From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

  And the food, too, was fine lake food, without the intricacy and tetchiness of the French cuisine. Good stable wines, red and white, many smoked mountain delicacies like sausage and viande de Grison[13] but, on the whole, matter of fact.

  The fine red wine of Stresa is just right for what we English call “elevenses,” namely, a midmorning snort to keep the soul sharply attuned to nature’s beauties, to keep the fantasy booted and spurred. Such was the charm of that sunlight I found myself gracefully polishing off a whole bottle while I scouted the little harbor for a boatman to carry me over the water to Isola Bella.

  I supposed that a good deal of hard bargaining would be in order, and I thought of Mark Twain in the Holy Land: the passage where he says that when he heard the prices the boatmen charged on Galilee he was not surprised that Jesus walked on the water rather than pay them.[14] But I was wrong about it all. My boatman turned out to be a mild ex-schoolmaster who was kindly as well as knowledgeable, and the price was fixed by law. So over the still pearly water we went puttering in his launch, to make a leisurely circuit of the two smaller islands before turning our prow in the direction of the finest. The last groups of tourists were arriving from several points on the mainland: peasants from the Italian Tyrol. Milanese families and even some Swabian Germans with folklore wives in bonnets and aprons and starched kerchiefs. The men wore dark brown medieval dress such as one sees in the paintings of Brueghel.[15]

  I climbed the staircase to the palace entrance where the group of uniformed guides lounged in the sunlight like gun dogs. Business was slack. I fell upon a pleasant young guide who set me quite a pace around the corkscrew palace with its armories and crypts and chancels, its secret gardens and sweetly curving balustrades and loggias. Considering the relatively small size of the island it is amazing how it gives the feeling of space and grandeur. It conveys harmony and grace, and also operatic fantasy so dear to the Italian heart. There are white peacocks that walk the extraordinary construction known as the Amphitheatre, scolding you with their horrible voices. And the grottoes whose walls are covered in coloured seashells. And a marionette theatre…

  Perhaps the most astonishing collection on the island is the plant collection that is unique and deserves a catalog all to itself. It took quite a time to complete a leisurely circuit, but when it was over I bade my boatman come and lunch with me at the little café called the Dolphin, the headquarters of the native fishing colony. We ate excellent lake trout and drank red wine while the sunlight steepened and the afternoon drew slowly on. We spoke of Isola Bella and my boatman said: “It is unfortunately too beautiful. When you make something so beautiful that the whole world must come and see it—why, what happens to your private life? You are overrun.” He had something there. Imagine standing on the green bridge of this pleasure ship and suddenly seeing a boat approach with Napoleon sitting in it, or Queen Victoria (for she was also an approving visitor). You could hardly send the butler down to say you were out when it came to guests of such calibre. I suppose this explains why the descendants of the family no longer inhabit this precious place. No doubt they have settled for privacy in Rome or Milan. And so Isola Bella with its cargo of fantasies belongs to the whole world, to us.

  Alexandria Revisited

  1978

  IN 1975 THE BBC TOOK ME BACK TO GREECE to make a film called Spirit of Place, based on my island books and the memories of the years when I lived there.[1] In between these happy Greek years lay darker ones, marked by war, which I had spent in Cairo and Alexandria. Last year, the film director, Peter Adam, suggested we travel again together, this time to Egypt, to the scenes of The Alexandria Quartet, and try to touch all the points which, either from a literary or personal point of view, meant something to me, or marked me or moved me.

  Filming is a sort of composite art—one is always manufacturing the work of two or three people and trying to assemble it into a coherent image. The writer is a solitary animal sitting in a garret, and when the stuff comes off his typewriter nobody else interferes with it. So to try and make a film about a subject which was precious and probably, from a general point of view, out of date was a trepidation added to traditional neuroses.

  To return to Egypt, to revisit Alexandria in order to see what traces, if any, remained of that extravagantly coloured world I had painted in The Alexandria Quartet? The idea filled me with unease. After thirty years or so, the country must have changed. There had been the long post-war reaction to the West and then an eight-year flirtation with Russia—until the abrupt discovery that Marxism spelt materialism. Then, apart from these factors, even the Egypt I had painted—or rather the Alexandria—had itself ceased to exist by the time I got there in the war years. Cavafy was eight years dead; the brothel quarter had moved to Cairo, whence I had brought it back to help me set the stage once more. And I myself? Had I changed also, as Egypt must have? These ideas, together with ancient memories of the place, splashed about in my mind as the plane hovered and sank upon Heliopolis through a sunset more marvellous than any I remember. At least nature was a constant, one could count on her. Or so I hoped.

  But we were very late and in the huge pandemonium of the airport, which vibrates still with the old noise and dust and smells, it was easy to think that not so very much had changed. This aspect of daily life, anyway; here we were, limp with fatigue at nine o’clock at night, but the beggars and borrowers, the scroungers and the footpads were still bursting with life. We got out to our bus, yes, but almost left our clothes behind in the process—so many were the imploring hands which plucked at our sleeves, or dived upon our shoes to clean them by main force.

  The first, the capital, change became immediately and delightfully plain: the uncovered faces of the Egyptian women. The veil had been set aside. And this was a change to be acclaimed, whatever the conservative elements of the country might say. But then, as if in revenge, they had pronounced against the bare breasts of the famous Egyptian belly-dancer, and forced her to wear an ignoble muslin shift. But this we were to encounter later in the journey. We had decided to motor by night to Alexandria, and once our film gear was loaded we nosed across the dusty rumbling metropolis with here and there a gleam of polished Nile water flowing, it seemed, out of the sky into the earth, and set off down the long road towards the famous old seaport.

  One was immediately reminded of the war period because of the long stream of lorries heading the same way, mostly without tail-lights—an endless crocodile bearing bales of dusty cotton towards the ships which would take them across the world. How often I took this night journey during the war; but the convoys then, rustling along in the darkness, bore our tanks and carriers and ammunition and every kind of weapon towards the Eighth Army front.

  A very tired file crew arrived in Alexandria in the middle of the night and piled up at the old Cecil Hotel, with its echoes of Justine.[2] Here we found that our rooms had been given away because of our lateness. However, after long argument, we recovered them and went piously to bed to awake next day to brilliant sunlight and a fine race of blue sea dashing the spray over the seafront with its aged palm trees clicking in the damp sea wind. Alexandria! Yes, it is shabbier, more unkempt, and it has lost its superficial cosmopolitan society, but some of the old magnetism is still there. The newcomer might just manage to feel some of its ancient charm, some of the attraction which excited the minds of Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Seferis. And there are still small corners which have not budged—like the quarter where Scobie[3] lived, or the mosque where he worshipped. The markets still pulse and vibrate with their exotic wares, and the fortune-tellers are still in business, as are the tattooers. There are still Greek taverns, like Diamandakis, in full swing, and several new Egyptian ones where one can eat well. But a great deal of the old leisure has gone, indeed there is little feeling of opulence to the place—Nasser[4] discouraged that, as his little blue-trousered university girls will explain to you seriously. Perhaps it is for the better. At any rate, in their blue trousers and unveiled now,
one can see Egyptian girls are the most beautiful in the world.

  We were sorry to leave them, and they pretended they were sorry to see us go up-river—back across the desert this time, stopping for a brief brush with the Coptic monks of St. Bishoy,[5] whose philosophy and life offered a marvellous austere commentary to the noisy, discordant, and tragic tempo of the towns. The air was like breathing ancient parchment. One was appalled by the harshness of their lives but one wanted to stay forever.

  The next stop was Cairo, with its famous pyramids and the whole extraordinary placid life unrolling around them. They form the Hyde Park Corner of the Middle East. Now they crawl with tourists, but during the war we had them to ourselves—like the hotels, which had been taken over and turned into HQS. You were likely to get caught in the revolving doors of Shepheard’s Hotel, because General de Gaulle[6] used to enter at such a rate that if you were light you would get swept round and round. At that time Egypt was neutral, Cairo an open city, and the blackout was something mysterious that had happened over there in Europe. Here we lived in a blaze of light. It was all the more extraordinary because people managed to get back from the line quite often for the weekend, for a drink and a dance, for a cinema or an art show. Fifty miles away the armies gnashed and gnawed at each other. I remember attending a party on a Nile barge which included a belly dancer. The host had invited far too many people, and this boat was badly anchored. The belly dancer rotated like an enormous top—she was one of the big ones—and every time she approached one side the whole boat listed. So we had to try to persuade her to stay in the middle of the floor. Finally she went too near the rails, the entire barge turned over and we all found ourselves in the Nile!

  Cairo, of course, is vastly changed. Now five times as many people live in the city as did when I was there. Most of the old places are gone. So we lost little time there and travelled south to Upper Egypt. You feel the river wind at once, and the long muscle of the Nile as you go winding up to Luxor and Aswan. Aswan is a kind of paradise, out of time. You put your feet up, mentally, physically and spiritually. The massive battered remnants of the ancient civilisation which surround you are so different from anything you could imagine down in Cairo: the temples of Abu Simbel and Karnak, the Valley of the Kings. The desert is ever present here, the burning glass of Egypt. Where the water is flowing through your fingers, the desert is flowing through your mind. These barren dunes are the last museum—nothing ever rots; the wind may blow tomorrow and uncover a whole civilisation.[7]

  What struck me during the filming (which took us all over Egypt) was that previously I had never seen the country at all. All I had seen then was, literally, Alexandria and Cairo. Working as a press officer at the British embassy, I had no time to register impressions. The war was the most exhausting period, I was really too numb to make a sort of paper model of Egypt. Now, having come back, I can construct it much more happily. I realise now that I must keep a leg in Egypt, because the new novels[8] I am writing span the war period. The war tore a hole in the beginning of my creative life and tore a hole in the lives of my characters at precisely the same point. You can’t send people away and have them come back six years later without explaining how or why. Wars are so terribly boring to describe. So Egypt is the answer.

  I was relieved to have my feelings reassured by this visit. The terrifying thing about film-making is that one has to work against Egypt, because it is so damned beautiful, so extravagant, that everywhere one puts up a camera one is in danger of the picture postcard. But a film can catch that wonderful feeling of stillness that Egypt always conveys: the slow, green blood-time of the Nile. We have such an album of pictures, and I realise that the still image is not comparable with the moving one, because the camera is actually photographing time passing. All this, of course, constitutes distress which directors must feel, as opposed to what writers feel.

  It is very strange to come back to Egypt now, after such a lapse of time, and find it relatively unchanged—because of the emanations of the ground. One verifies them by going from one sacred site to another, in the course of making this film, and they seem to me on the same frequency, with the same vibrations. The landscape is scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. The changes are simply superficial.

  With Durrell in Egypt

  1978

  WE WERE STILL HIGH IN THE AIR, enjoying a brilliant sunlight. The sun had not yet disappeared behind the horizon but was climbing steadily down through the golden bars of cloud. I did not need to be reminded that the two royal colours of Egypt, gold and green, were a kind of symbol of her sunsets, which are almost always the same, hardly ever differing in their primary colours. But below us the world had turned on its side and Cairo had foundered into near darkness—a provisional darkness, because the dust of the desert obscures outlines—and we were sinking down toward it into a pool of night punctuated by drifts of stars and the lights of the city just coming on. We could glimpse the sinuous backbone of the old serpent, the Nile, polished and gleaming and, strangely enough, giving off steam like a hot flatiron. Then darkness closed in abruptly, our own lights came on, and the capital swam up to meet us.

  I was not reassured by Cairo’s aerodrome, simply because I am always thrown into a panic by a great deal of noise and screaming, and Cairo rather specializes in a state of total pandemonium. This comes about, I have discovered after long analysis, because the bureaucracy, which is saddled with rather arduous and meticulous work, is not 100 percent literate, so that most orders are given verbally and there is no record of their having been carried out or not. As everyone is both officious and zealous, the resulting pandemonium—there is no other word except a Greek one, though there must have been a hieroglyphic for it in ancient times—has to be seen to be believed.

  This creates a terrible state of distress. You find yourself so helpless when someone takes your passport, throws it on a desk in an empty booth and then walks away and is lost in the crowd. Somebody else, meanwhile, is forcibly trying to clean your shoes, holding the ends of your trousers so that you can’t move, and screaming at you. Somebody else has stepped forward and is charmingly offering you a rusty syringe, in fact, a free injection of something which you do not need, having been injected with the necessaries before leaving.

  It was with great relief that our team—a BBC crew come to make a film about Egypt and about myself—recognized the editor of Le Progès Égyptien,[1] who had so kindly come to meet us. He was waiting at the barrier and he did a great deal to smooth down the overzealous ministrations. I must add, too, that we received very special treatment partly because Dr. Mursi Saad el-Din[2] happened to be an old, old colleague, in the realm of poetry. He had published his first poems in Personal Landscape in 1940 when he was an obscure official. Now he is the important chairman of the State Information Service and he, too, had actually come down himself to meet us, but we were so woefully late that he finally got hungry and went home to dinner, leaving an invitation for us all to come round and share it. But we were in a quandary because we had planned to pick up our little bus as soon as we arrived and drive it straight up to Alexandria that same night. Moreover, the bus was there already, in perfect trim, with all our equipment. What to do? After a moment of scattered debate, Peter Adam, the director of the film, decided that we would go up to Alex by night so that we could start work there the next day.

  It was a good decision. In fact, it was a comfort to get into the little van that was to be our transport for some time to come. We did not take the lonely desert road for fear of getting stranded, but decided on the inner one that leads through a straggle of ill-lit villages. This is the road that had been kept open while we supplied the Eighth Army during World War II. It was always a mystery to me how it was never hit, or sabotaged, or damaged. I was excited, and delighted in the darkness as we started to take our place in a long, long convey loaded down with bales of cotton. Cotton, indeed, was drifting everywhere. The whole night was filled with shreds of cotton, instead, of cou
rse, of tanks, because every night, all night, during the period when I did this little jaunt during the war, the Eighth Army was being supplied (largely by the Americans at that time) in semisecret with the Shermans and other elaborate tinware that enabled Montgomery to bring off the Alamein victory.[3] But now we were only carrying cotton, yet it was much the same procedure atmospherically, and we went through the various villages. They had not changed at all. The petrol pump is still broken at Damanhur and the man still winds it up by hand and unleashes steams of petrol all over the place. And the desert is always there at your elbow, the dust blows in; it is very, very deserted, the desert. The flesh is sorely tired in Egypt, it becomes desiccated, and the eyes are tired by the dust, and it’s such a relief when you clear the last headland and suddenly feel trees and the cool they bring and then, abruptly, sand dunes and the seafront.

  We didn’t get to the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria until after midnight. The lift didn’t work terribly well. It was largely a handheld lift, so to speak, and I could foresee that the man who operated it, who was called Ibrahim, would very shortly be left without a limb because, like a gorilla,[4] he kept putting his hand through the bars to excite knobs and pull switches so that the tenuous electric current would push it. However, in Egypt you learn to cover your ears, mouth and eyes, like those three monkeys in the Indian frescoes, and trust in fate. It hadn’t changed all that much after all; not fate, Alexandria.

  Lying awake that night in my high-ceilinged room, I tried to recapture old impressions and to square the feeling of this dark Alexandria around me with the old half-forgotten Alexandria that I had once known, and I found that the one constant was the wind. The wind that comes straight out of the Greek Cyclades and invests the entire town. It’s a nimble-fingered wind. It strays everywhere. All the flags rattle, the palm leaves rattle. Every time it lets up you feel as though you had suddenly gone deaf, but most of the time it’s fingering you all over, even in this huge blank old hotel room. It must, I suppose, have been once a rather opulent Edwardian-type room with large Voltaire chairs and scrolls on the ceiling and white plaster moldings, and now it was simply a shell of its former self, with the wind coming in under those clumsy great doors and shutters and through the bathroom window. There was this constant pressure of wind, and feeling it I was reassured and back in…well, in a Greek island, and I dropped into sleep like a lamb.