of Shiraz and Baluchistan to the playing cards of the Marseilles Tarot; incense of the Hejaz, green beads against the evil eye, combs, seeds, mirrors for birdcages, spices, amulets and paper fans ... the list was endless; and each, of course, carried in his private wallet - like a medieval pardoner - the fruit of the world's great pornographies in the form of handkerchiefs and postcards on which were depicted, in every one of its pitiful variations, the one act we human beings most dream of and fear.  Mysterious, underground, the ever-flowing river of sex, trickling easily through the feeble dams set up by our fretful legislation and the typical self-reproaches of the unpleasure-loving ... the broad underground river flowing from Petronius to Frank Harris.  (The drift and overlap of ideas in Mountolive's fuddled mind, rising and disappearing in pretty half-formulated figures, iridescent as soap-bubbles.)  He was perfectly at his ease now; he had come to terms with his unfamiliar state of befuddlement and no longer felt that he was drunk; it was simply that he had become inflated now by a sense of tremendous dignity and self-importance which gave him a grandiose deliberation of movement.  He walked slowly, like a pregnant woman nearing term, drinking in the sights and sounds.

      At long last he entered a small shop which took his fancy because of its flaring ovens from which great draughts of smoke settled in parcels about the room; the smell of thyme, roasting pigeon and rice gave him a sudden stab of hunger.  There were only one or two other diners, hardly to be seen through the clouds of smoke.  Mountolive sat down with the air of someone making a grudging concession to the law of gravity and ordered a meal in his excellent Arabic, though he still kept his dark glasses and tarbush on.  It was clear now that he could pass easily for a Moslem.  The café owner was a great bald Tartar-faced Turk who served his visitor at once and without comment.  He also set up a tumbler beside Mountolive's plate and without uttering a word filled it to the brim with the colourless arak made from the mastic-tree which is called mastika.  Mountolive choked and spluttered a bit over it, but he was highly delighted - for it was the first drink of the Levant he had ever tasted and he had forgotten its existence for years now.  Forgetting also how strong it was, and overcome with nostalgia he ordered himself a second glass to help him finish the excellent hot pilaff and the pigeon (so hot from the spit that he could hardly bare to pick it up with his fingers).  But he was in the seventh heaven of delight now.  He was on the way to recovering, to restoring the blurred image of an Egypt which the meeting with Leila had damaged or somehow stolen from him.

      The street outside was full of the shivering of tambourines and the voices of children raised in a chanting sort of litany; they were going about the shops in groups, repeating the same little verse over and over again.  After three repetitions he managed to disentangle the words.  Of course!

 

                                                     Lord of the shaken tree

                                                     Of Man's extremity

                                                     Keep thou our small leaves firm

                                                     On branches free from harm

                                                     For we thy little children be!

 

      'Well I'm damned,' he said, swallowing a fiery mouthful of arak and smiling as the meaning of the little processions became clear.  There was a venerable old sheik sitting opposite by the window and smoking a long-shanked  narguileh.  He waved towards the din with his graceful old hand and cried: 'Allah!  The noise of the children!'  Mountolive smiled back at him and said: 'Inform me if I err, sir, but it is for El Sird they cry, is it not?'  The old man's face lit up and he nodded, smiling his saintly smile.  'You have guessed it truly, sir.'  Mountolive was pleased with himself and filled ever more deeply with nostalgia for those half-forgotten years.  'Tonight then,' he said, 'it must be mid-Shaaban and the Tree of Extremity is to be shaken.  Is that not so?'

      Once more a delighted nod.  'Who knows,' said the old sheik, 'but that both our names may be written on the fallen leaves?'  He puffed softly and contentedly, like a toy train.  'Allah's will be done.'

      The belief is that on the eve of mid-Shaaban the Lote Tree of Paradise is shaken, and the falling leaves of the tree bear the names of all who will die in the coming year.  This is called the Tree of Extremity in some texts.  Mountolive was so pleased by the identification of the little song that he called for a final glass of arak which he drank standing up as he paid his reckoning.  The old sheik abandoned his pipe and came slowly towards him through the smoke.  He said: 'Effendi mine, I understand your purpose here.  What you seek will be revealed to you by me.'  He placed two brown fingers on Mountolive's wrist, speaking modestly and softly, as one who had secrets to impart.  His face had all the candour and purity of some desert saint.  Mountolive was delighted by him.  'Honoured sheik,' he said, 'divulge your sense, then, to an unworthy Syrian visitor.'  The old man bowed twice, looked circumspectly round the place, and then said: 'Be good enough to follow me, honoured sir.'  He kept his two fingers on Mountolive's wrist as a blind man might.  They stepped into the street together; Mountolive's romantic heart was beating wildly - was he now to be vouchsafed some mystical vision of religious truth?  He had so often heard stories of the bazaars and the religious men who lurked there, waiting to fulfil secret missions on behalf of that unseen world, the numinous, carefully guarded world of the hermetic doctors.  They walked in a soft cloud of unknowing with the silent sheik swaying and recovering himself at every few paces and smiling a maudlin smile of beatitude.  They passed together at this slow pace through the dark streets - now turned by the night to long shadowy tunnels or shapeless caverns, still dimly echoing to muffled bagpipe music or skirmishing voices muted by thick walls and barred windows.

      Mountolive's heightened sense of wonder responded to the beauty and mystery of this luminous township of shadows carved here and there into recognizable features by a single naphtha lamp or an electric bulb hanging from a frail stalk, rocking in the wind.  They turned at last down a long street spanned with coloured banners and thence into a courtyard which was completely dark where the earth smelt vaguely of the stale of camels and jasmine.  A house loomed up, set within thick walls; one caught a glimpse of its silhouette on the sky.  They entered a sort of rambling barrack of a place through a tall door which was standing ajar, and plunged into a darkness still more absolute.  Stood breathing for half a second in silence.  Mountolive felt rather than saw the worm-eaten staircase which climbed the walls to the abandoned upper floors, heard the chirrup and scramble of the rats in the deserted galleries, together with something else - a sound vaguely reminiscent of human beings, but in what context he could not quite remember.  They shuffled slowly down a long corridor upon woodwork so rotten that it rocked and swayed under their feet, and here, in a doorway of some sort, the old sheik said kindly: 'That our simple satisfactions should not be less than those of your homeland, effendi mine, I have brought you here.'  He added in a whisper, 'Attend me here a moment, if you will.'  Mountolive felt the fingers leave his wrist and the breath of the door closing at his shoulder.  He stayed in composed and trustful silence for a moment or two.

      Then all at once the darkness was so complete that the light, when it did come, gave him the momentary illusion of something taking place very far away, in the sky.  As if someone had opened and closed a furnace-door in Heaven.  It was only the spark of a match.  But in the soft yellow flap he saw that he was standing in a gaunt high chamber with shattered and defaced walls covered in graffiti and the imprint of dark palms - signs which guard the superstitious against the evil eye.  It was empty save for an enormous broken sofa which lay in the centre of the floor, like a sarcophagus.  A single window with all the panes of glass broken was slowly printing the blue darkness of the starry sky upon his sight.  He stared at the flapping, foundering light, and again heard the rats chirping and the other curious susurrus composed of whispers and chuckles and the movement of bare feet on boards.... Suddenly he thought of a girl's dormitory at a school: and as if invented by the very thought itself, through the open door at the end of the room trooped a crowd of small figures dressed in white soiled robes, like defeated angels.  He had stumbled into a house of child prostitutes, he realized with a sudden spasm of disgust and pity.  Their little faces were heavily painted, their hair scragged in ribbons and plaits.  They wore green beads against the evil eye.  Such little creatures as one has seen incised on Greek vases - floating out of tombs and charnel houses with the sad air of malefactors fleeing from justice.  It was the foremost of the group who carried the light - a twist of string burning in a saucer of olive oil.  She stooped to place this feeble will-o-the-wisp on the floor in the corner and at once the long spiky shadows of these children sprawled on the ceiling like an army of frustrated wills.  'No, by Allah,' said Mountolive hoarsely, and turned to grope at the closed door.  There was a wooden latch with no means of opening it on his side.  He put his face to a hole in the panel and called softly 'O sheik, where are you?'  The little figures had advanced and surrounded him now, murmuring the pitiable obscenities and endearments of their trade in the voices of heartbroken angels; he felt their warm nimble fingers on his shoulders, picking at the sleeves of his coat.  'O sheik,' he called again, shrinking up, 'it was not for this.'  But there was a silence beyond the door.  He felt the children's sharp arms twining round his waist like lianas in a tropical jungle, their sharp little fingers prying for the buttons of his coat.  He shook them off and turned his pale face to them, making a half-articulate sound of protest.  And now someone inadvertently kicked over the saucer with its floating wick and in the darkness he felt the tension of anxiety sweep through them like a fire through brushwood.  His protests had made them fear the loss of a lucrative client.  Anxiety, anger, and a certain note or terror were in their voices now as they spoke to him, wheedling and half-threatening; heaven only knew what punishments might attend them if he escaped!  They began to struggle, to attack him; he felt the concussion of their starved little bodies as they piled round him, panting and breathless with importunity, but determined that he should not retreat.  Fingers roved over him like ants - indeed, he had a sudden memory, buried from somewhere back in his remembered reading, of a man staked down upon the burning sand over a nest of white ants which would soon pick the flesh from his very bones.

      'No,' he cried incoherently again; some absurd inhibition prevented him from striking out, distributing a series of brutal cuffs which alone might have freed him.  (The smallest were so very small.)  They had his arms now, and were climbing on his back - absurd memories intruded of pillow fights in a dark dormitory at school.  He banged wildly on the door with his elbow, and they redoubled their entreaties in whining voices.  Their breath was as hot as wood-smoke.  'O Effendi, patron of the poor, remedy for our affliction....' Mountolive groaned and struggled, but felt himself gradually being borne to the ground; gradually felt his befuddled knees giving way under this assault which had gathered a triumphant fury now.

      'No!' he cried in an anguished voice, and a chorus of voices answered 'Yes.  Yes, by Allah!'  They smelt like a herd of goats as they swarmed upon him.  The giggles, the obscene whispers, the cajoleries and curses mounted up to his brain.  He felt as if he were going to faint.

      The suddenly everything cleared - as if a curtain had been drawn aside - to reveal him sitting beside his mother in front of a roaring fire with a picture-book open on his knee.  She was reading aloud and he was trying to follow the words as she pronounced them; but his attention was always drawn away to the large colourplate which depicted Gulliver when he had fallen into the hands of the little people of Lilliput.  It was fascinating in its careful detail.  The heavy-limbed hero lay where he had fallen, secured by a veritable cobweb of guyropes which had been wound around him pinioning him to the ground while the ant-people roved all over his huge body securing and pegging more and more guyropes against which every struggle of the colossus would be in vain.  There was a malign scientific accuracy about it all: wrists, ankles and neck pinioned against movement; tentpegs driven between the fingers of his huge hand to hold each individual finger down.  His pigtails were neatly coiled about tiny spars which had been driven into the ground beside him.  Even the tails of his surtout were skilfully pinned to the ground through the folds.  He lay there staring into the sky with expressionless wonder, his blue eyes wide open, his lips pursed.  The army of Lilliputians wandered all over him with wheelbarrows and pegs and more rope; their attitudes suggested a feverish anti-like frenzy of capture.  And all the time Gulliver lay there on the green grass of Lilliput, in a valley full of microscopic flowers, like a captive balloon....

      He found himself (though he had no idea how he had finally escaped) leaning upon the icy stone embankment of the Corniche with the dawn sea beneath him, rolling its slow swell up the stone piers, gushing softly into the conduits.  He could remember only running in dazed fashion down twisted streets in darkness and stumbling across the road and on to the seafront.  A pale rinsed dawn was breaking across the long sea-swell and a light sea-wind brought him the smell of tar and the sticky dampness of salt.  He felt like some merchant sailor cast up helpless in a foreign port at the other end of the world.  His pockets had been turned inside out like sleeves.  He was clad in a torn shirt and trousers.  His expensive studds and cufflinks and tiepin had gone, his wallet had vanished.  He felt deathly sick.  But as he gradually came to his senses he realized where he was from the glimpse of the Goharri Mosque as it stood up to take the light of dawn among its clumps of palms.  Soon the blind muezzin would be coming out like ancient tortoises to recite the dawn-praise of the only living God.  It was perhaps a quarter of a mile to where he had left the car.  Denuded now of his tarbush and dark glasses, he felt as if he had been stripped naked.  He started off at a painful trot along the stony embankments, glad that there was nobody about to recognize him.  The deserted square outside the Hotel was just waking to life with the first tram.  It clicked away towards Mazarita, empty.  The keys to his car had also disappeared and he now had the ignominious task of breaking the door-catch with a spanner which he took from the boot - terrified all the time that a policeman might come and question or perhaps even arrest him on suspicion.  He was seething with self-contempt and disgust and he had a splitting headache.  At last he broke the door and drove off wildly - fortunately, the chauffeur's keys were in the car - in the direction of Rushdi through the deserted streets.  His latchkey too had disappeared in the mêlée and he was forced to burst open one of the window-catches in the drawing-room in order to get into the house.  He thought at first that he would spend the morning asleep in bed after he had bathed and changed his clothes, but standing under the hot shower he realized that he was too troubled in mind; his thoughts buzzed like a swarm of bees and would not let him rest.  He decided suddenly that he would leave the house and return to Cairo before even the servants were up.  He felt that he could not face them.

      He changed his clothes furtively, gathered his belongings together, and set off across the town towards the desert road, leaving the city hurriedly like a common thief.  He had come to a decision in his own mind.  He would ask for a posting to some other country.  He would waste no more time upon this Egypt of deceptions and squalor, this betraying landscape which turned emotions and memories to dust, which beggared friendship and destroyed love.  He did not even think of Leila now; tonight she would be gone across the border.  But already it was as if she had never existed.

      There was plenty of petrol in the tank for the ride back.  As he turned through the last curves of the road outside the town he looked back once, with a shudder of disgust at the pearly mirage of minarets rising from the smoke of the lake, the dawn mist.  A train pealed somewhere, far away.  He turned on the radio of the car at full blast to drown his thoughts as he sped along the silver desert highway to the winter capital.  From every side, like startled hares, his thoughts broke out to run alongside the whirling car in a frenzy of terror.  He had, he realized, reached a new frontier in himself; life was going to be something completely different from now on.  He had been in some sort of bondage all this time; now the links had snapped.  He heard the soft hushing of strings and the familiar voice of the city breaking in upon him once again with its perverted languors, its ancient wisdoms and terrors.

     

                                                     Jamais de la vie,

                                                     Jamais dans ton lit

                                                     Quand ton coeur se démange de chagrin....

 

      With an oath he snapped the radio shut, choked the voice, and drove frowning into the sunlight as it ebbed along the shadowy flanks of the dunes.

      He made very good time and drew up before the Embassy to find Errol and Donkin loading the latter's old touring car with all the impedimenta of professional hunters - gun-cases and cartridge bags, binoculars and thermos flasks.  He walked slowly and shamefacedly towards them.  They both greeted him cheerfully.  They were due to start for Alexandria at midday.  Donkin was excited and blithe.  The newspapers that morning had carried reports that the King had made a good recovery and that audiences were to be granted at the weekend.  'Now, sir,' said Donkin, 'is Nur's chance to make Memlik act.  You'll see.'  Mountolive nodded dully; the news fell flatly on his ear, toneless and colourless and without presage.  He no longer cared what was going to happen.  His decision to ask for a transfer of post seemed to have absolved him in a curious way from any further personal responsibility as regards his own feelings.

      He walked moodily into the Residence and ordered his breakfast tray to be brought into the drawing-room.  He felt irritable and abstracted.  He rang for his despatch box to see what personal mail there might be.  There was nothing of great interest: a long chatty letter from Sir Louis who was happily sunning himself in Nice; it was fully of amusing and convivial gossip about mutual friends.  And of course the inevitable anecdote of a famous raconteur to round off the letter.  'I hope, dear boy, that the uniform still fits you.  I thought of you last week when I met Claudel, the French poet who was also an Ambassador, for he told me an engaging anecdote about his uniform.  It was while he was serving in Japan.  Out for a walk one day, he turned round to see that the whole residence was a sheet of flame and blazing merrily; his family was with him so he did not need to fear for their safety.  But his manuscripts, his priceless collection of books and letters - they were all in the burning house.  He hurried back in a state of great alarm.  It was clear that the house would be burned to the ground.  As he reached the garden he saw a small stately figure walking towards him - the Japanese butler.  He walked slowly and circumspectly towards the Ambassador with his arms held out before him like a sleepwalker; over them was laid the dress uniform of the poet.  The butler said proudly and sedately: "There is no cause for alarm, sir.  I have saved the only valuable object."  And the half-finished play, and the poems lying upstairs on the burning desk?  I suddenly thought of you, I don't know why.'

      He read on sighing and smiling sadly and enviously; what would he not give to be retired to Nice at this moment?  There was a letter from his mother, a few bills from his London tradesmen, a note from his broker, and a short letter from Pursewarden's sister.... Nothing of any real importance.

      There was a knock and Donkin appeared.  He looked somewhat crestfallen.  'The M.F.A.' he said, 'have been on the line with a message from Nur's office to say that he will be seeing the King at the weekend.  But ... Gabr hinted that our case is not supported by Memlik's own investigations.'

      'What does he mean by that?'

      'He says, in effect, that we have got the wrong Hosnani.  The real culprit is a brother of his who lives on a farm somewhere outside Alexandria.'

      'Narouz,' said Mountolive with astonishment and incredulity.

      'Yes.  Well apparently he --'

      They both burst out laughing with exasperation.  'Honestly,' said Mountolive, banging his fist into his palm, 'the Egyptians really are incredible.  Now how on earth have they arrived at such a conclusion?  One is simply baffled.'

      'Nevertheless, that is Memlik's case.  I thought you'd like to know, sir.  Errol and I are just off to Alex.  There isn't anything else, is there?'

      Mountolive shook his head.  Donkin closed the door softly behind him.  'So now they are going to turn on Narouz.  What a muddle of conflicting policies and diversions.'  He sank despairingly into a chair and frowned at his own fingers for a long moment before pouring himself out another cup of tea.  He felt incapable now of thought, of making the smallest decision.  He would write to Kenilworth and the Foreign Secretary this very morning about his transfer.  It was something he should have considered long since.  He sighed heavily.

      There came another and more diffident rap at the door.  'Come in,' he called wearily.  It opened and a dispirited-looking sausage-dog waddled into the room followed by Angela Errol who said, in a tone of strident heartiness not untouched by a sort of aggressive archness, 'Forgive the intrusion, but I came on behalf of the Chancery wives.  We thought you seemed rather lonely so we decided to put our heads together.  Fluke is the result.'  Dog and man looked at each other in a dazed and distrustful silence for a moment.  Mountolive struggled for words.  He had always loathed sausage-dogs with legs so short that they appeared to flop along like toads rather than walk.  Fluke was such an animal, already panting and slavering from its exertions.  It sat down at last and, as if to express once and for all its disenchantment with the whole sum of canine existence, delivered itself of a retromingent puddle on the beautiful Shiraz.  'Isn't he jolly?' cried the wife of the Head of Chancery.  It cost Mountolive something of an effort to smile, to appear to be overcome with pleasure, to express the appropriate thanks due to a gesture so thoughtful.  He was wild with vexation.  'He looks charming,' he said, smiling his handsome smile, 'really charming.  I am most awfully grateful, Angela.  It was a kind thought.'  The dog yawned lazily.  'Then I shall tell the wives that the gift has met with approval,' she said briskly, and moved towards the door.  'They will be delighted.  There is no companionship like that of a dog, is there?'  Mountolive shook his head seriously.  'None,' he said.  He tried to look as if he meant it.

      As the door closed behind her he sat down once more and raised his cup of tea to his lips as he stared unwinkingly and with distaste into the dog's lustreless eyes.  The clock chimed softly on the mantelpiece.  It was time to be going to the office.  There was much to be done.  He had promised to finish the definitive economic report in time for this week's bag.  He must bully the bag room about that portrait of himself.  He must....

      Yet he sat on looking at the dispirited little creature on the mat and feeling suddenly as if he had been engulfed in a tidal wave of human contumely - so expressed by his admirers in this unwanted gift.  He was to be garde-malade, a male nurse to a short-legged lap dog.  Was this now the only way left of exorcizing his sadness...?  He sighed, and sighing pressed the bell....

 

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