‘I should have brought my rifle,’ said Blix. ‘I will bet you a gin and tonic I could hit the sixth medal on the left-hand side right there where the enamel is peeling.’
‘You’re casting ridicule on a Captain of Caesar’s Legions. Do you know the penalty for that?’
‘No. I think they condemn you to read a Gayda editorial daily, for life. But it would be almost worth it.’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘Silence!’ This was uttered in punctilious English by the Captain himself, who followed it with some crisp orders in Italian, and the effect was magical. Four soldiers dived into the Leopard, dragged out everything movable and spread it on the sand — and once more our papers vanished across the desert in the keeping of a dispatch rider who handled his machine with impressive skill.
Three and a half hours after our landing at Amseat, word came (I suspected directly from Rome) that we might proceed to Benghazi.
‘But’ said the Captain, ‘you do not follow the coast. It is required that you take the desert route and circle the forts — three times for each.’
‘There is no desert route.’
‘You will circle these forts,’ said the Captain, ‘or be arrested at Benghazi.’ He clicked his heels, gave the Fascist salute, as did the entire garrison, and we took off.
Our map had been marked with three X’s — each indicating a fort. The X’s were at intervals across the Libyan Desert on a zigzag course. It was the first time I had been prevented from landing at Tobruk, and there could be no doubt that the Italians were making elaborate preparations, even then, for something more grandiose than just the defence of Libya. Their forts and their chests extended outward far beyond their usual confines.
From the air, the first fort looked like a child’s conception of a fort, executed in sand with a toy shovel. But that was only because of the vast and empty stretches that surrounded it; any desert fort, regardless of the flag that flew over it, would look like that. But we had spent a lot of precious time searching for this one and done a lot of grumbling about it too. Having achieved the goal, we found it disappointing.
The barracks were set around a huge square which appeared to be quite empty, and there were turrets like those of a penitentiary. If there were guns, they were well hidden. Either by design or necessity, the material from which the fort was built was the exact colour of the desert itself. As we circled, men came out of the buildings, and some of them waved their arms. A few waved violently — half in anger, I thought, because of the tantalizing liberty of our plane as against their dry drudgery, and half in welcome of a sign that the world was still a reasonable world that left men free to fly — or some men, anyway.
No spirit of gallant adventure emanated from that dreary fort. It was peopled by men whose roots had been pulled up and planted again in the sand, and whose cheerless houses, too, rested precariously on the same uncertain stuff. The simulated belligerence of a passive people was symbolized there. Like the pompous medals on the Captain’s chest, this fort was one of several medals pinned vaingloriously, if with doubtful permanence, on the great grey torso of the desert.
We circled again and levelled off and continued our search.
‘One bomb,’ said Blix, ‘would wipe it out.’
We found the next fort, by the grace of God, but not the last. The word ‘fort’ presents a massive picture to the mind, but to the Libyan Desert a fort is hardly more than just another hump of sand. A fort is nothing. We had no course to follow — only a pencil mark to find; and the size of a thing is great or small in relation to its background. The sky has stars — the desert only distance. The sea has islands — the desert only more desert; build a fort or a house upon it and you have achieved nothing. You can’t build anything big enough to make any difference.
Night falls like a dropped shutter in Libya in March. A plane without petrol falls too, or anyway spirals down into near oblivion.
‘We won’t bother about the last fort,’ I said to Blix. ‘I’d rather be jailed in Benghazi than stranded down there.’
‘You’re the pilot,’ said Blix. ‘Doctor Turvy and I are only passengers.’
XXII
Benghazi by Candlelight
THE GREEKS OF CYRENAICA called it Hesperides. Ptolemy the Third was in love with his wife, so he called it Berenice. I don’t know who changed it to Benghazi, but this is not the first act of vandalism the old city has suffered. The cornerstones of Benghazi are the tombs of its founders and their conquerors, and much of its history lies still buried in hand-hewn crypts of rock.
The city lives on an ancient spit of earth between the Gulf of Sidra and a marshy waste, and the shadow it casts has changed shape through the centuries. Once the shadow was slender and small; once it was broad and tipped with the arrogant spikes of a castle; once a monastery lent its quiet contours to the cool silhouette printed each day against the sand. But now, though this castle and this monastery still stand, their shadows are dissolved in the angular blur of modern buildings. The shape of the shadow has changed and will change again because Benghazi sprawls in the path of war. Mars kicks the little city to earth and it rises again, stubbornly, and is reduced again, but not for long. It is a small city with a soul — a grubby soul, perhaps, but cities with souls seldom die.
Like all seaports of the East, Benghazi is blatant and raw; it is weary and it is wise. Once it lived on ivory brought by caravan across the desert, trading this treasure and ostrich feathers and lesser things to an appreciative world, but now it deals in duller stuff — or deals in nothing, waiting for another war to pass, knowing that in reality it has no function except to provide hostelry for armies on the march.
Blix and I landed at Benghazi minutes before night. The Italian airport there is excellent, and so are the hangars. This latter convenience was especially satisfying to me, since I knew that our plane would be whisked away from us at once and put under lock and key (which it was). But there was no satisfaction in Blix’s reminder that jail awaited us.
‘If they are lenient,’ he said, ‘we oughtn’t to get more than five years for ignoring that last fort. It was a serious breach of etiquette.’
But we got nothing. The frantic efficiency of the garrison at Amseat seemed to have burned itself out before anybody could telegraph the authorities at Benghazi that we were arriving and that our visit to each of the three forts ought to be verified. Nobody cared.
We were, of course, dragged through the usual tedious business of explaining to assorted officials just why we were there — not to say just why we were alive at all; but this had become routine for us as well as for them, and so they were stalemated.
When the order came allowing us to go to our hotel, we left the last of the Government buildings we had been filtered through, and hired a Fiat taxi whose Arab driver had lain in ambush before the official portals from the moment we had entered them. The driver knew most certainly that there was not a hotel room to be had in all of Benghazi, but he chose to break this disheartening intelligence to us gently; he drove from one hotel to another, sitting behind the wheel with a kind of anticipant leer on his face, mumbling in gulps and snatches of English that the next place would surely have rooms enough. But there were none. Mussolini’s armies had outmanoeuvred us; Benghazi was occupied by fifty thousand polished boots.
In the end we gave up. We were hungry and thirsty and dead tired.
‘Find any place,’ said Blix, ‘anywhere, so long as it has a couple of rooms!’
‘Anywhere’ was the dirty fringe of Benghazi — the fringe that harbours the useless ones of twenty nations, the castoffs, the slag fallen to the side and forgotten until, out of necessity, it must sometimes be waded through or tread upon. ‘Anywhere’ was arrived at through a web-work of pinched and broken streets, dark, swept with the odours of poverty, the trapped and stagnant smells of stagnant life. ‘Anywhere’ was the anywhere of all cities — the refuse heap of human shards.
I sat with Blix
in the back of the taxi and felt weariness turn to depression. The taxi slowed, wavered, and stopped.
We were in front of a square, mud building two stories high. A few of its windows had glass, some were spread over with rags. None was lighted. The structure had about it a mute quality; it stared at the street with the soulless expression of imbecility.
Our driver waved his arm toward the doorway which was open and had a yellow light burning somewhere behind it. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I am lucky for you. No?’
Blix paid the fare without answering, and we went into a courtyard walled on all sides and festooned with tiers of tattered washing. The air was dead and smelled dead.
‘Nice place,’ said Blix.
I nodded, but we were not amused. We stood there stupidly, myself in white flying overalls no longer white, and Blix in wrinkled slacks and a shirt that had lost its shape. Everything about us was alien, and so we felt alien — almost apologetic, I think.
A door opened down the yard and a woman came toward us. She had a lighted candle and she lifted it close to our faces. Her own face held the lineage of several races, none of which had given it distinction. It was just a husk with eyes. She spoke, but we understood nothing. Hers was a language neither of us had ever heard.
Blix made gestures with his hands, asking for rooms, and the woman nodded quickly enough and led us into the house and up a flight of stairs. She showed us two rooms not even separated by a door. Each contained an iron bed that cowered under a sticky blanket and had an uncovered pillow at its head. One room had a white enamel basin on the floor, and the jug to match it was on the floor of the other. Everything lay under scales of filth.
‘All the diseases of the world live here,’ I said to Blix.
He was laconic. ‘So do we, until tomorrow.’
He followed our hostess down the stairs in the hope of finding food and a drink while I cleaned my face with handkerchiefs until it was recognizable again. Later I followed too.
I found them both in a kind of musty cell at the rear of the house. The cell had a stove and two shelves and its walls were patrolled by cockroaches. Blix had got a tin of soup and a tin of salmon and he was prying one of these open while he talked to the tired woman and she to him. They had discovered a common language, not really familiar to either, but it served.
‘We’re talking Dutch,’ Blix told me, ‘and in case you haven’t noticed it, this is a brothel. She runs it.’
‘Oh.’
I looked at the woman, and then at the cockroaches on the wall, and then at Blix.
‘I see,’ I said.
It was somehow inevitable, in the scheme of things, that this place should be a brothel and this woman the keeper of it.
Inevitable, but hardly reassuring, I thought. The scheme of things was a shabby scheme.
Blix got the soup tin open and poured the contents into a pot. The brothel keeper pressed her fragile shoulders against the wall and stood there nodding her head like a pecking bird. She was dressed in purple rags and they hung upon her in the unmistakable manner of the livery of her trade. And yet, I thought that a transformation would have been easy. Put her in an apron and soak the mask of paint from her face and she could be used as a fit subject for any artist wanting to depict the misery and the despair and the loneliness of all women driven to drudgery. She might have been a seamstress, a farmhand’s wife, a charwoman, a barmaid no longer maiden. She might have been anything — but of all things, why this?
Blix handed me a plate of soup and, as if it were a cue for her to retire, our hostess backed out of the room, grinning vapidly. She had long since forgotten the meaning of a smile, but the physical ability to make the gesture remained. Like the smile of a badly controlled puppet, hers was overdone, and after she had disappeared and the pad of her slippers was swallowed somewhere in the corridors of the dark house, the fixed, fragile grin still hung in front of my eyes — detached and almost tangible. It floated in the room; it had the same sad quality as the painted trinkets children win at circus booths and cherish until they are broken. I felt that the grin of the brothel keeper would shatter if it were touched and fall to the floor in pieces.
‘You’re thoughtful,’ said Blix.
He ate some of his soup and looked thoughtful too. ‘Centuries ago,’ he said, ‘Benghazi was called Hesperides — “The Garden of the Gods.” ’
‘I know. The garden needs tending.’
Blix produced a bottle of white wine that some Italian soldier had left and his successors had overlooked. We drank the wine out of enamel cups and ate the soup and the cold salmon, fighting a war of attrition against the cockroaches while the meal progressed.
The surface of our wooden table had the culinary history of the house inscribed upon it in grease. There was a candle stuck in a bottle, and a kerosene stove, and four walls, none with windows. The contrast to Shepheard’s in Cairo was inescapable, but not mentioned.
Blix preferred to talk about the brothel keeper. With the patience of a hopeful novelist, he had coaxed out of her, through the exchange of tortured Dutch, a kind of synopsis of her life. It was a life better left in synopsis — too sordid and too miserable even to afford a framework for romance.
As a child of six or seven she had been stolen from her parents and had been brought to Africa on a boat. She remembered that the boat was white on the outside and that the journey had made her sick, but could recall nothing else. She had been beaten occasionally, but not often. There had not been any great, immemorable moments of terror or suffering, nor any particular interludes of happiness that stayed in her mind. None of it was very clear, she had told Blix. She felt no resentment about anything, but lately the thought of the early period, whose dates and places she couldn’t remember, had begun to prey upon her mind.
‘She was about sixteen,’ Blix said, ‘before she learned she had been sold into prostitution. I’ve read about white slavery, but I never expected to meet a victim of it. She didn’t even know it was slavery until somebody told her; she just thought life was like that.’
‘What does she think now?’
‘She wants to get away from here, only she hasn’t any money. She wants to get back to the country she was born in. She thinks it might be Holland, but she doesn’t know. She says it had trees with fruit on them, and that it got cold sometimes. It’s about all she knows. I think she’s gone half-witted trying to remember more. It’s a hell of a thing to happen to anybody — like waking up and not knowing where you spent last night, only worse. Imagine not knowing where you came from!’
‘What was her original language?’
‘That’s a mystery too,’ Blix said; ‘she learned Dutch from a Dutch sailor and picked up Arabic, Italian, and other smatterings in one brothel or another. She mixes them all.’
‘Well, it’s very sad, but you can’t do anything about it.’
‘I can do a little. I’m going to give her some money.’
While we were still back in Cairo, Blix had been robbed of two hundred pounds sterling in a barber shop. It was nearly all he had saved from his last safari. I judged that he had about fifty left, but I knew him to be incorrigibly philanthropic. I suppose that any man who attempted to cheat Blix out of a shilling would do it at the risk of life and limb, but if the same man asked for a shilling, he would doubtless get twenty.
‘It’s your money and your kind sentiment,’ I said, ‘but how do you know she’s telling the truth?’
Blix stood up and shrugged. ‘Anybody kicked as far down the ladder as she’s been kicked isn’t obliged to tell the truth, but I think she told some of it. Anyway, you can’t expect gospel for a few pounds.’
We went upstairs and tried to get some sleep. I pulled the mattress off my bed and stretched out on the springs, fully dressed. In about ten minutes I could hear Blix snoring with magnificent resonance as he lay on the floor of his room, finding it quite as comfortable, I knew, as he had always found the forest, earth that had made his bed for years.
&nb
sp; I don’t know when or how he gave the woman his contribution to the crusade against the downtrodden of this world; I think he had already done it when he announced his intention to me. At least, when we prepared to leave her sad and shabby house of infamy, at four-thirty in the morning, our hostess was awake and fumbling in the kitchen.
I can’t say that her face was illumined by a new hope or that her eyes shone with any more inspiring light than they had held the night before. She was dull, slovenly, and as derelict as a woman could be. But she brewed a pot of tea and swept the ever-present cockroaches from the table with an indignant gesture. And after we had drunk the tea and had gone out of the courtyard and up the street, which was still almost completely dark, the brothel keeper stood in front of her brothel for a long time with the burning candle weeping tallow over her hands. It was the only light that we could see anywhere in the Garden of the Gods.
We crossed the Gulf of Sidra and landed first at Tripoli and then at Tunis, and then we saw green hills again and were finally at the end of the desert and at the end of Africa.
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