The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  “Do you fast?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Only when I have guests. I’m not religious.”

  Now I understood. He didn’t fast, so he didn’t need books. We talked about my insatiable need for reading material, and that’s when he mentioned Ezbekiya Gardens. He explained that it had been the site of a huge book market somewhere in downtown Cairo.

  “But that shut down,” my wife said, “years ago.”

  The director nodded. We all agreed it was a terrible pity.

  “The largest secondhand book market in Egypt?” I asked the director.

  “Maybe in the entire Middle East,” he said.

  ENCYCLOPEDIC

  MORE DEVIATIONS. I checked the computer, and after the usual false starts, I found the list of Chinese books and manuscripts donated by Sir Edmund to the Bodleian. These included volumes of the Yung Lo Ta Tien encyclopedia that he had pulled from the burning Hanlin Library a hundred years ago. I ordered up the original manuscripts of the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever known.

  The Yung Lo Ta Tien (or as some prefer to render it into English, the Yong-le Da Dian) encyclopedia was designed to cover all knowledge at the time it was written, and not just in synopsis—entire books and sizable verbatim extracts formed the substance of this encyclopedia.

  The arrangement of the texts within conformed to a poetic rather than a mechanistic system. The first word of each text quoted was ordered according to the fifteenth-century rhyming dictionary Hong-Wu-Zheng Yun.

  The origin of the encyclopedia was magnificent. The third Ming emperor decided to preserve all known literature. At first, 147 scholars were set to work. But ten years went by with only modest results. In 1404 the emperor appointed 2,169 more scholars to work for seven more years to complete the project. The seventy conservators at the British Library look piffling by comparison.

  By 1408 it was ready. Years later many lost works could only be found in the Yung Lo Ta Tien. It was too huge ever to print, being composed of 11,095 large volumes executed on fine white paper ruled in vermilion and bound in hard boards covered with yellow silk.

  Today there are only 370 volumes left. Two hundred or so remain in China and the rest are scattered around the globe. The Bodleian has nineteen volumes, eleven donated by Backhouse.

  The volumes that I looked at in the Bodleian are not the first edition—these were destroyed in another fire in 1744. Fortunately, a copy had been made in the preceding century. One hundred scholars working full time for five years had produced this one copy between 1562 and 1567.

  By 1773, 2,273 juan, or chapters, were recorded as missing from the great encyclopedia. There were roughly two chapters to a volume, so roughly a tenth of the corpus had already been pilfered. This steady decline continued into the nineteenth century. No one knows how many volumes were burned in the fire, but we can be sure the Yung Lo Ta Tien was far from complete at that date.

  I was surprised at how modern the sixteenth-century volumes looked. Rebound in blue boards to replace the original imperial-yellow silk, they looked as if they were less than a hundred years old. There was no foxing or yellowing and the paper was still pliable and tough. Comparing the volumes, I could see how styles varied ever so slightly depending on who had been the copyist at the time.

  The volumes were of large format but were only about seventy or eighty pages long. I counted the characters—there were about five hundred per page. Very roughly, then, each volume was about forty thousand words, slightly less than this book you’re reading. The entire encyclopedia would have had the same word count as the stock of a large secondhand bookshop.

  LOOT

  EBONY AND wax seals broken on the foot-long brass lock, Mrs. W. P. Ker, a survivor of the siege of the British legation, entered the private apartments of the empress at the Ming Shou Palace. She was the first female sightseer after Cossack troops had secured the outer gates of the Forbidden City.

  Looting had already taken place. Obscene scrawls in barely decipherable Cyrillic were scratched into the wall-high camphor-wood boxes in the dressing room.

  This was mild indeed. All were now familiar with disquieting gossip concerning Marshall Count von Waldersee cavorting on an imperial divan with a pliant Chinese prostitute while his soldiers methodically looted the place. In the Summer Palace, the empress’s golden phoenix throne had been unceremoniously chucked off the Peony Terraces into the Lake of the Western Hills. “Lewd and ribald drawings and writings” were scrawled by Russian conscripts on every available wall. Meanwhile, the French helped themselves to the Louis XIV instruments, ground lenses in golden settings, gifts from one Sun King to another, that had lain unused in the Imperial Observatory since the inauspicious reporting of a comet in the months before the Boxer uprising. But everyone agreed, and The Times reported as much, that the worst and most systematic looting was by the Germans.

  That said, Morrison, chief correspondent of The Times, did manage to help himself to the entire contents of a wealthy Chinese prince’s house, even down to the flowering shrubs in the garden. “I have left him the glass in the windows, but nothing else.” This was despite a suppurating gunshot wound in the journalist’s thigh. Had he been fit, Morrison announced that with his exceptional local knowledge he would have been richer in plunder than even Lady MacDonald, wife of the British minister Sir Claude, who, with a small, well-armed force of Marines, “devoted herself most earnestly to looting.”

  What everyone was ultimately after was the fabulous wealth of the Celestial Empress. The Germans were the most systematic, and before the Russians secured an international agreement that the Forbidden City should remain untouched, they had searched every cellar and attic for the dynastic wealth of the Manchus.

  Later, and despite the agreement, a Russian, General Linei-vitch, returned to his post in Amur loaded with ten chests of silk, fur, and ormolu valuables from the royal apartments. In this bout of looting, the indefatigable limping Morrison made off with the dowager empress’s jade prayer tablet from the camphor-wood escritoire at her bedside. But no one found the treasure.

  Mrs. Ker, in her visit, could have helped herself had she but known the secret of the empress’s bedchamber. Past the embroidered coats of black satin set with pearls, the Manchu shoes, and the boxes of silk handkerchiefs, overturned, some pale yellow, some pale blue; past dressers filled with sable skins and silk coats lined with fox, carved rose and sandalwood screens; past chairs and stools of jade and lacquer, jewel-trees, porcelain vases of celadon and “sang de hoeuf” past all this; past even the room of foreign clocks, “some handsome, others hideous, all ticking cheerfully, regardless of the ominous silence around … “

  Even the eunuch who wound the clocks did not know the secret. The treasure was not buried beneath the city, though some valuables were interred under the paving flags of the Palace of Peaceful Old Age. Nor was it hoisted into the pagodas above the simmering confusion of the Chinese court. No thickened walls or massive locks protected the imperial wealth from foreign hands. No strongbox or patent safe but rather a flimsy screen of silk. Using the same trompe-l‧œil that hides the doors to the Dagoba behind the Buddha in a Chinese temple, a silk partition in the dowager’s bedroom gave the illusion of a solid masonry wall. Behind the silk, undisturbed until her return, “lay all the gold and jewels” of China.

  BOOKS OK ANIMALS?

  THE FIFTY-FIVE-DAY siege ended when an army of Russians, Japanese, Italians, and British, including Grandpa Tom, marched into Peking. Chinese troops fought briefly before being overwhelmed by the foreign armies. The occupying force stayed on in Peking for many months, and food was in short supply.

  Père David died on 10 November 1900, just after the relief of the foreign legations in Peking. I like to conjecture that just as the last deer was slaughtered by a hungry Russian soldier camped in the imperial deer reserve, so Père David keeled over and died. I mean, it’s possible, isn’t it?

  Long-dead empires are remembered by the things they built and by the
books they wrote that we are still able to read.

  It struck me then that perhaps Père David did not die when Milu was killed off in China. There were still, after all, examples of the deer in Europe. Perhaps he died when the library had been burned down, when the original information about Milu was lost. The Hanlin Library was destroyed on 23 June 1900. Père David died five months later, in Paris, after several months of illness. Perhaps the onset of that fatal illness coincided with the fire? It’s a poetic conceit, but in my mind I cut the two sequences together—Père David dying and the library burning down. I thought about all the plants and animals named after him, how his contribution had been not to nurture living things but to kill things and record things in books. In a real sense Père David cared more for books than for animals.

  EGYPT VI

  MY WIFE said they paved over Ezbekiya Gardens with concrete, and that’s why the bookselkrs left. I wasn’t satisfied. Everyone I met I questioned about Ezbekiya Gardens. My wife’s aunt thought the Ezbekiya booksellers had moved to Hussain. Hussain is the area near Khan al Kalil, which the Lonely Vianet writer calked “The Khan,” after the manner of “The Hood.” Khan al Kalil is the bazaar where every tourist goes to buy knickknacks. It is also the area made famous by the novels of Naguib Mah-fouz. But behind the bazaar for tourists is a bazaar for everything else you could possibly imagine. Because of its winding alleys and crowded streets, I love going to the place. It feels like a real bazaar, unlike the antiseptic grand bazaar in Istanbul. And though the government is always threatening to demolish it and replace the original inhabitants and their houses with a folk-loric shopping center, they haven’t done it yet. Surely no government could be so stupid as to get rid of a prime tourist site?

  Hearing about Ezbekiya Gardens made me change my mind. If they could get rid of a place where secondhand books were traded, they could get rid of anything. By now I had gleaned more information from Nadim, an Egyptian psychiatrist who lived in the Arctic Circle in Canada but was back for a holiday.

  Nadim outlined the many advantages of living inside the Arctic Circle if your profession is psychiatry. For a start, no one wants to work there, so you get a big bonus incentive from the Canadian government. Secondly, there is no shortage of patients—those depressed by the twenty-four-hour darkness of winter and Eskimos suffering from extreme alienation provide a constant source of revenue. Thirdly, the lack of other psychiatrists means the government does not restrict how and when you work. You can work all round the clock if you want, seeing patients at II P.M.

  Nadim was there simply to make money. He was very sane about the whole thing. He was also very informative about Ezbekiya Gardens, since he often went there as a hoy. He told me his family used to stroll around the gardens on summer evenings.

  The only time I had actually seen the place was from a speeding car shooting along a flyover that crossed the gardens far below. Beneath the sooty ramparts of the bridge I glimpsed more roads, traffic, modern buildings in a semiderelict state, and people in rags riding on donkey carts loaded with garbage. No greenery, though.

  Nadim told me the gardens were now a small, enclosed area. The lake had been filled in and the opera house had been burned down by supporters of Sadat, shortly before he took over from Nasser.

  “But Sadat was in favor of modernization and Western influence—why would his supporters burn down the old opera house?” I asked.

  “That was why they burned it down” said Nadim. “They wanted to show the middle classes that nothing was safe and that it was necessary to support Sadat in his political clampdown.”

  Nadim and his brother used to wander around Ezbekiya Gardens looking for books in French and English. The booksellers used to lay their wares out in files on the wide pavements. There were hundreds of sellers, said Nadim, and thousands of books. “You could get anything in Ezbekiya Gardens,” he said with some warmth. “And for almost nothing, because foreign books were seen as worthless. My brother found a first edition of Victor Hugo for fifty piastres!”

  Strong stuff for a bookhead like me.

  I went to Hussain with my wife to try and find the displaced booksellers of Ezbekiya Gardens. We found some bookshops, but they only sold books in Arabic and religious books. It seems that my wife’s aunt had been wrong.

  Ezbekiya Gardens became a symbol for me of all that was good about the past, and its destruction now meant something very bad indeed. But where had the books all gone? You can’t just abolish a book market overnight, not the biggest in the Middle East, surely?

  “Why not?” said Nadim.

  “All those books must have gone somewhere” I said. “They must be somewhere here in Cairo, maybe in a warehouse or something”

  Nadim shrugged. I supposed that living in the Arctic Circle had made him more open to anything being possible. A huge book market could disappear if the property developers and their government lackeys decided it would.

  Nobody I asked about the disappearance of Ezbekiya Gardens thought it meant anything more than “progress.”Everyone accepted that there would be more cars and more crummy apartment blocks and that that was the price you paid for having electric gadgets and better health care, for “progress”

  What struck me as extraordinary was the deep belief that you had to have either one thing or the other. You couldn’t have medicine and gadgets without every garden being turned into a twenty-story building. Everyone was fatalistic about this. Everyone instinctively knew that something out of control was at work, a monster that gave us sweetmeats—if we wanted the sweetmeats we had to tolerate the monster.

  Humans have always tolerated monsters. But this one had no face, was intangible, not even formally agreed upon.

  The cars were getting to me now. On my first few visits to Cairo I had found the traffic exhilarating. There were a lot of cars, but they always seemed to be moving. If you were in a taxi you were always going somewhere. Increasingly, though, I found it quicker to walk through the fume-laden streets than to sit in a cab in a traffic holdup. And the cars were less interesting, modern Japanese cars, the same the world over.

  But even in a traffic jam you’d see interesting things. A bicycle with a steering wheel instead of handlebars. Two men shughtering a sheep by the roadside. An astonishingly beautiful beggar girl with a crutch and a lame leg and a scowl. Four men rebuilding an engine on a traffic island. Human stuff, better than television.

  In fact, one day, a cab driver I’d become friendly with wedged a TV between the front two seats of his Polski Fiat cab for me to watch as we drove. Apart from the poor reception and low quality of Egyptian TV, I still wasn’t interested. Even if I had been facing the best Hollywood movie on a perfect screen, I would have been hoking out at the street. In Egypt, critical mass has not been reached—life is still more interesting than television.

  But with Ezbekiya Gardens gone, how long would that last?

  FARM PLAN

  MY MOTHER rang and told me that the farm where she had grown up and where Grandpa Tom had lived in his caravan was coming up for auction. She was going to have another look around the place. “If I win the lottery this week,” she said, “I’ll buy it back.”

  The reserve price was a million pounds, twenty times the fifty thousand my family sold it for in 1968. My grandfather had bought the farm in 1940. Since my aunts and uncles weren’t interested in farming, my grandfather had felt duty bound to sell it, at less than market price, to the grandson of the man he’d bought it from. But now the grandson was old, and none of his daughters wanted the farm either. He had a bad back, and most of the land was used as a holiday caravan site, making use of its nearness to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Now no one, on either side of each family, wanted to carry on farming—not unless we won the lottery, that is.

  When Grandpa Tom lived on the farm, his was the only caravan. Dark green, not dissimilar to the one Monty ended his days in.

  I can actually only remember Grandpa Tom speaking about sixty words. We visited
the farm regularly, but he spoke rarely. As a result, the only solid connection to the Boxer Rebellion was his handing round of the photograph of the severed heads in the street. He would pass it round silently, and my father would fill in the historical facts.

  Grandpa Tom never spoke about any war that he had been in. He survived the whole of the first war as an infantry private, but his medals remained wrapped in their issue envelopes inside his portable desk-box.

  His interests when I was young were walking very slowly to the big road and finding things on the footpath by the canal. He often found wallets and dropped coins. In his box he had an 1860 farthing and a rare penny from 1912.

  When he discovered that I collected the tight rubber bands used to make lambs’ tails drop off, he used to give me any he found while out walking.

  UNICORN

  THE CHINESE unicorn, ch’i‧lin, was anciently described as having the body of a deer, the tail of a cow, and the hooves of a horse. From the Han period it was believed to be a benevolent animal, whose fleshy horn equipped it for war, although it never did harm.

  The implacable T’ang dynasty skeptic, Wang Ch’ung, declared that just as the serpent turns into a fish and the mouse turns into a turtle, so the stag is transformed, in times of peace and tranquillity, into a unicorn.

  Milu’s antlers look reversed because the brow tine, the forward antler prong with no “points” growing off it, is absent. Instead, the position occupied by the front prong is taken by the blades and spikes of the main part of the antlers. And sticking out at the back is a rear-facing prong or tine.

  When antlers are growing, their nurturing “velvet” would make them appear fleshy.