IX

 

The whole quarter lay drowning in the umbrageous violet of approaching nightfall.  A sky of palpitating velours which was cut into by the stark flare of a thousand electric-light bulbs.  It lay over Tatwig Street, that night, like a velvet rind.  Only the lighted tips of the minarets rose above it on their slender invisible stalks - appeared hanging suspended in the sky; trembling slightly with the haze as if about to expand their hoods like cobras.  Drifting idly down those remembered streets once more I drank in (forever: keepsakes of the Arab town) the smell of crushed chrysanthemums, ordure, scents, strawberries, human sweat and roasting pigeons.  The procession had not arrived as yet.  It would form somewhere beyond the harlot's quarter, among the tombs, and wind its slow way to the shrine, geared to a dancing measure; calling on the way at each of the mosques to offer up a verse or two of the Book in honour of El Scob.  But the secular side of the festival was in full swing.  In the dark alleys people had brought their dinner tables into the street, candlelit and decked with roses.  So sitting they could catch the chipped headtones of the girl singers who were already standing on the wooden platforms outside the cafés, piercing the heavy night with their quartertones.  The streets were beflagged, and the great framed pictures of the circumcision doctors rippled on high among the cressets and standards.  In a darkened yard I saw them pouring the hot sugar, red and white, into the little wooden moulds from which would emerge the whole bestiary of Egypt - the ducks, horsemen, rabbits, and goats.  The great sugar figurines too of the Delta folklore - Yuna and Aziz the lovers interlocked, interpenetrated - and the bearded heroes like Abu Zeid, armed and mounted among the brigands.  They were splendidly obscene - surely the stupidest word in our language? - and brilliantly coloured before being dressed in their garments of paper, tinsel, and spangled gold, and set up on display among the Sugar Booths for the children to gape at and buy.  In every little square now the coloured marquees had been run up, each with its familiar sign.  The Gamblers were already busy - Abu Firan, the Father of Rats, was shouting cheerfully for customers.  The great board stood before him on trestles, each of the twelve houses marked with a number and a name.  In the centre stood the live white rat which had been painted with green stripes.  You placed your money on the number of a house, and won, if the rat entered it.  In another box the same game was in play, but with a pigeon this time; when all the bets were laid a handful of grain was tossed into the centre and the pigeon, in eating it, entered one of the numbered stalls.

      I bought myself a couple of sugar figurines and sat down outside a café to watch the passing show with its brilliant pristine colour.  These little 'arusas' or brides I would have liked to keep, but I knew that they would crumble or be eaten by ants.  They were the little cousins of the santons de Provence or the bonhommes de pain d'épices of the French country fair: of our own now extinct gilt gingerbread men.  I ordered a spoon of mastika to eat with the cool fizzing sherbet.  From where I sat at an angle between two narrow streets I could see the harlots painting themselves at an upper window before coming down to set up their garish booths among the conjurers and tricksters; Showal the dwarf was teasing them from his booth at ground level and causing screams of laughter at his well-aimed arrows.  He had a high tinny little voice and the most engaging of acrobatic tricks despite his stunted size.  He talked continuously even when standing on his head, and punctuated the point of his patter with a double somersault.  His face was grotesquely farded and his lips painted in a clown's grin.  At the other corner under a hide curtain sat Faraj the fortune-teller with his instruments of divination - ink, sand, and a curious hairy ball like a bull's testicles only covered in dark hair.  A radiantly beautiful prostitute squatted before him.  He had filled her palm with ink and was urging her to scry.

      Little scenes from the street life.  A mad wild witch of a woman who suddenly burst into the street, foaming at the lips and uttering curses so terrible that silence fell and everyone's blood froze.  Her eyes blazed like a bear's under the white matted hair.  Being mad she was in some sort holy, and no-one dared to face the terrible imprecations she uttered which, if turned on him, might spell ill luck.  Suddenly a grubby child darted from the crowd and tugged her sleeve.  At once calmed, she took his hand and turned away into an alley.  The festival closed every the memory of her like a skin.

      I was sitting here, drunk on the spectacle, when the voice of Scobie himself suddenly sounded at my elbow.  'Now, old man,' it said thoughtfully.  'If you have Tendencies you got to have Scope.  That's why I'm in the Middle East if you want to know....'

      'God, you gave me a start,' I said, turning round.  It was Nimrod the policeman who had been one of the old man's superiors in the police force.  He chuckled and sat down beside me, removing his tarbush to mop his forehead.  'Did you think he'd come to life?' he enquired.

      'I certainly did.'

      'I know my Scobie, you see.'

      Nimrod laid his flywhisk before him and with a clap of his hands commanded a coffee.  Then giving me a sly wink he went on in the veritable voice of the saint.  'The thing about Budgie was just that.  In Horsham there's no Scope.  Otherwise I would have joined him years ago in the earth-closet trade.  The man's a mechanical genius, I don't mind admitting.  And not having any income except what the old mud-slinger - as he laughingly calls it - brings him in, he's stymied.  He's in baulk.  Did I ever tell you about the Bijou Earth Closet?  No?  Funny, I thought I did.  Well, it was a superb contrivance, the fruit of long experiment.  Budgie is an FRZS you know.  He got it by home study.  That shows you what a brain the man has.  Well it was a sort of lever with a trigger.  The seat of the closet was on a kind of spring.  As you sat down it went down, but when you got up it sprang up of its own accord and threw a spadeful of earth into the bin.  Budgie says he got the idea from watching his dog clear up after himself with his paws.  But how he adapted it I just can't fathom.  It's sheer genius.  You have a magazine at the back which you fill with earth or sand.  Then when you get up the spring goes bang and presto!  He's making about two thousand a year out of it, I don't mind admitting.   Of course it takes times to build up a trade, but the overheads are low.  He has just one man working for him to build the box part, and he buys the springs - gets them made to specification in Hammersmith.  And they're very prettily painted too, with astrology all round the rim.  It looks queer, I admit.  In fact it looks arcane.  But it's a wonderful contrivance the little Bijou.  Once there was a crisis while I was home on leave for a month.  I called in to see Budgie.  He was almost in tears.  The chap who helped, Tom the carpenter, used to drink a bit and must have misplaced the sprockets on one series of Bijous.  Anyway complaints started to pour in.  Budgie said that his closets had gone mad all over Sussex and were throwing earth about in a weird and unwholesome way.  Customers were furious.  Well, there was nothing for it but to visit all his parishioners on a motorbike and adjust the sprockets.  I had so little time that I didn't want to miss his company - so he took me along with him.  It was quite an adventure I don't mind telling you.  Some of them were quite mad with Budgie.  One woman said the sprocket was so strong her closet threw mud the length of the drawing-room.  We had a time quietening her down.  I helped by lending a soothing influence I don't mind admitting, while Budgie tinkered with the springs.  I told stories to take their minds off the unhappy business.  But finally it got straightened out.  And now it's a profitable industry with members everywhere.'

      Nimrod sipped his coffee reflectively and cocked a quizzical eye in my direction, proud of his mimicry.  'And now,' he said, throwing up his hands, 'El Scob....'

      A crowd of painted girls passed down the street, brilliant as tropical parrots and almost as loud in their chattering and laughing.  'Now that Abu Zeid,' said Nimrod, 'has taken the Mulid under his patronage it's likely to grow into a bit of a headache for us.  It's such a crowded quarter.  This morning he sent a whole string of he-camels on heat into the town with bercim clover.  You know how horrible they smell.  And when they're in season they get that horrible jelly-like excrescence on their necks.  It must irritate them or suppurate or something, for they're scratching their necks the whole time on walls and posts.  Two of them had a fight.  It took hours to untangle the affair.  The place was blocked.'

      Suddenly a series of bangs sounded from the direction of the harbour and a series of bright coloured rockets traced their splendid grooves across the night, drooping and falling away with a patter and a hiss.  'Aha!' said Nimrod with self-satisfaction.  'There goes the Navy.  I'm glad they remembered.'

      'Navy?' I echoed as another long line of rockets tossed their brilliant plumage across the soft night.

      'The boys of H.M.S. Milton,' he chuckled.  'I happened to dine on board last night.  The wardroom was much taken by my story of an old Merchant Seaman who had been beatified.  I naturally did not tell them very much about Scobie; least of all about his death.  But I did hint that a few fireworks would be appropriate as coming from British mariners, and I also added that as a political gesture of respect it would earn them good marks with the worshippers.  The idea caught on at once, and the Admiral was asked for permission.  And there we go!'

      We sat for a while in companionable silence watching the fireworks and the highly delighted crowd which saluted each salvo with long quivering exclamations of pleasure.  'All-ah!  All-ah!'  Finally Nimrod cleared his throat and said: 'Darley, can I ask you a question?  Do you know what Justine is up to?'  I must have looked very blank, for he went on at once without hesitation: 'I only ask you because she rang me yesterday and said that she was going to break parole today, come into town deliberately, and that she wanted me to arrest her.  It sounds quite absurd - I mean to come all the way into town to give herself up to the Police.  She said she wanted to force a personal interview with Memlik.  It had to be me as reports from the British officers on the force would carry weight and draw Memlik's attention.  It sounds a bit of a rigmarole, doesn't it?  But I've got a date with her at the Central Station in half an hour.'

      'I know nothing about the matter.'

      'I wondered if you did.  Anyway, keep it under your hat.'

      'I will.'

      He stood up and held out his hand to say goodbye.  'You're off tonight I gather.  Good luck.'  As he stepped down from the little wooden platform he said: 'By the way, Balthazar is looking for you.  He's somewhere down at the shrine - what a word!'  With a brief nod his tall figure moved away into the brilliant swirling street.  I paid for my drink and walked down towards Tatwig Street, bumped and jostled by the holiday crowd.

      Ribbons and bunting and huge coloured gonfalons had been hung from every balcony along the street.  The little piece of wasteland under the arched doors was now the most sumptuous of saloons.  Huge tents with their brilliant embroidered designs had been set up, creating a ceremonial parade ground where the dancing and chanting would be held when the procession reached its destination.  This area was crowded with children.  The drone of prayers and the shrill tongue-trills of women came from the shrine which was dimly lit.  The suppliants were invoking fruitfulness of Scobie's bathtub.  The long quavering lines of the Suras spun themselves on the night in a web of melodious sound.  I quested round a bit among the crowd like a gun-dog, hunting for Balthazar.  At last I caught sight of him sitting somewhat apart at an outdoor café.  I made my way to his side.  'Good,' he said.  'I was on the lookout for you.  Hamid said you were off tonight.  He telephoned to ask for a job and told me.  Besides I wanted to share with you my mixture of shame and relief over this hideous accident.  Shame at the stupidity, relief that she isn't dead.  Both mixed.  I'm rather drunk with relief, and dazed with the shame.'  He was indeed rather tipsy.  'But it will be all right, thank God!'

      'What does Amaril think?'

      'Nothing as yet.  Or if he does he won't say.  She must have a comfortable twenty-four hours of rest before anything is decided.  Are you really going?'  His voice fell with reproof.  'You should stay, you know.'

      'She doesn't want me to stay.'

      'I know.  I was a bit shocked when she said she had told you to go; but she said "You don't understand.  I shall see if I can't will him back again.  We aren't quite ripe for each other yet.  It will come."  I was amazed to see her so self-confident and radiant again.  Really amazed.  Sit down, my dear chap, and have a couple of stiff drinks with me.  We'll see the procession quite well from here.  No crowding.'  He clapped his hands rather unsteadily and called for more mastika.

      When the glasses were brought he sat for a long while silent with his chin on his hands, staring at them.  Then he gave a sigh and shook his head sadly.

      'What is it?' I said, removing his glass from the tray and placing it squarely before him on the tin table.

      'Leila is dead,' he said quietly.  The words seemed to weigh him down with sorrow.  'Nessim telephoned this evening to tell me.  The strange thing is that he sounded exhilarated by the news.  He has managed to get permission to fly down and make arrangements for her funeral.  D'you know what he said?'  Balthazar looked at me with that dark all-comprehending eye and went on.  'He said: "While I loved her and all that, her death has freed me in a curious sort of way.  A new life is opening before me.  I feel years younger."  I don't know if it was a trick of the telephone or what but he sounded younger.  His voice was full of suppressed excitement.  He knew, of course, that Leila and I were the oldest of friends but not that all through this period of absence she was writing to me.  She was a rare soul, Darley, one of the rare flowers of Alexandria.  She wrote: "I know I am dying, my dear Balthazar, but all too slowly.  Do not believe the doctors and their diagnoses, you of all men.  I am dying of heartsickness like a true Alexandrian."'  Balthazar blew his nose in an old sock which he took from the breast-pocket of his coat; carefully folded it to resemble a clean handkerchief and pedantically replaced it.  'Yes,' he said again, gravely, 'what a word it is - "heartsickness"!  And it seems to me that while (from what you tell me) Liza Pursewarden was administering her death-warrant to her brother, Mountolive was giving the same back-hander to Leila.  So we pass the loving-cup about, the poisoned loving-cup!'  He nodded and took a loud sip of his drink.  He went on slowly, with immense care and effort, like someone translating from an obscure and recondite text.  'Yes, just as Liza's letter to Pursewarden telling him that at last the stranger had appeared was his coup de grâce so to speak, so Leila received, I suppose, exactly the same letter.  Who knows how these things are arranged?  Perhaps in the very same words.  The same words of passionate gratitude: "I bless you, I thank you with all my heart that through you I am at last able to receive the precious gift which can never come to those who are ignorant of its powers."  Those are the words of Mountolive.  For Leila quoted them to me.  All this was after she went away.  She wrote to me.  It was as if she were cut off from Nessim and had nobody to turn to, nobody to talk to.  Hence the long letters in which she went over it all, backwards and forwards, with that marvellous candour and clear-sightedness which I so loved in her.  She refused every self-deception.  Ah! but she fell between two stools, Leila, between two lives, two loves.  She said something like this in explaining it to me: "I thought at first when I got his letter that it was just another attachment - as it was in the past for his Russian ballerina.  There was never any secret between us of his loves, and that is what made ours seem so truthful, so immortal in its way.  It was a love without reserves.  But this time everything became clear to me when he refused to tell me her name, to share her with me, so to speak!  I knew then that everything was ended.  Of course in another corner of my mind I had always been waiting for this moment; I pictured myself facing it with magnanimity.  This I found, to my surprise, was impossible.  That was why for a long time, even when I knew he was in Egypt, and anxious to see me, I could not bring myself to see him.  Of course I pretended it was for other reasons, purely feminine ones.  But it was not that.  It wasn't lack of courage because of my smashed beauty, no!  For I have in reality the heart of a man."'

      Balthazar sat for a moment staring at the empty glasses with wide eyes, pressing his fingers softly together.  His story meant very little to me - except that I was amazed to imagine Mountolive capable of any very deep feeling, and at a loss to imagine this secret relationship with the mother of Nessim.

      'The Dark Swallow!' said Balthazar and clapped his hands for more drink to be brought.  'We shall not look upon her like again.'

      But gradually the raucous night around us was swelling with the deeper rumour of the approaching procession.  One saw the rosy light of the cressets among the roofs.  The streets, already congested, were now black with people.  They buzzed like a great hive with the contagion of the knowledge.  You could hear the distant bumping of drums and the hissing splash of cymbals, keeping time with the strange archaic peristaltic rhythms of the dance - its relatively slow walking pace broken by queer halts, to enable the dancers, as the ecstasy seized them, to twirl in and out of their syncopated measures and return once more to their places in the line of march.  It pushed its way through the narrow funnel of the main street like a torrent whose force makes it overleap its bed; for all the little side streets were full of sightseers running along, keeping pace with it.

      First came the grotesque acrobats and tumblers with masks and painted faces, rolling and contorting, leaping in the air and walking on their hands.  They were followed by a line of carts full of candidates for circumcision dressed in brilliant silks and embroidered caps, and surrounded by their sponsors, the ladies of the harem.  They rode proudly, singing in juvenile voices and greeting the crowd: like the bleating of sacrificial lambs.  Balthazar croaked: 'Foreskins will fall like snow tonight, by the look of it.  It is amazing that there are no infections.  You know, they use black gunpowder and lime-juice as a styptic for the wound!'

      Now came the various orders with their tilting and careening gonfalons with the names of the holy ones crudely written on them.  They trembled like foliage in the wind.  Magnificently robed sheiks held them aloft walking with difficulty because of their weight, yet keeping the line of the procession straight.  The street-preachers were gabbing the hundred holy names.  A cluster of bright braziers outlined the stern bearded faces of a cluster of dignitaries carrying huge paper lanterns, like balloons, ahead of them.  Now as they overran us and flowed down the length of Tatwig Street in a long ripple of colour we saw the various orders of Dervishes climb out of the nether darkness and emerge into the light, each order distinguished by its colour.  They were led by the black-capped Rifiya - the scorpion-eaters of legendary powers.  Their short barking cries indicated that the religious ecstasy was already on them.  They gazed around with dazed eyes.  Some had run skewers through their cheeks, others licked red-hot knives.  At last came the courtly figure of Abu Zeid with his little group of retainers on magnificently caparisoned ponies, their cloaks swelling out behind them, their arms raised in salutation like knights embarking on a tournament.  Before them ran a helter-skelter collection of male prostitutes with powdered faces and long flowing hair, chuckling and ejaculating like chickens in a farmyard.  And to all this queer discontinuous and yet somehow congruent mass of humanity the music lent a sort of homogeneity; it bound it and confined it within the heartbeats of the drums, the piercing skirl of the flutes, the gnashing of the cymbals.  Circling, proceeding, halting: circling, proceeding, halting, the long dancing lines moved on towards the tomb, bursting through the great portals of Scobie's lodgings like a tide at full, and deploying across the brilliant square in clouds of dust.

      And as the chanters moved forward to recite the holy texts six Mevlevi dervishes suddenly took the centre of the stage, expanding in a slow fan of movement until they had formed a semicircle.  They wore brilliant white robes reaching to their green slippered feet and tall brown hats shaped like huge bombes glacées.  Calmly, beautifully, they began to whirl, these 'tops spun by God', while the music of the flutes haunted them with their piercing quibbles.  As they gathered momentum their arms, which at first they hugged fast to their shoulders, unfolded as if by centrifugal force and stretched out to full reach, the right palm turned upward to heaven, the left downward to the ground.  So, with heads and tall rounded hats titled slightly, like the axis of the earth, they stayed there miraculously spinning, their feet hardly seeming to touch the floor, in this wonderful parody of the heavenly bodies in their perpetual motion.  On and on they went, faster and faster, until the mind wearied of trying to keep pace with them.  I thought of the verses of Jalaluddin which Pursewarden used sometimes to recite.  On the outer circles the Rifiya had begun their display of self-mutilation, so horrible to behold and yet so apparently harmless.  The touch of a sheik's finger would heal all these wounds pierced in the cheeks and breasts.  Here a dervish drove a skewer through his nostrils, there another fell upon the point of a dirk, driving it up through his throat into his skull.  But still the central knot of dancers continued its unswerving course, spinning in the sky of the mind.

      'My goodness,' said Balthazar at my elbow, with a chuckle, 'I thought he was familiar.  There's the Magzub himself.  The one at the further end.  He used to be an absolute terror, more than half mad.  The one who was supposed to have stolen the child and sold it to a brothel.  Look at him.'

      I saw a face of immense world-weary serenity, the eyes closed, the lips curved in a half-smile; as the dancer spun slowly to a halt this slender personage, with an air of half-prayerful modesty, took up a bundle of thorns and lighting it at a brazier thrust the blazing mass into his bosom against the flesh, and started to whirl once more like a tree in flames.  Then as the circle came to a swaying halt he plucked it out once more and gave the dervish next to him a playful slap upon the face with it.

      But now a dozen dancing circles intervened and took up the measure and the little courtyard overflowed with twisting turning figures.  From the little shrine came the steady drone of the holy word, punctuated by the shrill tongue trills of the votaries.

      'Scobie's going to have a heavy night,' said Balthazar with irreverence.  'Counting foreskins up there in the Moslem heaven.'

      Somewhere far away I heard the siren of a ship boom in the harbour, recalling me to my senses.  It was time to be going.  'I'll come down with you,' said Balthazar, and together we started to push and wriggle our way down the crowded street towards the Corniche.

      We found a gharry and sat silent in it, hearing the music and drumming gradually receding as we traversed the long rolling line of the marine parade.  The moon was up, shining on the calm sea, freckled by the light breeze.  The palms nodded.  We clip-clopped down the narrow twisted streets and into the commercial harbour at last with its silent ghostly watercraft.  A few lights winked here and there.  A liner moved out of its berth and slid softly down the channel - a long glittering crescent of light.

      The little launch which was to carry me was still being loaded with provisions and luggage.

      'Well,' I said, 'Balthazar.  Keep out of mischief.'

      'We'll be meeting again quite soon,' he said quietly.  'You can't shake me off.  The Wandering Jew, you know.  But I'll keep you posted about Clea.  I'd say something like "Come back to us soon", if I didn't have the feeling that you weren't going to.  I'm damned if I know why.  but that we'll meet again I'm sure.'

      'So am I,' I said.

      We embraced warmly, and with an abrupt gesture he climbed back into the gharry and settled himself once more.

      'Mark my words,' he said as the horse started up to the flick of a whip.

      I stood, listening to the noise of its hooves until the night swallowed them up.  Then I turned back to the work in hand.

 

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