The Avignon Quintet

by Lawrence Durrell

  These young people were hospitality itself, and soon the large centre cabin with its enormous table and hanging petrol lantern was well and truly taken over – our belongings were disposed upon and around the bunks which lined the walls. The big central table with its sanded benches was where we sat and ate or played cards, or spread out our maps and writing materials. We were staying with them too briefly to have accumulated much luggage, for they were planning a trip of some two weeks and were very well equipped with everything in the way of tinned food and ammunition for their sporting guns. But the mood was so tranquil, the coilings of the great river so suave and dense with beautiful islands and groves, that we quite forgot that the pastures which bordered it were thick with quail and turtle-dove. While we were with them there was no shooting by common consent. That would begin, said Affad, when they arrived in the true north, the crocodile reaches. One ached to be going with them. Not the less because their visit to upper Egypt was to end with a ride out to a distant oasis where a famous country fair was to be held, and where a clairvoyant of renown was to be encountered who would tell their fortunes. “I don’t mind about the fortune-teller,” said Sam, “but the oasis sounds everything one has read about. What a damned shame.” But the two “ogres” professed not to be unduly superstitious and would, they said, be delighted to offer themselves to the fortune-teller as subjects.

  We dined that night by lantern light, while high overhead the night sky spread its carpet of brilliant stars and a frail new moon shone. It was quite chilly on the water and the freshets of evening wind rapped upon our prow as we drew into shore to anchor for the evening meal. Our consciousness had already been lulled and subdued by the thump of bare feet upon the wooden deck and the quavering, trailing songs of the watermen as they guided us southwards. The river opened and closed like a fan – suddenly enlarging its confines into whole estuaries or small lakes, only to fold back into its own narrow bed for a space. Kites hung in the higher airs, keeping up their steady relentless patrol, but all along the banks we met brilliant rollers and kingfishers, and the little rock-doves of the desert fringe with their plaintive small cry: “Too few,” they seemed to say, “too few.”

  The ever-changing light all round expanded and contracted solid outlines and distances so that the eyes, travelling in pursuit, were mesmerised by the apparent make-believe. “Lord bless you,” exclaimed Sam, inappropriately crossing himself and repeating the Latin grace in use at his Oxford college. “You couldn’t describe it to anyone because you can hardly believe it yourself.”

  Palms and tombs, tombs and waterwheels and palms. Islands rising and subsiding in the mist. A river which flowed like smoke between the two deserts in a luxuriant green bed full of paradisiacal plants and trees. “No wonder dervishes dance,” Sam went on, and Affad smiled his approval. “Who wouldn’t?” But with the rising light came also the glare and the parching heat, so that at midday the sky weighed a ton. “Tell me what surprised you most about Egypt,” said Affad curiously; he was genuinely curious and not merely in search of compliments. To have replied, “O everything” would have been at once too easy and not sufficiently exact; for my part what had assailed me was an extraordinary sense of familiarity. To throw open one’s shutters at Mena House and find oneself with, so to speak, a personal Sphinx squatting outside one’s window, patient as a camel … They seemed great playful toys, the Sphinxes, and despite the complete mystery which surrounded their history and meaning, curiously warm and familiar – domesticated animals, like the water-buffalo or the camel. And then of course the desert itself had been a complete surprise. One came upon it, came to the edge of the carpet of human plantation and there it was like a great theatrical personage, waiting serenely. It was at once a solitude and also homely as a back-garden. But as much an entity as the Atlantic; one could not just walk into it for a stroll, for its shapes were always changing; at the least wind all contours changed, and one’s tracks were expunged at a breath. No more could one decide to go for a row in the Atlantic without misgivings. The desert was a metaphor for everything huge and dangerous, yet without so seeming. Parts were slick as a powdered wig, parts shallow with pretty coloured rocks and clays, striated with the marks of vanished caravans; parts were like a burnt-out old colander full of dead cinders. Rosy winds sighed about it at dawn, or when the desert wind called khamseen set upon it, pillars of rusty blood-coloured wind raced as spume races ahead of the waves in an Atlantic storm. But riding across it one found certain animals quite at home, oriented and self-possessed; the rat, the jerboa, a kind of jack rabbit – how did they manage it when there was no cover at all save scrub? Packs of wild dogs wandered about with the air of living off the land – but what could they find to eat? Heavy dews at dawn and at midnight provided moisture of a kind for insects like mantises and locusts. But dogs? The desert offered a different sort of providence; its terrible frugality engendered introspection and compassion. God!

  Some of this I managed to say and Affad listened keenly, with interest. The desert fringed our present skyline, but here we were gliding upon the glazed reaches of the Nile which offered the contrasts of cool surface wind and sparkling water, not to mention the gorgeous panorama of river-craft with its thousand eye-coaxing sails of different hues. Here the felucca came into her own, dominating, like some great queen of antiquity, the river upon which she had been built to travel. The beauty of function, the elegance of purity and stress. No one could see a felucca and not feel it to be a symbol expressing the unconscious essence of womanhood. But feluccas have no need to be fashion-conscious. The way they press their cheeks to the river wind is as invariable as the wind itself, which imposes on them a formal geometrical precision of trajectory. They run down river upon a few sweet angles of inclination – and they surprise one with the feeling that they are among man’s choicest and rarest creations, which indeed they are. Their field of action is limited and more exacting than ocean navigation. The Nile flows directly down out of the heart of Africa into ancient Greek history – like the spine of a cobra. Its feluccas are controlled by the river winds which arrive and depart like soft-footed servants whose work is dedicated to these swallow-cut, pouting lateen rigs. A shivering goes through them like an electric current all day long, and they slide down river as if on a cord, then abruptly come to a halt and everything is becalmed, frozen in the middle of a tactic; the feluccas bow their heads as if the wind when it comes will behead them. Instead the glass floor starts rolling again, and quietly they turn to left or right to resume their journey. Here and there you might encounter one ferrying sugar-cane and wearing an eye like some apt Aegean echo; but the eye will be an Egyptian eye – the eye of the camel, in fact, with its double set of eyelashes. One will recognise the ship as a Greek vessel manned from the Greek colony at Edfu. The whole of Herodotus gazes out of that kohl-traced eye!

  The people of the river too are special and apart, different from the mundane and banausic town Egyptians. On the banks they superintend the criss-crossing water-channels and tend their dates and their vegetables, but always with time for a salute and a hoarse cry of welcome which invites the wayfarer to sit and sup with them. The women strike one more than the men – their magnificent carriage upon the treacherous river banks. They are black-avised as warlocks and wear their black cowls with formality and disdain. But their smile, fuller of ivory than a male elephant in rut, flashes out of toil-worn faces packed with all the majesty of hunger. They glide along like the unconscious patricians which they are, and their bear-like, gloating walk seems to draw its rhythm from the pace of the Nile’s green blood, flowing steadily from some distant wound in the heart of Africa.

  “For me,” said Bruno, “it was chiefly the tombs, dug so deep into the ground, and yet so snug. I have never seen anything comparable to the tiny kings lying there in their painted cocoons surrounded by their toys, as if the world of childhood also passed with them through the barrier of death. But what am I saying – ‘barrier’? I was struck by the facts of tha
t marvellous workmanship, all those frescoes so brilliant in their colouring, were to lie there unobserved by human eyes through the centuries. The little kings and queens with their toys, slowly drying out in their awkward sarcophagoi (the word means flesh-devourer in Greek, no?); their attitude to death was quite different from ours, or indeed from their contemporaries the Greeks’ with their asphodel-splashed underworld expressing all the sincere and open regret which the thought of death brought. They had no impassivity about death – it was terrible and sad and uprooting, and the end of every happiness. They refused to allow themselves any factitious consolation. And yet they were also naive, they felt if they wailed enough, made enough noise they might make death relent. But the Egyptian? This massive, slumbering, vegetal life of silence and vacancy, strapped into one’s swaddling clothes, the mummy wrappings … Then I realised that the word eternity really meant something to them – an eternal waiting – but for what they did not know. Time existed forever in massive extension – to the very confines of the human consciousness. It was frozen, their thoughts as well as their tears were frozen by the sepulchre, but there was no repining for death was real, and it existed like the next room exists while we are talking in this one. I got a shock off these strange little mummies, planted like vegetables in the shaly valleys. Even to sit beside them in the tombs and hear one’s own heart beating was a strange experience. And the toys? Reaching out one could actually touch their touch upon them, the touch of children’s fingers! But the quality of immobility, of waiting without thought, without hope, without desire, is something you can see in the peasants today as they wait for the sun to rise or set, or for the station to open, for the first train to come. They wait like inanimate objects, like sacks of grain, like chunks of marble. There is no buoyancy in them – just the enormous load of their waiting. One can read into their posture some of the immobility of the little kings in their brightly painted tombs. The word ‘eternity’ comes into the mind, the whole field of consciousness becomes one eternal waiting-room. Even the dust does not gain upon one in these bright tombs, for they are sealed and the little kings exist now in a tepid vacuum of eternity. They can get no older now, nor will they ever get any younger; but at least they have achieved a perpetual immobility, a perfection of non-being beyond moon or sun.”

  “How beautiful the women are!” cried Sylvaine. “They don’t seem to fuss very much about the veil either.”

  “It’s hard to work as they do and wear it.”

  “I hope they abolish it one day. What eyes!”

  “What eyes!” echoed Sam and added, in garbled quotation, “She walks in beauty like the Nile.” But it was an apt enough paraphrase for what one felt watching the women upon the banks, their tall frames moulded from the darkness of water and clay, brown as terracotta. In them you felt the great river with its sudden eddies and slow oozings, its lapses and languors. Yes, the river was her clock-time, she walked in time to river’s green blood, the Nile-pulse which throbbed in that velvet smooth element. The warmth of these villagers was inspiriting, smiles of charcoal, ivory or magenta, sudden flashes from the turret of a veil; and then the hoarse, bronze laughter of the man, brazen heads laughing, bronze arms raised. All suddenly cut off by a bend in the river, decapitated: their voices drowned by the shrieking of waterwheels whose wooden squeak is the most characteristic sound of the Egyptian night.

  The pilot smiles as he answers the wave of a whole village – but the smile passes like a breath over embers and then is gone, lost in his dark abstraction, his nilotic amnesia. Slowly the villages pass out of sight; night is falling, soft as a great moth. These big lumbering men and women have all the humbling dignity of dispossessed monarchs. They are paupers, ravaged by want and illness. The old stand about in attitudes of deafness, like so many King Lears. And yet their land is a paradise – nature’s exuberance has gone wild. You see cork oaks ravaged by ants, honeysuckle climbing into palm trees, water-laved rock carved into the heads of elephants. But everything enjoying a seeming aloneness under that burning sky. Dusk to darkness to starlight. A fish jumps. Then another. Then a sudden shower of silver arrows. It is to be our last night aboard.

  A faint river wind favours us, keeping the night insects at bay, so we are able to have our dinner by candleshine on deck – a smoky flapping light which we would soon extinguish in favour of a young rising moon. We grew sentimental and spoke of après la guerre. The French couple unhesitatingly expressed their intention of returning to Provence to spend the rest of their lives in the old tumbledown chateau of their ancestors. Bruno wanted to write a book about the Templars – apparently there was a mass of unpublished matter in the muniments room of the chateau.

  “You will come too,” he cried warmly. “I feel you will. I know you will. We will be happy living there with just each other for company!” I hardly dared to extend my wishes so far, though Sam seemed ready enough to promise so far ahead. I could not envisage any end to this war, and a deep sadness took possession of me. I thought of Anne Farnol and wondered how many like her would be forced to abdicate in the face of fate. Then, with a jolt, I “recognised” the face of Sylvaine; it is strange how small things stick. I had seen her for a while in the lunatic asylum of Montfavet near Avignon. I had been taken there by Lord Galen to visit a friend of his and I had glimpsed a dark girl, a patient, walking in the rose garden. So very like Sylvaine, the dark, bird-headed girl – they could have been twins as well. I told her this and she smiled and shook her head. “Not me,” she said, “or me in another life – who can say?”

  We had become such close friends now that it was quite a wrench to envisage this parting; just round the corner was the little town where tomorrow our car would wait to ferry us back to the capital where we were expected to dine with my Prince. Another small sadness too was that soon Sam would be going back to the front – and everyone knew that there was a big battle impending in the Western Desert. My heart turned over as I thought of Constance and watched her handsome, insouciant mate packing his kit bag.

  On the morrow it was all goodbyes and regrets, unfeigned enough, for the whole voyage had been a miracle of comfort and delight. Yes, we would all meet again, we swore it. Then with a melancholy thoroughness we packed our affairs into the big camouflaged staff car which bore the Egyptian army crescent. The return journey was a whirlwind of dusk and clamour as we swept through the villages on the river bank, scattering livestock and villagers alike by the noise of our triple horns. There was some point in this speeding, for the capital was a good distance away – and indeed we only arrived at the palace with half an hour to spare before dinner. As my servant wound me into my cummerbund I heard Sam in the shower talking, half to himself and half to me: “So Constance doth make cowards of us all, eh? As a matter of fact I wrote her a long letter from Greece; but God knows if it will ever reach her through the army post office. Anyway, I feel the better for having talked to you. Will you write her about my visit? You have so many more nouns and verbs than I.” I agreed to do this.

  The servant brought in a parcel of clothes and started laying out a desert uniform with Egyptian army tabs. Sam watched this curiously, wondering what it could mean. “I have been created an honorary lieutenant in the Egyptian army for tomorrow. Apparently the picnic place is technically out of bounds except to troops.” It was some time later over whiskies in the scarlet leather salon that the Prince himself added the details to this explanation, smoking a hashish-loaded cigarette in a long yellow holder.

  “It has always been our favourite picnic place, an old Coptic monastery in ruins, Aby Fahym. Now since that corner of the desert has been cleared of the Italians I have asked H.Q. for permission to revisit it. You will see how pretty it is, though mostly knocked down. First the Italians took it, then the British kicked them out; then they came back, then were kicked out again. Each time they knocked a piece off it. There was one old monk who refused to move; he lived in the ruins, crawling about like a lizard. Both sides fed him, he became a sort of
mascot. Finally he disappeared in the last British attack which took the place, and since then has never been seen. He will obviously become a legend in the Coptic Church; but meanwhile you will see how pretty it is.”

  Next morning we set off by car and motored to the desert fringe where we were met by horses and a string of camels: slower moving traffic, so to speak, but more adept when it came to carrying heavy baggage, tents and suchlike. Everyone was in high good spirits. The party had been joined by two young staff officers from the Military Mission, an Egyptian liaison officer and an R.A.M.C. doctor who seemed to be on good terms with the Prince and Princess and answered to the name of Major Drexel. He professed himself to be “swanning”, very much as Sam himself was. The Princess with some hauteur refused the horses and camels which she described as “Bedouin folklore” and elected to lead us in her comfortable estate car with its special tyres. So we set off in a somewhat straggling party to complete the first part of the journey which was undertaken with circumspection, for the route led us first through a network of minefields until we hit the final wire with its command cars and straggling tanks on duty. Here we provided our permits and documents and were ushered into the desert as if into a drawing-room by a ceremonious staff officer who took the trouble, however, to compare map references with the liaison officer and insist that we went no further than the feature mentioned on our permit. “At least, we take no responsibility for you beyond that point.”