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

by Lawrence Durrell

  On the morrow there was a brilliant ripe sunlight and the whole of the city to explore again. The centre is so small that one can traverse the length and breadth of it during a comfortable morning’s shopping. But all the smart shops seemed to have folded up and all the old businesses—the French, the Italian, the Jewish, the Armenian—had vanished. The Arabic language had replaced all the other languages on the medicine bottles, on boardings, on posters, which gives the whole city a feeling of having been plunged into Arabdom. In the old days, a restaurant invited you to six different types of menu, and the whole thing had gaiety and charm. In fact, it’s not possible to see the little watercolours of Raoul Dufy of the Cannes waterfront about forty years ago without realizing that that was how Alex used to look. It was a thoroughly cosmopolitan Mediterranean town.

  Now, alas or not, the desert had moved in, and the Russians had moved out. The long, eight-year flirtation with Russia had really not been extremely fruitful, though I am not sure about the economic or sociological benefits they might have brought which were invisible to my tourist eye.[5] Perhaps they had brought benefits, I don’t know, but what had happened was simply that the dust has got into the town and that everything agreeable, Western, rich, comfortable, capitalist, and easygoing had vanished.

  There are no more coloured awnings on the seafront, and while the cafés are still there they’re now deserted, and if you ask for a coffee, sometimes there isn’t one. Shortage and stress seem to me the two cardinal factors. But, at the same time, very few beggars were to be seen in the streets, and the unveiled women were a treat because the enormous variety and the beauty of the Egyptian face had come out, and with it the wonderful impact of different cultures. You had a face, for example, from the middle of Africa which had impacted on a blond face from the steppes, and the result was honey-gold eyes and the most marvelous complexion, and an extraordinary tilt to the head not to be found anywhere else in the world. And a felucca walk! That’s Alexandria! I was glad to discover it anew through a sudden change of political weather in which the veil—that hated veil which reduced one to a pair of twinkling eyes—had at last been abolished.

  Yes, the next morning it was sunny and I walked curiously about the town feeling all disembodied, like a ghost, because nearly everyone I had known here was dead. I went and had a look at my old office and I saw how much had changed. Little enough in the sense of the climatic dispositions—the fresh wind blowing through it all the time was still there. But a great deal of the style, the elegance, the sparseness and the richness and the luxuriance had vanished, and with it had come not really a proletarianism, not an aggressive coolie culture, but simply apathy—apathy and dust and, of course, the feeling that nothing worked.

  Take the postal service: it is the most extraordinary thing in the world. The British got it to work in a hesitant way for a few years, but something was always going wrong. I don’t know what the word for it is in Arabic, a postal service, but it must represent something very strange to them. Most of your letters never arrive and some of them in the same batch arrive within ten minutes of your having written them as if there were a telepathic computer somewhere. Of the hundreds of postcards I’ve sent from various places in Egypt, only about one-third arrived, and those in such record time as not to be believed by the people who received them. Anyway, these kinds of anomalies are part of the Egyptian scene and you rapidly accustom yourself to them.

  Familiarity and sentiment and the sense of leisure and pleasure had led my steps at last toward the Greek quarter and finally toward the Greek library, where I managed to unearth a friend of mine, a poet, Theodore Moschonas,[6] who has been the Greek Patriarchal Secretary for the last half-century, I suppose. He’s eighty-seven. It didn’t seem to be possible that he was still there, looking as young as ever, as intelligent as ever, with his perfect English. We talked for a little while, talked our way back to the old Alexandria, and I told him that I was being given a “Justine party” that evening by a notable Egyptian surgeon, married to an English lady, who had great affection for my books and wished to make it as much the kind of party as I might have described in one of them. He chuckled and said, “I don’t know who on earth could arrange that for you today, but I wish you luck.” I think he meant by this that the old Greek colony had completely disappeared in the social sense.

  In fact, we were only about forty guests, but the party took place in a tremendously smart pavilion just outside the confines of the town. There were four to six languages spoken. The girls wore long dresses. There were German girls, there were British, there were Swedes, there were French and there were Greeks, but not too many diplomats, who always tend to act as wadding in a party, preventing the sincere flow of thought or gaiety. The whole evening was so strikingly in contrast to the rundown town that we all felt how welcome was the elegance, the smartness and the snap of the old Alexandria that had all but vanished. It was a wonderful gift to me—a compliment in the true Alexandrian style.

  But there was another pleasure in store for me. Peter Adam had discovered that at the Greek Consulate space had been found for a small Cavafy museum. The poet’s work had been with me since I was twenty, I suppose, and since I was first introduced to it in Athens during a momentous evening that was shared by Henry Miller and that he has described a little bit in The Colossus of Maroussi.[7] Then C.P. Cavafy was completely unknown.

  Well, I did not really expect very much of this museum, but it proved to be quite perfect. The consulate itself is rather a handsome, old-fashioned, Pan-Hellenic building of a style which I would characterize as “gymnasium.” Gymnasiums in Greece go in for marble columns and arcades and green lawns, and the museum has a vast courtyard lined with marble columns. The Greek Consulate shares this idiom with them and has a pleasant aura of sunshine, the feeling of being not too far from Plato’s Academy.

  Moreover, the museum had actually been donated the contents of Cavafy’s little flat down in Rue Lepsius, and all the furniture had been arranged in the exact fashion in which he had left it when he died. It reminded me very much of my pious visits to Baker Street at the end of the war, where some bright man had decided to reconstruct, in the most faithful detail, the rooms of Sherlock Holmes with all the mementos of the master and Dr. Watson! But here it was even better because it was more truthful to fact. There was Cavafy’s own furniture, which I so well remember as being the kind of furniture of the polite salons of Greece when I first went there. What was more touching, more moving still, was his entire library, the books that had been cherished but well-used.

  It seemed to me rather sacrilegious, in fact, to sit at the actual desk of the old poet, uncomfortable as it was, with all his books around me and to read in English, instead of in Greek, for the BBC two of his famous Alexandrian poems. I quickly wrote postcards to the people who had shared that evening in Athens when, for the first time, we heard the great poems “Ithaca,” “The Barbarians,” and “The City” read in beautiful English translation by George Katsimbalis, the Colossus himself. From this fruitful desk I sent him one, I sent another to Miller in America. I sent one to Theodore Stephanides in London, and one to another friend in Athens who also had been present. I hoped that the cards would bring the perennial message of Cavafy’s poetry to them, and a very happy memory of Athens, 1938.

  Well, the Justine party furnished me with a number of new friends, and on the following two days I wandered around the shops with them to see what sort of things were still available. Not very much I am afraid; it’s pretty much a shambles, really. All I found, with interest, that the long flirtation with the Russians had yielded practically no sympathy. It shouldn’t have surprised me but it did, because I thought if ever they had had a fitting theatre of operations, a country as poor as Egypt was perfect for their kind of solutions to economic problems. Here they could apply their form of institutionalized poverty with all the sanctimoniousness necessary but I had reckoned without the fact that Moslems still believe in God and Marxists don’t. Though an
Egyptian may be poor and illiterate, he is still fervently religious. What kind of propaganda is possible against this? On the other hand, one had hoped that the Russians might have found some solution to the great problems in Egypt, such as the perennial food shortages that plague the economy, driving prices up and the citizenry to sometimes violent outbursts, but it didn’t seem that they had. All that they had spread was a sense of penury, intellectual and economic.

  I suppose their greatest triumph might be considered the High Dam at Aswan, but already there have been second thoughts about it and nobody in Egypt seemed to think that it had really justified itself. There was a kind of ambivalent feeling about it. With reason, for it’s a tremendously fragile creation. A Boy Scout with a sack full of gelignite could blow it up and drown everyone in Egypt in a few days, so that one has to think about it in strategic terms also. Then, in ecological terms, the danger of fooling about with the Nile current is that while you might, with luck, increase the amount of land that can be cultivated, you risk tearing the mud out of its bed. The silk sleeve of that delicious black mud which the Nile brings down—mud which provides the soil on which the Egyptian grows his crops—is like the mucous membrane of the Nile, and it would be tragic if fooling about with the dam altered the actual density of the silt. This, too, was a problem that was put to me by journalists, and so on and so forth. I apologize for recording gossip, but I can do no other. I simply can’t pronounce on these problems, they’re too technical. All I can say is that the Egyptians did seem to me no richer than they had been, but they did seem to me much happier. They felt freerer, they were more independent now the Russians had gone, and it’s a country where even poverty has a splendid kind of opulence. Well, the Russians had spent eight years there but, apart from a few windbreaks, I was not shown anything of any special interest, and I had the impression that the basic thing that Russia had done for the Egyptians was to free the lower classes psychologically, because now the old begging whine had been replaced by a much more resilient and independent “Hallo!” which was pleasant to hear.

  In Cairo we were able to see, so to speak, more clearly round us, because it is the centre of communications. And here one realizes that it’s not the war and the problems of war that have made the country difficult to visit at the moment. What really has created that problem is tourist block-bookings. The hotel arrangements in Egypt are pretty fragile, good at their very best, but, even at the moderate levels, extremely expensive, and they have been literally block-booked so far ahead, perhaps two years ahead, that it is not possible for individuals to set off to look around Egypt, though there is no real official impediment to such a notion. It is simply a question that in doing so, visitors limit themselves to a level of accommodation and sanitation that is worse than medieval. Indeed, in many places it is not possible to get a room at all.

  There was a good deal of pictorial work for the camera to do in the mosques and bazaars, and we were glad of our own transport, though I must say nothing was difficult to visit. If there were difficulties of movement it was not due to overofficiousness; it was due, at one point, for example, to a sudden dearth of taxis. All the taxis disappeared for a few days. At another time, all small change seemed to disappear. Successive waves of this sort swept across Cairo, and there didn’t seem to be any particular reason. They were just like sudden attacks of dizziness in a social system that was, of course, always pretty precarious. But the overpopulation is something you really do feel in Cairo, where everyone appears to be standing on his neighbour’s face, and this creates a frenetic subsistence. I had forgotten how the old beggars, beggars who were really hungry, challenged one in asking for money. It’s almost as if they would gouge your eyes out with a pocketknife. But the smallest suggestion of a smile on your face is always enough to break their skull into a million pieces of friendly laughter. The poor in Egypt are perhaps the gayest poor anywhere in the universe.

  In Cairo we were lodged in great style at the finest hotel in Egypt, the old Mena House. It has lost its old, rather seedy chic but has gained in Oriental opulence and size, having been taken over by the Indians. Comfortable and spacious as it was, the decor of the bars and public salons suggested something between the Taj Mahal and a Hollywood musical. And with justice, for its patrons were for the most part American travellers intrepidly doing the Egyptian circuit on tours that were pretty efficiently run, as far as I could see. The trip was not too exacting—a visit to the Egyptian Museum, to Sakara, and then the Pyramids was what most programs featured. It is pleasing to record, too, that the Pyramids are much better looked after and much less encumbered than they used to be; there are no more streams of beggars and footpads hanging about whining and plucking your sleeve and quite equal to snatching your wallet in the Grand Corridor! No, it is much better organized, and if you pick your time of day (very early, or late, when the tourists have gone), you can still find yourself alone among the ruins. Tipping the wink to a Sphinx while riding among the Pyramids at sunset still has its old Robert Hichens romantic glow.[8]

  I was rather sad that Dr. Mursi was unable to materialize during this period, but as an old press attaché I quite realized what kept him—his President, the gentle Sadat, had just made his astonishing visit to Israel and, of course, the news wires were blocked with messages.[9]

  Sadat’s amazing leap into the dark was, of course, the subject of every conversation devoted to politics. It had caused both jubilation and consternation; jubilation because the ordinary Egyptian is easygoing and peaceable and hates conscription and war; consternation because the President had consulted nobody in the matter. It was easy to foresee that this gallant initiative would set the other Arab states smoldering with thoughts of treachery and separate negotiations. Qaddafi in Libya,[10] for example, who had shacked-up with the Russians, to use a vulgar phrase, would be furious. And so it turned out; his reaction was immediate and sulfurous. More amusing, though, was the fact that Sadat had unwittingly thrown his own propaganda line into confusion. The old hard Arab line vis-à-vis the Jews was slightly in disarray. It was hardly the moment to keep on calling for a Holy War, for it might prejudice delicate negotiations. But all hearts were really with Sadat, for the Egyptians are fundamentally generous; the trouble is that they are also fickle. Sadat might make agreements that another President, subjected to other forces, might repudiate overnight.

  I was curious to see whether Nasser’s vaunted claims to have abolished illiteracy were founded on anything more solid than propaganda. There were now five times as many Egyptians as there had been when I was last here, in 1950, yet the shift in newspaper circulation did not reflect a sudden expansion of a reading public. It is a pity, because if one can’t read and write, and can’t add and subtract, the modern world becomes a tricky place in which to live. Thus Egypt has always been an easy place to exploit, and doubly so now because the foreigners had gone and the Copts were in eclipse. It stood to reason that like Cleopatra of old, a girl with more beauty than brains, Egypt was forced into flirtations of power, playing off her powerful neighbours one against the other in order to balance her budget, depleted from overspending. So she was playing Russia and America now just as once she had played Rome off against Anatolia, France against England. It will always be like this. But the Sadat initiative did not seem to enter into this category of calculated scheming, for he had risked much in letting himself be guided by the generous impulse; he has many enemies and many risks to run, but the gesture was wonderful and well worth them all. It proves that in him Egypt has found not simply another politician but a somewhat saintly statesman. It would be a wonderful breakthrough if this thorny problem could be set aside in favour of a peaceful coexistence. It depends on what role the Russians decide to adopt.

  Politics aside, everything else was reassuring. We really did have time for leisurely sessions at the Pyramids with nobody about. Nor were we bothered by officialdom. The team was able to shoot more or less at random along the canals with their dramatic background of de
sert and pyramid.

  The Egyptians were rather astonished by the great age of many of the American tourists, and they marveled at their stamina. I must say, it did seem sometimes as if whole geriatric wards had been swept up and pushed into aeroplanes. It was both touching and amusing to see the rows of stationary camels with their elaborately accoutered drivers waiting on the slope below the pyramids. Everyone just had to have his or her picture taken on a camel, and they were efficiently processed by the guides. The look of beatitude on grandma’s face was a delight. You could see how she looked at the age of ten when she first encountered a camel in her picture book. It was most touching. I was glad to overhear conversations which suggested that she wasn’t being gypped, that she did feel she was getting her money’s worth, despite the almost universal affliction which she called (out of delicacy) “Montezuma’s revenge.” This, of course, I knew only too well, and we were all to be lightly touched by it before the trip was over. What helped us, perhaps, was our preoccupation with the cholera epidemic, just being brought under control while we were there. Mineral water costs about the same as whisky!