'Goodness!' Lom affected a child big specially indulged on its birthday as he grasped Abdslem's intention.
'Just for us!' The Moroccan waved a carefree hand at the scene as he pressed down on the accelerator.
But perhaps the scrutiny of his watch had not been on Jay's account after all. They sped on. But from where the Boulevard disappeared out of sight in a right-hand curve in front of them, there now came the sound of sudden, arbitrary drums, and the ululating of women.
'Oh dear!' Lom commented.
Unabashed, though with a shrug, Abdslem ploughed the jeep to a standstill among the crowd at the roadside as the first motor-cycle outriders swept up to them.
The Sultan's motorcade passed them slowly, and Jay had a startling impression of it. Curiously, the cars were not Cadillacs but a uniform species of shooting brake that looked modest, almost English, in everything except their dimensions. These were gargantuan. Each vehicle had a wheelbase on something like the scale of a London bus, and held some dozen passengers. Half a dozen of these specially built monsters preceded the royal car, while the uniformity of the fifteen or so following it was broken only by an even larger vehicle, painted dark green, and resembling a vast, though windowless mobile bungalow. The royal car differed from the others in being open, and painted white. In this the king stood upright, raising both arms in a triumphant gesture to the crowds. A brilliant white djellaba, and matching tarboosh set off the rather negroid cast and colouring of his face. Any momentary thoughts Jay might have had that he was never likely to he better placed to make dramatic petition for Achmed's release were snuffed by the malign expressions of some of the bodyguard. Not surprisingly, perhaps, a number of these regarded the hastily parked military jeep with its two oddly assorted European passengers minutely. The captain named Abdslem, Jay noticed, was impressively saluting.
Then the procession was past them; and they were moving out into the road again after the last police car. The strange wailing of the women was still deafening: men made no sound.
'What was that van affair the size of a house?' Jay shouted, leaning forward between the front seats.
'Hospital,' Abdslem called back; the wind of their acceleration making communication more difficult now. 'In case some person shoot the king.'
'A legacy of Kennedy, I suppose,' Lom said, over his shoulder.
Jay waved away something he was being offered to eat. 'Be damned,' he muttered, settling back.
Dust flew from their wheels in the hot afternoon. The Moroccan drove fast, but expertly. Lom produced a floppy green hat. Behind his sun-glasses, Jay sank into something like torpor, conscious of the brilliant, ever changing scenes that flashed by, but finding release from coherent thought in the immediacy of the heat, and the jarring, purposeful career of the hard-sprung, open car. So long as the wind buffetted past his ears, his mind was content to cling tightly within the confused awareness of travel.
Disjointedly, he thought of the sleepfilled, often sleezy cosmopolitan city they had left behind. When the king departed, Tangier's unique vacancy and purposelessness would descend upon it once more. Dead, as some said, since the ending of the International Zone, it nevertheless retained a fascination that was perhaps no more than the wry awareness of its undeniable decadence. It was the city of uncertainty; as yet insufficiently sure of itself to be either the advocate, or even the apologist of anything that was very definite at all. The high-water mark of Europe once, the ebb had left only curiosities on the shore. Newly arrived expatriates scratched their heads and stared warily about them. Their more indigenous counterparts, drifter's themselves, for the city had not been purely Moorish, purely anything for centuries, stared back. But then ideas, even objects, confronted one another only similarly; and with the same envy, suspicion, or propensity for careless alliance.
There was Porte's, the best pâtisserie outside Paris, more decorous than Fortnums'. There was Thor Corbet. And the least inspired mosque, probably, in Islam. Catherine Diergardt, and Brown. Brown and that girl. Could they he—it suddenly came to him—secret emissaries of some sort? Perhaps of a humanitarian organisation, say a United Nations agency, sent to probe the horror that had engulfed Achmed? But no—he was surprised at his own instant knowledge—that wasn't it. That wasn't it, at all.
The procession inside his head moved on. A bar off the Rue Fez that produced black Sudanese girls as readily as branded beers. Raphael, Mary Simpson. That bullring the Spaniards built, crumbled now, useless. Jaqueline, and killer dogs. Gnarled fishermen living on kif and singly caught sardines. A tape-recorded call to prayer. The dreary beach-cum-bar-and-bar-again queers. Blue haired, smothering Spanish ladies beneath kilos of costume jewellery. The rent youths, doubling as gigolos. Divorced colonial women, in speculative retreat behind Dunhill holders. Brown's little friends, with white jeans from Kadex, and unnaturally wise eyes. The pale aspirants to succeed Dean. Halliday, whom Jay should have known, now dead in a riot. The thousands of sheep fleeces for sale after the Aid el Kebir. Ali, the sad, wine-swilling father. Manolo. The curious Jew in front. Caroline Adam, that unplaceable girl. Dan Gurney: murdered, almost certainly . . .
There was the glittering Boulevard, the seedy Soccos, the English Church of St Andrew, most of whose parishioners had arrived at a secret compact with God about bed. There were the Jews with black suits, black beards and black homburgs. There was the sky. The dawn that lightened slowly out of the vast expanses of Africa. There was that politician, whom Chalmers had described, ridiculing the workless from the running-board of his car. Brodie himself, whose mysticism might well be the only coherence the complex knew . . .
And there was Naima. Naima from whom the speeding jeep was carrying him away. Naima, who seemed not to belong to the city. Who was more real, yet more strange.
The sun baked hot the macadam, the concrete, the pastel-washed plaster, the mud-brick, the people, as, at times, the rain tried mercilessly to wash all these away.
It was May now. Time of the city's special effort. When it yawned. When it wet its lips, though with bored appetite. Exercised its jaw, yet carelessly, in preparation for the summer tourists. Paint was flicked on to beach cafés. A news-stand ostentatiously displayed a year-old copy of Punch. The police seized neither pornographic postcards nor paperbacks, because these did not exist. Instead they stepped sobered out of the Spanish-dubbed Hollywood at the Roxy, and arbitrarily gaoled anyone in sight who might baffle Western expectation. Often it was only after puzzled thought. 'Was there a beggar with sores like this in that sequence of Times Square?' 'Mustafa, this boy Achmed Zoffri has been brought in again. He says the Nazarene he worked for is dead' . . .
In the city was Naima. There was too much, as the beat called Ezra had evidently decided. There was too little, though with Achmed to pay for it.
The savage beauty of the Rif Mountains lay all about them: inaccessible ridges that were bare, slate blue, jagged, as though axed out of whetstone. Tormented scrub dung to the walls of the valleys, whose narrow, serpentine beds sometimes revealed a ribbon of live green, or early corn crop turning gold. The crêpe petals of poppies fluttered scarlet at the roadside. Forty kilometres. Yet one need not come this far to experience the recurrent shock of just how alien the city was, even to its immediate hinterland. People paused now to watch their passage. Many raised a hand in greeting. A life that was the same yesterday as it would be tomorrow had its own tempo in the stoop of the Berber woman gathering wood, the absorption of a man shaving his pubis on a sunny rock not far from the road's edge. Storks seemed to favour the highway with remote interest too. Fearless, even a little arrogant in their sacred protection, they took a pace backward, and stretched lazy wings a moment at the racing jeep.
They began to pass primitive, mountain villages: honeycombs built into a sheer face of rock, tonally inseparable from the surrounding scene, and visible only as a series of more or less rectangular apertures. Even the road had lost its cosmopolitan look, becoming mare purely French, straight and tree lined, now
that it had begun to dip down into the plain. All Spanish and British influence was left behind with the city, and the triangular promontory dividing the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. From here on there would be only the ghosts of French colonialism, with its new cities built invariably, and out of fear rather than deference, a few kilometres outside the old. There was little left now to distinguish the origins of these very finely. At most there remained the bare, echoing provincial restaurant, open to the sidewalk, with its soup-stained waiter, its broken fan, and the extremes of unpredictability that mark an adoptive cooking. Once more Jay waved away Lom's seemingly inexhaustible paper-bag, whose contents he had now identified. Instead, he thought of the dismal salons where he had sat, surely the only patron to have ever actually eaten among the bravely beer-drinking youths batting the little ball excitedly back and forth between the croaking wooden men in the boxed football game, only to be afforded an utterly improbable meal of Routiers' splendour and proportions. Of the identical setting where he had chewed the leather omelette, the mummified chicken knee, the lettuce snatched from the load that happened at that moment to be passing through the great, sleepy white blaze of midday in the square beyond the oil-clothed pavement tables, the drooped, unstirring strip of tattered awning. And Jay recognised now a nostalgia in himself. It was a liberating emotion after the staleness of the city.
Delicate, wand-like cypresses lined the road. The plain lay stilly beneath the sun with even greater assurance than the mountains. The people, the scenes they passed, seemed totally the phenomena of a carelessness that proclaimed only the sovereignty of that present, idling hour. Yet the most commonplace physical movement of a human being had about it the subjugation which was the essence of the philosophy of mektoub; and with this some quite final sadness. The people they were passing lived terribly, and died, most often, in great pain. Jay could not define what it was they did have, which the city had certainly lost, and whose lack he felt within himself as he gazed out from the speeding jeep.
The great sense of stillness, of a predestined order that was unchallengeable, but also not worth challenging, remained throughout the long afternoon. An eagle fell from the sky upon a herd of goats with young kids. Even the plunge of the huge bird, and the distant herdsboy's useless hurling of his stave had about them the feel of slow motion, half reality. Afterwards, Jay was to remember the early afternoon as disrupted, only given lively movement and purpose even, as a domestic fowl fled squawking from beneath their wheels in a village street. When that happened it seemed as though the easy apathy, the peace, must be affronted, outraged for quite hundreds of miles around.
They were climbing again. This time the barren hills were more rounded. For nearly an hour the jeep twisted upwards in low gear, and then they were edging down the gigantic escarpment at whose foot the city of Fez huddled, low, and grey against the floor of its mighty valley. The approach, by the northern arc which they had taken, was by far the most dramatic, and for Jay never failed to produce a moment that was like a mystical experience in its intensity, and simple wonder. The lonely wilderness of hills one had first to cross undoubtedly had something to do with it. Descending into the valley, one came suddenly upon arable land, olive groves and young wheat. Another shoulder of hill was turned and there, still below, the city the Arabs built and so tightly fortified against the indigenous Berbers crouched in its own shallow declivity, an impenetrable warren whose broadest thoroughfare scarcely allowed two laden mules to pass one another, and from whose squat, rock-coloured mass of building protruded only the delicate, green-tiled fingers of many minarets. Fez was a locked, secretive city, studiously conscious of being the seat of the world's oldest university, the centre of the country's thought and religion. The gravity of the city's appearance, and of its people, were alike as different as could he from the gay, sprawling southern city of Marrakesh, with its giant, dusty red ramparts, bright groves of palms, and vast fluid and multi-racial population resulting from its Saharan trade. Yet already Jay could make out the faintest outline on the horizon where the snow-capped Atlas began. Marrakesh was still over a hundred and eighty miles away.
The jeep sped on over the hot plain. Jay began to wonder when Lom proposed to stop. So far they had made no pause, and exchanged only passing remarks against the wind of their passage. Lom had not enquired after his purpose. For his own part, Jay was content for the moment to delay his curiosity about Lom's, in particular his evidently organised way of achieving whatever it might be. About the smart army officer he still felt unease. His presence also made him wary of broaching his own problem. The sun seemed to get hotter as it lowered in the sky. Jay closed his eyes and let his head settle back on the hard, flat cushion behind him. Slowly, with the image of Fez still magical on his retina, and Achmed a problem he would face with nightfall, or when the endless motion ceased, all thought dissolved from his mind.
* * * * *
Abdslem Kerim laughed when he looked back over his shoulder.
'We were at a late party last night,' Lom said, by way of explanation.
The youth touched the paper-bag. 'Maybe in Kashah Tadla I can find you some real majoun. All thick with honey. It is many, many times stronger than when smoke kif.' 'Good,' Lom said. His drifting mind settled, amused a moment, upon the unpredictability of Abdslem's English. At least there'd been no opportunity for his being brutally slapped on the back. 'Shall we stop the night there?'
'Is best,' Abdslem said. 'And tomorrow on. Drop your friend in Marrakesh. Then same day into the desert. Okay?'
'Okay.'
Suddenly Abdslem smiled. 'You know by Jews' quarter in Arab town is called mellah? And that word just means "salt"?'
Because we're the salt of the earth, perhaps, Lom thought ironically. He shook his head.
'Is because,' Abdslem was seriously informative, 'when Arabs cut off all the heads in battle, the Jews were expert in salting them. Always they do this work before the heads were put up on the city walls. Clean, not smell then, you see.'
'Do you still cut off heads?'
Abdslem laughed. 'No! Sometimes if a man is very angry, maybe.'
They were silent some minutes. Abdslem glanced over his shoulder once more. 'Some thing I tell you now,' he said. 'If we see the Jordanian irregulars, careful eh? With me is all right. But some these men! Hussein send them to us because they are too anti-Jew. They make too much trouble at home. Is secret, this. They're not officially here. But Hussein is fascist king too. Same interest as Hassan.'
They drove silently for several more miles. Suddenly Abdslem exclaimed. He looked again at Lom; then began braking the jeep.
* * * * *
The halt had jerked Jay from sleep, because no echo of a rifle lingered in his cars. Yet he came awake to the conviction that Lom had been shot. Blood had seeped on to the back of his shirt. Extraordinarily, the officer was taking no heed of this. He might not even have noticed it. Instead, he appeared to be pleading apologetically with Lom. Then Jay saw Lom was partially collapsed, that tears ran down his face.
'What happened,' Jay asked urgently.
Startled, the Moroccan became aware of him. 'I don't know. I say—I joke maybe is danger where we go. Suddenly—he cry.'
Afraid of danger, of death? Lom? Jay was uncomprehending. 'But he's been wounded!' he almost shouted.
The Arab returned him a blank stare as though he were demented. Is dream?' he suggested wonderingly.
'Bloody idiot, look!' Jay said savagely, pulling the officer half over the seat, from where he could see Lom's bleeding shoulder.
In amazement, the Arab looked at the seepage of blood; then uncomprehendingly back at Jay. 'How this thing?' he asked.
Now, slowly, Lom's own hand came up and explored the shoulder. 'Is there blood?' His voice, though tremulous, sounded as surprised as the looks Jay was exchanging with the Moroccan.
'Why, yes,' Jay said. There is.'
'Then it's nothing to worry about' Lom sounded recovered, impatient. 'Drive on.'
> Looking still confusedly at Jay, as if for orders now, the Arab removed his dark glasses. In the same moment Jay placed the face. He had seen the man, touting like any other down-at-heel at the Cafe Fuentes in the Socco. In their circumstances at that moment this recognition seemed of little consequence.
'But,' Jay began, 'Captain Kerim seemed to think he had said something. A joke about danger . . .'
'Let's just drive on,' Lom interrupted, with what was now almost new-found hauteur. He softened as though conscious of this. 'Eating that stuff can make one over-emotional perhaps—drive on.'
'Well, we know that,' Jay endeavoured clumsily to lighten the embarrassment which seemed to have thickened over the whole inexplicable episode.
The jeep moved off. Awkwardly once more, Jay leaned forward between the seats. 'You sure that shoulder's going to be all right?'
'It's nothing,' was all Lom would say.
With the last splash of golden sunlight they motored into Kasbah Tadla. The small, cross-roads town, with its crumbling mud fort above the river gorge, its imposing mosque forming one side of a huge, dust-surfaced, arcaded square, and its miniature suqs, whose stalls were simple cavities in whitewashed walls, was an intriguingly peaceful place. Old men squatted vacantly in the last warmth of the day. Here and there a lone figure, standing apart like a sentinel, prepared for prayer. Some boys passed a football between the legs of a tethered donkey. The inevitable stork's nest topped the minaret, which the levelling sun had turned a deep, sandstone gold, and the river was still deep between its wide banks. Willows preceded blue gums to the rich water's edge. Jay, deeply preoccupied as he now was, became only half conscious of these things.
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