Mountolive - Chapter V

literary transcript

My dear David,

You will be astonished to get a letter of such length from me, I don't doubt. But the news of your appointment only reached me lately in rumoured form, and there is much you should know about the state of affairs here which I could not address to you formally as Ambassador Designate (Confidential: Under Flying Seal) ahem!

Ouf! What a bore! I hate writing letters as you well know. And yet ... I myself shall almost certainly be gone by the time you arrive, for I have taken steps to get myself transferred. After a long series of calculated wickednesses I have at last managed to persuade poor Errol that I am unsuitable for the Mission which I have adorned these past months. Months! A lifetime! And Errol himself is so good, so honest, so worthy; a curious goat-like creature who nevertheless conveys the impression of being a breech-delivery! He has put in his paper against me with the greatest reluctance. Please do nothing to countermand the transfer which will result from it, as it squares with my own private wishes. I implore you.

The deciding factor has been my desertion of my post for the past five weeks which has caused grave annoyance and finally decided Errol. I will explain everything. Do you remember, I wonder, the fat young French diplomat of the Rue du Bac? Nessim took us round once for drinks? Pombal by name? Well, I have taken refuge with him - he is serving here. It is really quite gay chez lui. The summer over, he headless Embassy retired with the Court to winter in Cairo, but this time without Yours Truly. I went underground. Nowadays we rise at eleven, turn out the girls, and after having a hot bath play backgammon until lunch-time; then an arak at the Café Al Aktar with Balthazar and Amaril (who send their love) and lunch at the Union Bar. Then perhaps we call on Clea to see what she is painting, or go to a cinema. Pombal is doing all this legitimately; he is on local leave. I am en retraite. Occasionally the exasperated Errol rings up long distance in an attempt to trace me and I answer him in the voice of a poule from the Midi. It rattles him badly because he guesses it is me, but isn't quite sure. (The point about a Wykehamist is that he cannot risk giving offence.) We have lovely, lovely conversations. Yesterday I told him that I, Pursewarden, was under treatment for a glandular condition chez Professor Pombal but was now out of danger. Poor Errol! One day I shall apologize to him for all the trouble I have caused him. Not now. Not until I get my transfer to Siam or Santos.

All this is very wicked of me, I know, but ... the tedium of this Chancery with all these un-grown-up people! The Errols are formidably Britannic. They are, for example, both economists. Why both, I ask myself? One of them must feel permanently redundant. They make love to two places of decimals only. Their children have all the air of vulgar fractions!

Well. The only nice ones are the Donkins; he is clever and high-spirited, she rather common and fast-looking with too much rouge. But ... poor dear, she is over-compensating for the fact that her little husband has grown a beard and turned Moslem! She sits with a hard aggressive air on his desk, swinging her leg and smoking swiftly. Mouth too red. Not quite a lady and hence insecure? Her husband is a clever youth but far too serious. I do not dare to ask if he intends to put in for the extra allowance of wives to which he is entitled.

But let me tell you in my laboured fashion what lies behind all this nonsense. I was sent here, as you know, under contract, and I fulfilled my original task faithfully - as witness the giant roll of paper headed (in a lettering usually reserved for tombstones) Instruments for a Cultural Pact Between the Governments of His Britannic Majesty etc. Blunt instruments indeed - for what can a Christian culture have in common with a Moslem or a Marxist? Our premises are hopelessly opposed. Never mind! I was told to do it and I done it. And much as I love what they've got here I don't understand the words in relation to an educational system based on the abacus and a theology which got left behind with Augustine and Aquinas. Personally I think we both have made a mess of it, and I have no parti-pris in the matter. And so on. I just don't see what D.H. Lawrence has to offer a pasha with seventeen wives, though I believe I know which one of them is happiest.... However, I done it, the Pact I mean.

This done I found myself rapidly sent to the top of the form as a Political and this enabled me to study papers and evaluate the whole Middle Eastern complex as a coherent whole, as a policy venture. Well, let me say that after prolonged study I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it is neither coherent nor even a policy - at any rate a policy capable of withstanding the pressures which are being built up here.

These rotten states, backward and venal as they are, must be seriously thought about; they cannot be held together just by encouraging what is weakest and most corrupt in them, as we appear to be doing. This approach would presuppose another fifty years of peace and no radical element in the electorate at home: that given, the status quo might be maintained. But given this prevailing trend, can England be as short-sighted as this? Perhaps. I don't know. It is not my job to know these things, as an artist; as a political I am filled with misgiving. To encourage Arab unity while at the same time losing the power to use the poison-cup seems to me to be a very dubious thing: not policy but lunacy. And to add Arab unity to all the other currents which are running against us seems to me to be an engaging folly. Are we still beset by the doleful dream of the Arabian Nights, fathered on us by three generations of sexually disoriented Victorians whose subconscious reacted wholeheartedly to the thought of more than one legal wife? Or the romantic Bedouin-fever of the Bells and Lawrences? Perhaps. But the Victorians who fathered this dream on us were people who believed in fighting for the value of their currency; they knew that the world of politics was a jungle. Today the Foreign Office appears to believe that the best way to deal with the jungle is to turn Nudist and conquer the wild beast by the sight of one's nakedness. I can hear you sigh. 'Why can't Pursewarden be more precise. All these boutades!'

Very well. I spoke of the pressures. Let us divide them into internal and external, shall we, in the manner of Errol? My views may seem somewhat heretical, but here they are.

Well then, first, the abyss which separates the rich from the poor - it is positively Indian. In Egypt today, for example, six per cent of the people own over three-quarters of the land, thus leaving under a feddan a head for the rest to live on. Good! Then the population is doubling itself every second generation - or is it third? But I suppose any economic survey will tell you this. Meanwhile there is the steady growth of a vocal and literate middle-class whose sons are trained at Oxford among our comfy liberalisms - and who find no jobs waiting for them when they come back here. The babu is growing in power, and the dull story is being repeated here as elsewhere. 'Intellectual coolies of the world unite.'

To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic. The Arab Union, etc.... My dear chap, why are we thinking up these absurd constructs to add to our own discomfiture - specially as it is clear to me that we have lost the basic power to act which alone would ensure that our influence remained paramount here? These tottering backward-looking feudalisms could only be supported by arms against these disintegrating elements inherent in the very nature of things today; but to use arms, 'to preach with the sword,' in the words of Lawrence, one must have a belief in one's own ethos, one's own mystique of life. What does the Foreign Office believe? I just don't know. In Egypt, for example, very little has been done beyond keeping the peace; the High Commission is vanishing after a rule of - since 1888? - and will not leave behind even the vestiges of a trained civil service to stabalize this rabble-ridden grotesque which we now apparently regard as a sovereign state. How long will fair words and courtly sentiments prevail against the massive discontents these people feel? One can trust a treaty king only as long as he can trust his people. How long remains before a flashpoint is reached? I don't know - and to be frank I don't much care. But I should say that some unforeseen outside pressure like a war would tumble over these scarecrow principalities at a breath. Anyway, these are my general reasons for wanting a change. I believe we should reorient policy and build Jewry into the power behind the scenes here. And quick.

Now for the particular. Very early in my political life I ran up against a department of the War Office specializing in general intelligence, run by a Brigadier who resented the idea that his office should bow the knee to us. A question of rank, or allowances, or some such rot; under the Commission he had been allowed more or less a free hand. Incidentally, this is the remains of the old Arab Bureau left over from 1918 which has been living on quietly like a toad buried under a stone! Obviously in the general re-alignment, his show must (it seemed to me) integrate with somebody. And now there was only an embryonic Embassy in Egypt. As he had worked formerly to the High Commission's Political Branch, I thought he should work to me - and indeed, after a series of sharp battles, bent if not broke him - Maskelyne is the creature's name. He is so typical as to be rather interesting, and I have made extensive notes on him for a book in my usual fashion. (One writes to recover a lost innocence!)

Well, since the Army discovered that imagination is a major factor in producing cowardice they have trained the Maskelyne breed in the virtues of counter-imagination: a sort of amnesia which is almost Turkish. The contempt for death has been turned into a contempt for life and this type of man accepts life only on his own terms. A frozen brain alone enables him to keep up a routine of exceptional boredom. He is very thin, very tall, and his skin has been tanned by Indian service to the colour of smoked snakeskin, or a scab painted with iodine. His perfect teeth rest as lightly as a feather upon his pipestem. There is a peculiar gesture he has - I wish I could describe it, it interests me so much - of removing his pipe slowly before speaking, levelling his small dark eyes at one, and almost whispering: 'Oh, do you really think so?' The vowels drawing themselves out infinitely into the lassitude, the boredom of the silence which surrounds him. He is gnawed by the circumscribed perfection of a breeding which makes him uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and indeed he walks about in his well-cut cavalry coat with a Noli me tangere air. (Breed for type and you always get anomalies of behaviour.) He is followed everywhere by his magnificent red pointer Nell (named after his wife?) who sleeps on his feet while he works at his files, and on his bed at night. He occupies a room in a hotel in which there is nothing personal - no books, no photographs, no papers. Only a set of silver-backed brushes, a bottle of whisky and a newspaper. (I imagine him sometimes brushing the silent fury out of his own scalp, furiously brushing his dark shiny hair back from the temples, faster and faster. Ah, that's better - that's better!)

He reaches his office at eight having bought his day-late copy of the Daily Telegraph. I have never seen him read anything else. He sits at his huge desk, consumed with a slow dark contempt for the venality of the human beings around him, perhaps the human race as a whole; imperturbably he examines and assorts their differing corruptions, their maladies, and outlines them upon marble minute-paper which he always signs with his little silver pen in a small awkward fly's handwriting. The current of his loathing flows through his veins slowly, heavily, like the Nile at flood. Well, you can see what a numéro he is. He lives purely in the military imagination, for he never sees or meets the subjects of most of his papers; the information he collates comes in from suborned clerks, or discontented valets, or pent-up servants. It does not matter. He prides himself on his readings of it, his I.A. (intelligence appreciation), just like an astrologer working upon charts belonging to unseen, unknown subjects. He is judicial, proud as the Calif, unswerving, I admire him very much. Honestly I do.

Maskelyne has set up two marks between which (as between degree-signs on a calibrated thermometer) the temperatures of his approval and disapproval are allowed to move, expressed in the phrases: 'A good show for the Raj' and 'Not such a good show for the Raj'. He is too single-minded of course, ever to be able to imagine a really Bad Show for the Bloody Raj. Such a man seems unable to see the world around him on open sights; but then his profession and the need for reserve make him a complete recluse, make him inexperienced in the ways of the world upon which he sits in judgement.... Well, I am tempted to go on and frame the portrait of our spycatcher, but I will desist. Read my next novel but four, it should also include a sketch of Telford, who is Maskelyne's Number Two - a large blotchy ingratiating civilian with ill-fitting dentures who manages to call one 'old fruit' a hundred times a second between nervous guffaws. His worship of the cold snaky soldier is marvellous to behold. 'Yes, Brigadier', 'No, Brigadier', falling over a chair in his haste to serve; you would say he was completely in love with his boss. Maskelyne sits and watches his confusion coldly, his brown chin, cleft by a dark dimple, jutting like an arrow. Or he will lean back in his swivel-chair and tap softly on the door of the huge safe behind him with the faintly satisfied air of a gourmet patting his paunch as he says: 'You don't believe me? I have it all in here, all in here.' Those files, you think, watching this superlative, all-comprehending gesture, must contain material enough to indict the world! Perhaps they do.

Well, this is what happened: one day I found a characteristic document from Maskelyne on my desk headed Nessim Hosnani, and subtitled A Conspiracy Among the Copts which alarmed me somewhat. According to the paper, our Nessim was busy working up a large and complicated plot against the Egyptian Royal House. Most of the data were rather questionable I thought, knowing Nessim, but the whole paper put me in a quandary, for it carried the bland recommendation that the details should be transmitted by the Embassy to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs! I can hear you draw your breath sharply. Even supposing this were true, such a course would put Nessim's life in the greatest danger. Have I explained that one of the major characteristics of Egyptian nationalism is the gradually growing envy and hate of the 'foreigners' - the half-million or so of non-Moslems here? And that the moment full Egyptian sovereignty was declared the Moslems started in to bully and expropriate them? The brains of Egypt, as you know, is its foreign community. The capital which flowed into the land while it was safe our suzerainty, is now at the mercy of these paunchy pashas. The Armenians, Greeks, Copts, Jews - they are all feeling the sharpening edge of this hate; many are wisely leaving, but most cannot. These huge capital investments in cotton, etc., cannot be abandoned overnight. the foreign communities are living from prayer to prayer and from bribe to bribe. They are trying to save their industries, their life-work from the gradual encroachment of the pashas. We have literally thrown them to the lions!

Well, I read and re-read this document, as I say, in a state of considerable anxiety. I knew that if I gave it to Errol he would run bleating with it to the King. So I went into action myself to test the weak points in it - mercifully it was not one of Maskelyne's best papers - and succeeded in throwing doubt upon many of his contentions. But what infuriated him was that I actually suspended the paper - I had to in order to keep it out of Chancery's hands! My sense of duty was sorely strained, but then there was no alternative; what would those silly young schoolboys next-door have done? If Nessim was really guilty of the sort of plot Maskelyne envisaged, well and good; one could deal with him later according to his lights. But ... you know Nessim. I felt that I owed it to him to be sure before passing such a paper upwards.

But of course Maskelyne was furious, though he had the grace not to show it. We sat in his office with the conversational temperature well below zero and still falling while he showed me his accumulated evidence and his agents' reports. 'I have this man Selim suborned,' Maskelyne kept croaking, 'and I'm convinced his own secretary can't be wrong about it. There is this small secret society with the regular meetings - Selim has to wait with the car and drive them home. Then there is this curious cryptogram which goes out all over the Middle East from Balthazar's clinic, and then the visits to arms manufacturers in Sweden and Germany....' I tell you, my brain was swimming! I could see all our friends neatly laid out on a slab by the Egyptian Secret Police, being measured for shrouds.

I must say, too, that circumstantially the inferences which Maskelyne drew appeared to hold water. It all looked rather sinister; but luckily a few of the basic points would not yield to analysis - things like the so-called cipher which friend Balthazar shot out once every two months to chosen recipients in the big towns of the Middle East. Maskelyne was still trying to follow these up. But the data were far from complete and I stressed this as strongly as I could, much to the discomfort of Telford, though Maskelyne is too cool a bird of prey to be easily discountenanced. Nevertheless I got him to agree to pend the paper until something more substantial was forthcoming to broaden the basis of the doctrine. He hated me but he swallowed it, and so I felt that I had gained at least a temporary respite. The problem was what to do next - how to use the time to advantage? I was of course convinced that Nessim was innocent of these grotesque charges. But I could not, I admit, supply explanations as convincing of those of Maskelyne. What, I could not help wondering, were they really up to? If I was to deflate Maskelyne, I must find out for myself. Very annoying, and indeed professionally improper - but que faire? Little Ludwig must turn himself into a private investigator, a Sexton Blake, in order to do the job! But where to begin?

Maskelyne's only direct lead on Nessim was through the suborned secretary, Selim; through him he had accumulated quite a lot of interesting though not intrinsically alarming data about the Hosnani holdings in various fields - the land bank, shipping line, ginning mills, and so on. The rest was largely gossip and rumour, some of it damaging, but none of it more than circumstantial. But piled up in a heap it did make our gentle Nessim sound somewhat sinister. I felt that I must take it all apart somehow. Specially as a lot of it concerned and surrounded his marriage - the acid gossip of the lazy and envious, so typical of Alexandria - or anywhere else for that matter. In this, of course, the unconscious moral judgements of the Anglo-Saxon were to the fore - I mean in the value-judgements of Maskelyne. As for Justine - well, I know her a bit, and I must confess I rather admire her surly magnificence. Nessim haunted her for some time before getting her to consent, I am told; I cannot say I had misgivings about it all exactly, but ... even today their marriage feels in some curious way uncemented. They make a perfect pair, but never seem to touch each other; indeed, once I saw her very slightly shrink as he picked a thread from her fur. Probably imagination. Is there perhaps a thundercloud brooding there behind the dark satin-eyed wife? Plenty nerves, certainly. Plenty hysteria. Plenty Judaic melancholy. One recognizes her vaguely as the girlfriend of the man whose head was presented on a charger.... What do I mean?

Well, Maskelyne says with his dry empty contempt: 'No sooner does she marry than she starts an affair with another man, and a foreigner to boot.' This of course is Darley, the vaguely amiable bespectacled creature who inhabits Pombal's box-room at certain times. He teaches for a living and writes novels. He has that nice round babyish back to the head which one sees in cultural types; slight stoop, fair hair, and the shyness that goes with Great Emotions imperfectly kept under control. A fellow-romantic quotha! Looked at hard, he starts to stammer. But he's a good fellow, gentle and resigned ... I confess that he seems unlikely material for someone as dashing as Nessim's wife to work upon. Can it be benevolence in her, or simply a perverse taste for innocence? There is a small mystery here. Anyway, it was Darley and Pombal who introduced me to the current Alexandrian livre de chevet which is a French novel called Moeurs (a swashing study in the grand manner of nymphomania and psychic impotence) written by Justine's last husband. Having written it he wisely divorced her and decamped, but she is popularly supposed to be the central subject of the book and is regarded with grave sympathy by society. I must say, when you think that everyone is both polymorph and perverse here, it seems hard luck to be singled out like this as the main character in a roman vache. Anyway, this lies in the past, and now Nessim has carried her into the ranks of le monde where she acquits herself with a sharply defined grace and savagery. They suit her looks and the dark but simple splendours of Nessim himself. Is he happy? But wait, let me put the question another way. Was he ever happy? Is he unhappier now than he was? Hum! I think he could do a lot worse, for the girl is neither too innocent nor too unintelligent. She plays the piano really well, albeit with a sulky emphasis, and reads widely. Indeed, the novels of Yours Truly are much admired - with a disarming wholeheartedness. (Caught! Yes, this is why I am disposed to like her.)

On the other hand, what she sees in Darley I cannot credit. The poor fellow flutters on a slab like a skate at her approach; he and Nessim are, however, great frequenters of each other, great friends. These modest British types - do they all turn out to be Turks secretly? Darley at any rate must have some appeal because he has also got himself regally entangled with a rather nice little cabaret dancer called Melissa. You would never think, to look at him, that he was capable of running a tandem, so little self-possession does he appear to have. A victim of his own fine sentiment? He wrings his hands, his spectacles steam up, when he mentions either name. Poor Darley! I always enjoy irritating him by quoting the poem by his minor namesake to him:

O blest unfabled Incense Tree

That burns in glorious Araby,

With red scent chalicing the air,

Till earth-life grows Elysian there.

He pleads with me blushingly to desist, though I cannot tell which Darley he is blushing for; I continue in magistral fashion:

Half-buried in her flaming breast

In this bright tree she makes her nest

Hundred-sunned Phoenix! When she must

Crumble at length to hoary dust!

It is not bad conceit for Justine herself. 'Stop' he always cries.

Her gorgeous death-bed! Her rich pyre

Burn up with aromatic fire!

Her urn, sight-high from spoiler men!

Her birth-place when self-born again!

'Please. Enough.'

'What's wrong with it? It's not such a bad poem, is it?'

And I conclude with Melissa, disguised as an 18th Century Dresden China shepherdess.

The mountainless green wilds among,

Here ends she her unechoing song

With amber tears and odorous sighs

Mourned by the desert where she dies!

So much for Darley! But as for Justine's part in the matter I can find no rhyme, no reason, unless we accept one of Pombal's epigrams at its face value. He says, with fat seriousness: 'Les femmes sont fidèles au fond, tu sais? Elles ne trompent que les autres femmes!' But it seems to me to offer no really concrete reason for Justine wishing to tromper the pallid rival Melissa. This would be infra dig for a woman with her position in society. See what I mean?

Well, then, it is upon Darley that our Maskelyne keeps his baleful ferret's eyes fixed; apparently Selim tells us that all the real information on Nessim is kept in a little wall-safe at the house and not in the office. There is only one key to this safe which Nessim always carries on his person. The private safe, says Selim, is full of papers. But he is vague as to what the papers can be. Love letters? Hum. At any rate, Selim has made one or two attempts to get at the safe, but without any luck. One day the bold Maskelyne himself decided to examine it at close range and take, if necessary, a wax squeeze. Selim let him in and he climbed the back stairs - and nearly ran into Darley, our cicisbeo, and Justine in the bedroom! He just heard their voices in time. Never tell me after this that the English are puritans. Some time later I saw a short story Darley published in which a character exclaims: 'In his arms I felt mauled, chewed up, my fur coated with saliva, as if between the paws of some great excited cat.' I reeled. 'Crumbs!' I thought. 'This is what Justine is doing to the poor bugger - eating him alive!'

I must say, it gave me a good laugh. Darley is so typical of my compatriots - snobbish and parochial in one. And so good! He lacks devil. (Thank God for the Irishman and the Jew who spat in my blood.) Well, why should I take this high and mighty line? Justine must be awfully good to sleep with, must kiss like a rainbow and squeeze out great sparks - yes. But out of Darley? It doesn't hold water. Nevertheless 'this rotten creature', as Maskelyne calls her, is certainly his whole attention, or was when I was last there. Why?

All these factors were tumbling over and over in my mind as I drove up to Alexandria, having secured myself a long duty weekend which even the good Errol found unexceptionable. I never dreamed then, that within a year you might find yourself engaged by these mysteries. I only knew that I wanted, if possible, to demolish the Maskelyne thesis and stay the Chancery's hand in the matter of Nessim. But apart from this I was somewhat at a loss. I am no spy, after all; was I to creep about Alexandria dressed in a pudding-basin wig with concealed earphones, trying to clear the name of our friend? Nor could I very well present myself to Nessim and, clearing my throat, say nonchalantly: 'Now about this spy-net you've got here....' However, I drove steadily and thoughtfully on. Egypt, flat and unbosomed, flowed back and away from me on either side of the car. The green changed to blue, the blue to peacock's eye, to gazelle-brown, to panther-black. The desert was like a dry kiss, a flutter of eyelashes against the mind. Ahem! The night became horned with stars like branches of almond-blossom. I gibbered into the city after a drink or two under a new moon which felt as if it were drawing half its brilliance from the open sea. Everything smelt good again. The iron band that Cairo puts round one's head (the consciousness of being completely surrounded by burning desert?) dissolved, relaxed - gave place to the expectation of an open sea, an open road leading one's mind back to Europe.... Sorry. Off the point.

I telephoned the house, but they were both out at a reception; feeling somewhat relieved I betook myself to the Café Al Aktar in the hope of finding congenial company and found: only our friend Darley. I like him. I like particularly the way he sits on his hands with excitement when he discusses art, which he insists on doing with Yours Truly - why? I answer as best I can and drink my arak. But this generalized sort of conversation puts me out of humour. For the artist, I think as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain. Artist and public simply register, like a seismograph, an electromagnetic charge which can't be rationalized. One only knows that a transmission of sorts goes on, true or false, successful or unsuccessful, according to chance. But to try to break down the elements and nose them over - one gets nowhere. (I suspect this approach to art is common to all those who cannot surrender themselves to it!) Paradox. Anyway.

Darley is in fine voice this eve, and I listen to him with grudging pleasure. He really is a good chap, and a sensitive one. But it is with relief that I hear Pombal is due to appear shortly after a visit to the cinema with a young woman he is besieging. I am hoping he will offer to put me up as hotels are expensive and I can then spend my travel allowance on drink. Well, at last old P. turns up, having had his face smacked by the girl's mother who caught them in the foyer. We have a splendid evening and I stay chez him as I had hoped.

The next morning I was up betimes though I had decided on nothing, was still bedevilled in mind about the whole issue. However, I thought I could at least visit Nessim in his office as I had so often done, to pass the time of day and cadge a coffee. Whispering up in the huge glass lift, so like a Byzantine sarcophagus, I felt confused. I had prepared no conversation for the event. The clerks and typists were all delighted and showed me straight through into the great domed room where he sat.... Now here is the curious thing. He not only seemed to be expecting me, but to have divined my reasons for calling! He seemed delighted, relieved and full of an impish sort of serenity. 'I've been waiting for ages,' he said with dancing eyes, 'wondering when you were finally going to come and beard me, to ask me questions. At last! What a relief!' Everything melted between us after this and I felt I could take him on open sights. Nothing could exceed the warmth and candour of his answers. They carried immediate conviction with me.

The so-called secret society, he told me, was a student lodge of the Cabala devoted to the customary mumbo-jumbo of parlour mysticism. God knows, this is the capital of superstition. Even Clea has her horoscope cast afresh every morning. Sects abound. Was there anything odd in Balthazar running such a small band of would-be hermetics - a study group? As for the cryptogram, it was a sort of mystical calculus - the old boustrophedon no less - with the help of which the lodge-masters all over the Middle East could keep in touch. Surely no more mysterious than a stock-report or a polite exchange between mathematicians working on the same problem? Nessim drew one for me and explained roughly how it was used. He added that all this could be effectively checked by consulting Darley who had taken to visiting these meetings with Justine to suck up hermetical lore. He would be able to say just how subversive they were! So far so good. 'But I can't disguise from you,' he went on, 'the existence of another movement, purely political, with which I am directly concerned. This is purely Coptic and is designed simply to rally the Copts - not to revolt against anyone (how could we?) but simply to band themselves together; to strengthen religious and political ties in order that the community can find its way back to a place in the sun. Now that Egypt is free from the Copt-hating British, we feel freer to seek high offices for our people, to get some Members of Parliament elected and so on. There is nothing in all this which should make an intelligent Moslem tremble. We seek nothing illegitimate or harmful; simply our rightful place in our own land as the most intelligent and able community in Egypt.'

There was a good deal more about the back history of the Coptic community and its grievances - I won't bore you with it as you probably know it all. But he spoke it all with a tender shy fury which interested me as being so out of keeping with the placid Nessim we both knew. Later, when I met the mother, I understood; she is the driving force behind this particular minority-dream, or so I believe. Nessim went on: 'Nor near France and Britain fear anything from us. We love them both. We ask for no aid, no money. We think of ourselves as Egyptian patriots, but knowing how stupid and backward the Arab National element is, and how fanatical, we do not think it can be long before there are violent differences between the Egyptians and yourselves. They are already flirting with Hitler. In the case of a war ... who can tell? The Middle East is slipping out of the grasp of England and France day by day. We minorities see ourselves in peril as the process goes on. Our only hope is that there is some respite, like a war, which will enable you to come back and retake the lost ground. Otherwise, we will be expropriated, enslaved. But we still place our faith in you both. Now, from this point of view, a compact and extremely rich influence little group of Coptic bankers and businessmen could exercise an influence out of all proportion to its numbers. We are your fifth column in Europe, fellow Christians. In another year or two, when the movement is perfected, we could bring immediate pressure to bear on the economic and industrial life of the country - if it served to push through a policy which you felt to be necessary. That is why I have been dying to tell you about us, for England should see in us a bridgehead to the East, a friendly enclave in an area which daily becomes more hostile, to you.' He lay back, quite exhausted, but smiling.

'But of course I realize,' he said, 'that this concerns you as an official. Please treat the matter as a secret, for friendship's sake. The Egyptians would welcome any chance to expropriate us Copts - confiscate the millions which we control: perhaps even kill some of us. They must not know about us. That is why we meet secretly, have been building up the movement so slowly, with such circumspection. There must be no slips, you see. Now my dear Pursewarden. I fully realize that you cannot be expected to take all I tell you on trust, without proof. So I am going to take a rather unusual step. Day after tomorrow is Sitna Damiana and we are having a meeting in the desert. I would like you to come with me so that you can see everything, hear the proceedings and have your mind quite clear about our composition and our intentions. Later we may be of the greatest service to Britain here; I want to drive the fact home. Will you come?'

Would I come!

I went. It was really a great experience which made me realize that I had hardly seen Egypt - the true Egypt underlying the fly-tormented airless towns, the drawing-rooms of commerce, the bankers' sea-splashed villas, the Bourse, the Yacht Club, the Mosque.... But wait.

We set off in a cold mauve dawn and drove a little way down the Aboukir road before turning inland; thence across dust roads and deserted causeways, along canals and abandoned trails which the pashas of old had constructed to reach their hunting-boxes on the lake. At last we had to abandon the car, and here the other brother was waiting with horses - the troglodyte with the gueule cassée, Narouz of the broken face. What a contrast, this black peasant, compared to Nessim! And what power! I was much taken by him. He was caressing a swashing great hippo's backbone made into a whip - the classical kurbash. Saw him pick dragonflies off the flowers at fifteen paces with it; later in the desert he ran down a wild dog and cut it up with a couple of strokes. The poor creature was virtually dismembered in a couple of blows, by this toy! Well, we rode sombrely along to the house. You went there ages ago, didn't you? I had a long session with the mother, an odd imperious bundle of a woman in black, heavily veiled, who spoke arresting English in a parched voice which had the edge of hysteria in it. Nice, somehow, but queer and somewhat on edge - voice of a desert father or desert sister? I don't know. Apparently the two sons were to take me across to the monastery in the desert. Apparently Narouz was due to speak. It was his maiden over - his first try at it. I must say, I couldn't see this hirsute savage being able to. Jaws working all the time pressing the muscles around his temples! He must, I reflected, grind his teeth in sleep. But somehow also the shy blue eyes of a girl. Nessim was devoted to him. And God what a rider!

Next morning we set off with a bundle of Arab horses which they rode sweetly and a train of shuffle-footed camels which were a present for the populace from Narouz - they were to be cut up and devoured. It was a long exhausting trek with the heat mirages playing havoc with concentration and eyesight and the water tepid and horrible in the skins, and yours truly feeling baleful and fatigued. The sun upon one's brainpan! My brains were sizzling in my skull by the time we came upon the first outcrop of palms - the jumping and buzzing image of the desert monastery where poor Damiana had her Diocletian head struck from her shoulders for the glory of our Lord.

By the time we reached it dusk had fallen, and here one entered a brilliantly-coloured engraving which could have illustrated ... what? Vathek! A huge encampment of booths and houses had grown up for the festival. There must have been six thousand pilgrims camped around in houses of wattle and paper, of cloth and carpet. A whole township had grown up with its own lighting and primitive drainage - but a complete town, comprising even a small but choice brothel quarter. Camels pounded everywhere in the dusk, lanterns and cressets flapped and smoked. Our people pitched us a tent under a ruined arch where two grave bearded dervishes talked, under gonfalons folded like the brilliant wings of moths, and by the light of a great paper lantern covered in inscriptions. Dense darkness now, but brilliantly lit sideshows with all the fun of the fair. I was itching to have a look round and this suited them very well as they had things to arrange within the church, so Nessim gave me a rendezvous at the home tent in an hour and a half. He nearly lost me altogether, I was so enraptured by the freak town with its mud streets, and long avenues of sparkling stalls - food of every sort, melons, eggs, bananas, sweets, all displayed in that unearthly light. Every itinerant pedlar from Alexandria must have trekked out across the sand to sell to the pilgrims. In the dark corners were the children playing and squeaking like mice, while their elders cooked food in huts and tents, lit by tiny puffing candles. The sideshows were going full blast with their games of chance. In one booth a lovely prostitute sang heart-breakingly, chipped quartertones and plangent headnotes as she turned in his sheath of spiral sequins. She had her price on the door. It was not excessive, I thought, being a feeble-minded man, and I rather began to curse my social obligations. In another corner a story-teller was moaning out the sing-song romance of El Zahur. Drinkers of sherbet, of cinnamon, were spread at ease on the seats of makeshift cafés in these beflagged and lighted thoroughfares. From within the walls of the monastery came the sound of priests chanting. From without the unmistakable clatter of men playing at single-stick with the roar of the crowd acclaiming every stylish manoeuvre. Tombs full of flowers, watermelons shedding a buttery light, trays of meat perfuming the air - sausages and cutlets and entrails buzzing on spits. The whole thing welded into one sharply fused picture of light and sound in my brain. The moon was coming up hand over fist.

In the Ringa-booths there were groups of glistening mauve abstracted Sudanese dancing to the odd music of the wobbling little harmonium with vertical keys and painted gourds for pipes; but they took their step from a black buck who banged it out with a steel rod upon a section of railway line hanging from the tent-pole. Here I ran into one of Cervoni's servants who was delighted to see me and pressed upon me some of the curious Sudanese beer they call merissa. I sat and watched this intent, almost maniacal form of dance - the slow revolutions about a centre and the queer cockroach-crushing steps, plunging the toe down and turning it in the earth. Until I was woken by the ripple of drums and saw a dervish pass holding one of the big camel-drums - a glowing hemisphere of copper. He was black - a Rifiya - and as I had never seen them do their fire-walking, scorpion-eating act, I thought I might follow him and see it tonight. (It was touching to hear Moslems singing religious songs to Damiana, a Christian saint; I heard voiced ululating the words 'Ya Sitt Ya Bint El Wali' over and over again. Isn't that odd? 'O Lady, Lady of the Viceroy'.) Across the darkness I tracked down a group of dervishes in a lighted corner between two great embrasures. It was the end of a dance and they were turning one of their number into a human chandelier, covered in burning candles, the hot wax dripping all over him. His eyes were vague and tranced. Last of all comes an old boy and drives a huge dagger through both cheeks. On each end of the dagger he hoists a candlestick with a branch of lighted candles in each. Transfixed thus the boy rises slowly to his toes and revolves in a dance - like a tree on fire. After the dance, they simply whipped the sword out of his jaw and the old man touched his wounds with a finger moistened with spittle. Within a second there was the boy standing there smiling again with nothing to show for his pains. But he looked awake now.

Outside all this - the white desert was turning under the moon to a great field of skulls and millstones. Trumpets and drums sounded and there came a rush of horsemen in conical hats waving wooden swords and shrieking in high voices, like women. The camel-and-horse races were due to start. Good, though I, I shall have a look at that; but treading unwarily I came upon a grotesque scene which I would gladly have avoided if I had been able. The camels of Narouz were being cut up for the feast. Poor things, they knelt there peacefully with their forelegs folded under them like cats while a horde of men attacked them with axes in the moonlight. My blood ran cold, yet I could not tear myself away from this extraordinary spectacle. The animals made no move to avoid the blows, uttered no cries as they were dismembered. The axes bit into them, as if their great bodies were made of cork, sinking deep under every thrust. Whole members were being hacked off as painlessly, it seemed, as when a tree is pruned. The children were dancing about in the moonlight picking up the fragments and running off with them into the lighted town, great gobbets of bloody meat. The camels stared hard at the moon and said nothing. Off came the legs, out came the entrails; lastly the heads would topple under the axe like statuary and lie there in the sand with open eyes. The men doing the axing were shouting and bantering as they worked. A huge soft carpet of black blood spread into the dunes around the group and the barefoot boys carried the print of it back with them into the township. I felt frightfully ill of a sudden and retired back to the lighted quarter for a drink; and sitting on a bench watched the passing show for a while to recover my nerve. Here at last Nessim found me and together we walked inside the walls, past the grouped cells called 'combs'. (Did you know that all early religions were built up on a cell pattern, imitating who-knows-what biological law?...) So we came at last to the church.

Wonderfully painted sanctuary screen, and ancient candles with waxen beards burning on the gold lectern, the light now soft and confused by incense to the colour of pollen; and the deep voices running like a river over the gravel-bottomed Liturgy of St Basil. Moving softly from gear to gear, pausing and resuming, starting lower down the scale only to be pressed upwards into the throats and minds of these black shining people. The choir passed across us like swans, breath-catching in their high scarlet helmets and white robes with scarlet crossbands. The light on their glossy black curls and sweating faces! Enormous frescoed eyes with whites gleaming. It was pre-Christian, this; each of these young men in his scarlet biretta had become Rameses the Second. The great chandeliers twinkled and fumed, puffs of snowy incense rose. Outside you could hear the noises of the camel-racing crew, inside only the grumble of the Word. The long hanging lamps had ostrich-eggs suspended under them. (This has always struck me as being worth investigating.)

I thought that this was our destination but we skirted the crowd and went down some stairs into a crypt. And this was it at last. A series of large beehive rooms, lime-washed white and spotless. In one, by candlelight, a group of about a hundred people sat upon rickety wooden benches waiting for us. Nessim pressed my arm and pushed me to a seat at the very back among a group of elderly men who gave me place. 'First I will talk to them,' he whispered, 'and then Narouz is to speak to them - for the first time.' There was no sign of the other brother as yet. The men next to me were wearing robes but some of them had European suits on underneath. Some had their heads wrapped in wimples. To judge by their well-kept hands and nails, none were workmen. They spoke Arabic but in low tones. No smoking.

Now the good Nessim rose and addressed them with the cool efficiency of someone taking a routine board meeting. He spoke quietly and as far as I could gather contented himself with giving them details about recent events, the election of certain people to various committees, the arrangements for trust funds and so on. He might have been addressing shareholders. They listened gravely. A few quiet questions were asked which he answered concisely. Then he said: 'But this is not all, these details. You will wish to hear something about our nation and our faith, something that even our priests cannot tell you. My brother Narouz, who is known to you, will speak a little now.'

What on earth could the baboon Narouz have to tell them, I wondered? It was most interesting. And now, from the outer darkness of the cell next-door came Narouz, dressed in a white robe and looking pale as ashes. His hair had been smeared down on his forehead in an oiled quiff, like a collier on his day off. No, he looked like a terrified curate in a badly-ironed surplice; huge hands joined on his chest with the knuckles squeezed white. He took his place at a sort of wooden lectern with a candle burning on it, and stared with obvious wild terror at his audience, squeezing the muscles out all over his arms and shoulders. I thought he was going to fall down. He opened his clenched jaws but nothing came. He appeared to be paralysed.

There came a stir and a whisper, and I saw Nessim looking somewhat anxiously at him, as if he might need help. But Narouz stood stiff as a javelin, staring right through us as at some terrifying scene taking place behind the white walls at our backs. The suspense was making us all uncomfortable. Then he made a queer motion with his mouth, as if his tongue were swollen, or as if he was surreptitiously swallowing a soft palate, and a hoarse cry escaped him. 'Meded! Meded!' It was the invocation for divine strength you sometimes hear desert preachers utter before they fall into a trance - the dervishes. His face worked. And then came a change - all of a sudden it was as if an electric current had begun to pour into his body, into his muscles, his loins. He relaxed his grip on himself and slowly, pantingly began to speak, rolling those amazing eyes as if the power of speech itself was half-involuntary and causing him physical pain to support.... It was a terrifying performance, and for a moment or two I could not understand anything, he was articulating so badly. Then all of a sudden he broke through the veil and his voice gathered power, vibrating in the candlelight like a musical instrument.

'Our Egypt, our beloved country,' drawing out the words like toffee, almost crooning them. It was clear that he had nothing prepared to say - it was not a speech, it was an invocation uttered extempore such as one has sometimes heard - the brilliant spontaneous flight of drunkards, ballad singers, or those professional mourners who follow burial processions with their shrieks of death-divining poetry. The power and the tension flooded out of him into the room; all of us were electrified, even myself whose Arabic was so bad! The tone, the range and the bottled ferocity and tenderness his words conveyed hit us, sent us sprawling, like music. It didn't seem to matter whether we understood them or not. It does not even now. Indeed, it would have been impossible to paraphrase the matter. 'The Nile ... the green river flowing in our hearts hears its children. They will return to her. Descendants of the Pharaohs, children of Ra, offspring of St Mark. They will find the birthplace of light.' And so on. At times the speaker closed his eyes, letting the torrent of words pour on unhindered. Once he set his head back, smiling like a dog, still with eyes closed, until the light shone upon his back teeth. That voice! It went on autonomously, rising to a roar, sinking to a whisper, trembling and crooning and wailing. Suddenly snapping out words like chainshot, or rolling them softly about like honey. We were absolutely captured - the whole lot of us. But it was something comical to see Nessim's concern and wonder. He had expected nothing like this apparently, for he was trembling like a leaf and quite white. Occasionally he was swept away himself by the flood of rhetoric and I saw him dash away a tear from his eye almost impatiently.

It went on like this for about three-quarters of an hour and suddenly, inexplicably, the current was cut off, the speaker was snuffed out. Narouz stood there gasping like a fish before us - as if thrown up by the tides of inner music on to a foreign shore. It was as abrupt as a metal shutter coming down - a silence impossible to repair again. His hands knotted again. He gave a startled groan and rushed out of the place with his funny scrambling motion. A tremendous silence fell - the silence which follows some great performance by an actor or orchestra - the germinal silence in which you can hear the very seeds in the human psyche stirring, trying to move towards the light of self-recognition. I was deeply moved and utterly exhausted. Fecundated!

At last Nessim rose and made an indefinite gesture. He too was exhausted and walked like an old man; took my hand and led me up into the church again, where a wild hullabaloo of cymbals and bells had broken out. We walked through the great puffs of incense which now seemed to blow up at us from the centre of the earth - the angel and demon-haunted spaces below the world of men. In the moonlight he kept repeating: 'I never knew, I never guessed this of Narouz. He is a preacher. I asked him only to talk of our history - but he made it ...’ He was at a loss for words. Nobody had apparently suspected the existence of this spellbinder in their midst - the man with the whip! 'He could lead a great religious movement,' I thought to myself. Nessim walked wearily and thoughtfully by my side among the palms. 'He is a preacher, really,' he said with amazement. 'That is why he goes to see Taor.' He explained that Narouz often rode into the desert to visit a famous woman saint (alleged by the way to have three breasts) who lives in a tiny cave near Wadi Natrum; she is famous for her wonder-working cures, but won't emerge from obscurity. 'When he is away,' said Nessim, 'he has either gone to the island to fish with his new gun or to see Taor. Always one or the other.'

When we got back to the tent the new preacher was lying wrapped in his blanket sobbing in a harsh voice like a wounded she-camel. He stopped when we entered, though he went on shaking for a while. Embarrassed, we said nothing and turned in that night in a heavy silence. A momentous experience indeed!

I couldn't sleep for quite a while, going over it all in my mind. The next morning we were up at dawn (bloody cold for May - the tent stiff with frost) and in the saddle by the earliest light. Narouz had completely come to himself. He twirled his whip and played tricks on the factors in a high good humour. Nessim was rather thoughtful and withdrawn, I thought. The long ride galled our minds and it was a relief to see the crested palms grow up again. We rested and spent the night again at Karm Abu Girg. The mother was not available at first and we were told to see her in the evening. Here an odd scene took place for which Nessim appeared as little prepared as I. As the three of us advanced through the rose-garden towards her little summerhouse, she came to the door with a lantern in her hand and said: 'Well, my sons, how did it go?' At this, Narouz fell upon his knees, reached out his arms to her. Nessim and I were covered with confusion. She came forward and put her arms round this snorting and sobbing peasant, at the same time motioning us to leave. I must say I was relieved when Nessim sneaked off into the rose-garden and was glad to follow him. 'This is a new Narouz,' he kept repeating softly, with genuine mystification. 'I did not know of these powers.'

Later Narouz came back to the house in the highest of spirits and we all played cards and drank arak. He showed me, with immense pride, a gun he had had made for him in Munich. It fires a heavy javelin under water and is worked by compressed air. He told me a good deal of this new method of fishing under water. It sounded a thrilling game and I was invited to visit his fishing island with him one weekend to have a pot. The preacher had vanished altogether by now; the simple-minded second son had returned.

Ouf! I am trying to get all the salient detail down as it may be of use to you later when I am gone. Sorry if it is a bore. On the way back to the town I talked at length to Nessim and got all the facts clear in my head. It did seem to me that from the policy point of view the Coptic group might be of the greatest use to us; and I was certain that this interpretation of things would be swallowed if properly explained to Maskelyne. High hopes!

So I rode back happily to Cairo to rearrange the chessboard accordingly. I went to see Maskelyne and tell him the good news. To my surprise he turned absolutely white with rage, the corners of his nose pinched in, his ears moving back about an inch like a greyhound. His voice and eyes remained the same. 'Do you mean to tell me that you have tried to supplement a secret intelligence paper by consulting the subject of it? It goes against every elementary rule of intelligence. And how can you believe a word of so obvious a cover story? I have never heard of such a thing. You deliberately suspend a War Office paper, throw my fact-finding organization into disrepute, pretend we don't know our jobs, etc...' You can gather the rest of the tirade. I began to get angry. He repeated dryly: 'I have been doing this for fifteen years. I tell you it smells of arms, of subversion. You won't believe my I.A. and I think yours is ridiculous. Why not pass the paper to the Egyptians and let them find out for themselves?' Of course I could not afford to do this, and he knew it. He next said that he had asked the War Office to protest in London and was writing to Errol to ask for 'redress'. All this, of course, was to be expected. But then I tackled him upon another vector. 'Look here,' I said. 'I have seen all your sources. They are all Arabs and as such unworthy of confidence. How about a gentleman's agreement? There is no hurry - we can investigate the Hosnanis at leisure - but how about choosing a new set of sources - English sources? If the interpretations still match, I promise you I'll resign and make a full recantation. Otherwise I shall fight this thing right through.'

'What sort of sources do you have in mind?'

'Well, there are a number of Englishmen in the Egyptian Police who speak Arabic and who know the people concerned. Why not use some of them?'

He looked at me for a long time. 'But they are as corrupt as the Arabs. Nimrod sells his information to the press. The Globe pay him a retainer of twenty pounds a month for confidential information.'

'There must be others.'

'By God there are. You should see them!'

'And then there's Darley who apparently goes to these meetings which worry you so much. Why not ask him to help?'

'I won't compromise my net by introducing characters like that. It is not worth it. It is not secure.'

'Then why not make a separate net - let Telford build it up. Specially for this group, for no other. And having no access to your main organization. Surely you could do that?'

He stared at me slowly, drop by drop. 'I could if I chose to,' he admitted. 'And if I thought it would get us anywhere. But it won't.'

'At any rate, why not try? Your own position here is rather equivocal until an Ambassador comes to define it and arbitrate between us. Suppose I do pass this paper out and this whole group gets swept up?'

'Well, what?'

'Supposing it is, as I believe it to be, something which could help British policy in this area, you'll get no thanks for having allowed the Egyptians to nip it in the bud. And indeed, if that did prove to be the case, you would find....'

'I'll think about it.' He had no intention of doing so, I could see, but he must have. He changed his mind; next day he rang up and said he was doing as I suggested, though 'without prejudice'; the war was still on between us. Perhaps he had heard of your appointment and knew we were friends. I don't know.

Ouf! that is about as much as I can tell you; for the rest, the country is still here - everything that is heteroclyte, devious, polymorph, anfractuous, equivocal, opaque, ambiguous, many-branched, or just plain dotty. I wish you joy of it when I am far away! I know you will make your first mission a resounding success. Perhaps you won't regret these tags of information from

Yours sincerely

Earwig van Beetfield

* * * * *

Mountolive studied this document with great care. He found the tone annoying and the information mildly disturbing. But then, every mission was riven with faction; personal annoyances, divergent opinions, they were always coming to the fore. For a moment he wondered whether it would not be wiser to allow Pursewarden the transfer he desired; but he restrained the thought by allowing another to overlap it. If he was to act, he should not at this stage show irresolution - even with Kenilworth. He walked about in the wintry landscape waiting for events to take definite shape around his future. Finally, he composed a tardy note to Pursewarden, the fruit of much rewriting and thought, which he despatched through the bag room.

My dear P.,

I must thank you for your letter with the interesting data. I feel I cannot make any decisions before my own arrival. I don't wish to prejudge issues. I have however decided to keep you attached to the Mission for another year. I shall ask for a greater attention to discipline than your Chancery appears to do; and I know you won't fail me however disagreeable the prospect of staying seems to you. There is much to do this end, and much to decide before I leave.

Yours sincerely,

David Mountolive

It conveyed, he hoped, the right mixture of encouragement and censure. But of course, Pursewarden would not have written flippantly had he visualized serving under him. Nevertheless, if his career was to take the right shape he must start at the beginning.

But in his own mind he had already planned upon getting Maskelyne transferred and Pursewarden elevated in rank as his chief political adviser. Nevertheless a hint of uneasiness remained. But he could not help smiling when he received a postcard from the incorrigible. 'My dear Ambassador,' it read. 'Your news has worried me. You have so many great big bushy Etonians to choose from.... Nevertheless. At your service.'

* * * * *