* * * *
EIGHTEEN
LUXOR IS DOMINATED by her two greatest monuments. The dreaming ruins of Karnak and the confident edifice of the Winter Palace Hotel dwarf a miscellany of native houses, official buildings and hovels, the modern village. The hotel is the magnificent pride of all Englishmen and the envy of every other race; she is fully worthy of the ancient city. A huge white building, her wide, winding twin stairways to the long outer terrace dominate the river-front and look directly across to distant Theban mountains. From her flowery balconies you can see ancient temples, the dim battlements of Medinet Habu and the twin colossi who are all that remain of the lost temple of Amenhotep. Then come the dusty terraces of Deir el Bahari. Between these, on the cliff-side, is a curving honeycomb of nobles’ tombs. Then the great shoulder of the hill hides the Valley of the Kings, beyond which is the wide, unwelcoming desert and the hostile borderlands where wild Bedouin still rove and raid.
The hotel’s great garden faces east. One can almost forget Egypt, taking one’s meals in the company of other upper-class Europeans. With its imported shrubs and its tall walls, the Winter Palace is magically self-contained. All one sees of Luxor are the far-off eastern hills, blue and translucent as chalcedony in the morning light. The gardens boast every kind of familiar English flower - roses, carnations, pansies, irises, geraniums surrounded by smooth green lawns as sweet-smelling as any English cricket pitch, constantly tended by impeccably uniformed gardeners.
‘Luxor is the soul of Egypt,’ Malcolm Quelch insists. We sip our afternoon Darjeeling. (I had slammed the broken door swiftly that night but was convinced he had in that instant seen us both. He had chosen to pretend amnesia, perhaps to save us all embarrassment. Save for a single passing reference to his two years of medical training with the army and his willingness to use his skills to help any native who might be in discomfort, he did not attempt to explain the affair. Indirectly, I had let him know I was a man of the world and that Esmé had no notion of the world at all.) ‘Karnak is perfectly fitted for a great city, don’t you think? On the east we have the long stretch of rich plain, a shadowy changing green reaching to the very foot of the hills! To the west we have that wonderful view of the western plain. Then, between east and west is our sinuous Nile!’
With Esmé I had already taken to renting a kalash to explore the vicinity. We had trotted beside fair fields, dotted with palm thickets, through hills which rose low to the south before suddenly towering, knife-edged, to the Red Mountain -that huge and fantastic outcrop, scarred white as Odysseus’s old wound by a pathway descending from the ridge. ‘That mountain is as the ghost of the greatness of Thebes,’ declared Quelch, drawing closer, ‘as a liss of the Earth-gods, as a thunder-cloud advancing out of an open sky! Whether it be close upon you, grim, brown-red, hot, arid, impenetrable, rugged against all time - or far away, a mass of shimmering rose with paths of faint blue shadow in the early morning! And it is always immense and immediate, my dear friends, upon all things and all men!’
He has become emphatically lyrical since we disembarked. Far from avoiding Esmé or myself, he takes to seeking us out, as if needing to impose upon that graphic moment a different image of himself which we can respect and which might even erase all memory of it. His manner is more urbane, and increasingly avuncular. ‘No Ptolemy, no Roman, no Frenchman ever built anything as magnificent and practical as this hotel,’ continues Quelch as I begin to consider escape. ‘Monsieur Pierre Loti, in that peevish and decadent epitome of Anglophobia which he entitled The Death of Philae, murmurs fretfully against this hotel, you know. But don’t you find it has a fine presence? It dwarfs the modern village to forgetfulness. That alone is surely a valuable quality? I have said all this in my book. I was flattered to receive a personal letter from Thomas Cook’s and, before the War, could sign for anything I pleased at the bar or in the restaurant. The War lowered the tone of so much. What sort of Will was it that drove us to such terrible self-destruction?’
I admit it is a question I often ask. I hope to answer it through one of the photoplays I will write for our new company. The Folly would be set in a French garden invaded by soldiers of every country. Quelch thought that Sir Ranalf Steeton would leap at the idea - ‘especially if you include some love-interest. A young lady violated by the Boche, for instance.’
I intended my film to be above mere nationalism and felt Sir Ranalf must appreciate the universal appeal of my idea. He was after all dedicated to making pictures with an international flavour. He had affirmed this when he arrived on the train from Cairo, accompanied by three servants and a large amount of luggage. He had taken almost half a floor in the Winter Palace. Some of the rooms were for our film-making purposes, but I had the impression that servants, rather than Sir Ranalf, had been forced into more cramped accommodation.
Most of us were not, in fact, staying there, but retained our rooms on the moored boat, dining by special arrangement at the hotel. A modest account was kept in the company name and we received envelopes of cash for small transactions, but few of us felt any urge to buy souvenirs so had very few immediate needs. Accounts opened in our names by Sir Ranalf in the United Egyptian Bank received the bulk of our fees.
‘When the May blooms red ‘midst the green of the glade and the white May spreads and the white flowers fade, I shall recall our trysting plait, and seek the heart of the hawthorn’s stem to find our winding brands again,’ quoted Quelch by way of a companionable reference to a favourite Wheldrake, Love in the Dale, and with a gesture both romantic and mechanical rose to greet Mrs Cornelius who strode towards us through the garden followed by four little boys in bleached linen, their heads piled with what were evidently her purchases. ‘Good heavens, Mrs Cornelius! Have you a private income? Where on earth did you come by the cash? Or is it all on credit?’
‘Not me, perfessor!’ She laughed without rancour. ‘It’s not ser diffrent ‘ere from Petticoat Lane. Ain’t yer ‘eard o’ the baiter system? I got the ‘ole bloody lot fer a silk petticoat that wos a size too small fer me, an’ an ‘at that wos a size too big. Some local lady’s gonna look ther pride o’ the ‘arem ternight!’ And, passing us with a wink, she gave the boys kindly instructions in simple Arabic.
Quelch at least pretended to be amused. I understood that he seemed at his easiest when actually at his most anxious. ‘Fas est etab hoste doceri, as Ovid tells us. I must see what unwanted articles I have in my own wardrobe. Perhaps one of the native sheikhs would care for a pair of excellent galoshes?’
I did not in those days understand ‘galoshes’ and he was irritated by my query. ‘Actually,’ he continued with a sudden change of mood, ‘I suppose it’s a bit infra dig for a white man to bargain with the natives in that way.’
I said I saw no harm in it.
‘Well, perhaps just for the British. A foreigner, after all. . . A Russian.’ His smile threatened to disappear into his head. ‘A sort of neutral. No offence. The only English people who do that sort of thing in Cairo are the drunkards, the worn-out whores and the deserters. And, of course,’ he lowered his voice, ‘the nouveau-riche touristas.’
Until then I had not cared about my lack of spending money but, since Cook’s were unable to provide us with suitable cheques for our accounts in Port Said, I now saw a way to obtaining a few souvenirs. In our business transactions Quelch had been generous in his acceptance of IOUs from us all, and knew he would be repaid as soon as we returned to Cairo. In spite of his warnings about ‘face’ I nonetheless determined to find some more or less honest antiquarian and barter perhaps some of my jade and amber cigarette-holders for some mementos. I suspected Quelch’s own willingness to extend credit had much to do with wishing to ingratiate himself with us and gain a permanent situation in our company. Thus he made himself especially agreeable with me. I guessed he feared his secret would become generally known, so he seemed eager to be of help. I had in mind an Egyptian collar for my little girl and an elegant statue of Anubis, the jackal. Quelch express
ed considerable approval of my taste but was pessimistic as to my chances of finding any original, though new tombs were always being sought by those who resented the Egyptian Society’s imperialist monopoly on antiquities. ‘Egypt exists because others honour her dead,’ he reflected. ‘Indeed, Egyptians honour only death. Nothing else is sacred to them. All they have left to sell is the contents of their tombs, and the manufactured replicas they bury for a year or so to give them the authentic suggestion of the Pit. What a peculiar heritage, Mr Peters! Do all old empires come to this? Will Russia and Britain one day have nothing to sell the world but their graveyards, their statues and their museums?’
I found his remarks fatuous at the time. The Bolsheviks’ current encouragement of the package tour and the sightseeing bus has vindicated Quelch in this at least, while it is obvious whenever I look out of my window how readily the hub of the British Empire has degenerated into a nation of shrieking street-arabs hawking the synthetic ikons of their exhausted glory.
Fifty years ago I was like any tourist. I wanted a good-quality souvenir of my visit. True, the film itself would of course ultimately be the best memento, but I itched to do a little bargaining. I remembered I had also accumulated a large variety of silk ties and handkerchiefs in the latest ‘jazz’ styles. I returned to where the Nil Atari was moored a little west of the hotel’s quay, to find the tradeable haberdashery and smokers’ accessories in my stowage. I then went back to the corniche, walking slowly down to the souk clustered at the very bases of Karnak’s ancient pillars, where a mosque had grown almost organically from ruins whose stones were used in its own nativity. This blend of architecture and scenery, the miscellaneous crowd representing a host of trades, professions and costumes, a glimpse of almost four thousand years of mankind’s history, was perhaps a symbol, as Quelch had implied, of every imperial fate. It was oddly sweet to look upon temples where people had worshipped the living Osiris, Amon, Set and Isis, in the blind faith of absolute belief. All manner of other momentary favourites, local deities, animals and the great Ra, were alive beneath Egypt’s eternal sun, the true source of her Glory. I looked at Coptic churches carved from the ruins of chapels originally dedicated to Horus and Sekhmet. Those early Christians believed they put the holy mark of God on the works of Satan. The warlike followers of Mohammed, who had next imposed their grim morality upon these buildings, hacked at the wholesome signs of gender and fertility until they became obscene. I inhaled the smell of the desert, the water, the palms, the spices, fabrics and aromatic woods; the less pleasant smells of human bodies and sewage. I would look suddenly into green or blue eyes staring from faces which might have belonged to hawkers or scribes or field-hands of the Eleventh Dynasty. I absorbed by touch and taste and scent, through my eyes and ears, the layered centuries of a capital which had ruled the mightiest empire of the ancient world. I did this as a welcome stranger at whom everyone smiled and offered their goods. I plunged into the embracing crowd as I might plunge into the legendary Pool of Time. This last was, for me at least, the sweetest of Luxor’s temptations.
Thrusting through narrow lanes of stalls and chattering salesmen, whose dark, sardonic eyes regarded me with a thousand separate calculations or were as frankly curious as their veiled women, hanging over balconies which perched crazily atop awnings, sometimes leaning to form archways for muddy alleys paved with old coffee-cans and excavated uneven stones sticking like hags’ teeth from the dirt to snag a camel’s hoof or trip a running child, I was at once absorbed. I lost sense of passing time. I grew increasingly fascinated, not with the variety of goods (save for the local foodstuffs they issued largely from the same rather unvaried cornucopia producing manufactured antiquities and poorly-printed pornography) but by the lack of urgency with which these people conducted their business. They say the Arab has nothing to spend but time. But that glib phrase scarcely described the value these people placed on the formalities and pleasures of conversation and barter. In Odessa’s Slobodka, too, there were important rituals involved in the buying, selling and trading of goods and services: this often in lieu of any other entertainment. Bargaining was clearly of greater importance to Luxor’s citizens than profit and doubtless it had been the same to her founders. Locally, certain histrionic gifts were much appreciated, highly applauded and well rewarded. The better a merchant’s pantomime of poverty, despair and sheer frustration with another’s stupidity, the more he was patronised. A culture which denies its people so many casual pleasures has created pleasure - even art - from the ordinary functions of daily life. Here the aesthetics of argument are displayed and criticised in the little cafes where men drink tea, or coffee, or smoke from the communal ‘hookah’ every proprietor provides. They comment on matters of the day - perhaps observing a group of drunken English soldiers shouldering their way through the mobs, shouting obscenities as they go, or making some amused comment upon the baffled crocodile of tourists brought to taste the realities of modern life and make trembling purchases at shops and stalls already come to some previous arrangement with their particular dragoman. The more refined people wear pale European suits and tarbooshes and read copies of The Egyptian Gazette or La Vie Parisienne as they sit in little chairs outside their premises filled with superb objects identical to those made thousands of years ago, carved by hands through which flows the blood of the original artists. There were people for sale in there, moreover, creatures of every age and trained in every humiliation. Slavery, when not an open part of a society, when it is made shameful and criminal and secret, becomes a dark thing. I heard this argument many times in the Muslim world and appreciated its logic, but I could not approve. The men in the souk’s shadows whisper to me, displaying an intimate knowledge of my desires. They offer me all they know to be forbidden. But I push them away. They offer me disease and death, I say. They offer me shame. Shuft, effendi. Shuft, shuft, effendi. Murhuuba, aiwa? They touched me; they grinned and made smacking noises with their lips. They made little gasping sounds and they winked and flirted. This was not what I had come for, I told them. La, la! U’al! Imshi! Imshi! But they were relentless. They had an idea that a lone European only came to the souk seeking sexual digression. While I did not find this especially offensive, I grew impatient with their persistence. Attempting to avoid a rouged boy, I found myself in a little cul-de-sac formed by three tall houses, their walls covered with awnings shadowing stalls selling fish over which black masses of flies crawled like a heaving canopy. I turned to seek a way out, pushing through the youths and little boys whose hands clutched at my arms, their opportunist nails digging into my flesh. Behind me, as if following me, I saw a tall European, wearing a rich gelabea and a kefta. His deeply tanned face was alight with laughter at my plight. His teeth were white, as startling as his eyes and as familiar as his hands which now quickly pulled the veil about his lower features before he wheeled about. I was still in a state of profound shock. I saw him move swiftly to merge with the crowd. Almost sick with disbelief I found the use of my limbs and paid no attention to the squealing children who still picked at my clothing and my person.
‘Kolya!’ I cried at last, stumbling forward. ‘Kolya!’
It was none other than my oldest and closest friend, my teacher, my exemplar! Shura had said he was in Egypt, on a mission for his new employer. Why had he followed me? Certainly he had recognised me. There was therefore some good reason why he did not wish me to know him. He could easily be working not for Stavisky at all but for a foreign government.
The little boys were brushed aside, the begging girls smacked back as with sudden unthinking energy I continued in hasty pursuit of my friend. I did not consider at that moment his good reasons for not wishing to meet. Separation from Kolya had been an agony I had feared to admit and now here was a chance to be free of it. This friend and evangelist of my youth had been, in so many ways, the creator of my adult self. I had despaired ever to experience again his languid, aristocratic ambience, his perfect poise and diction, his amusement with the world a
nd all its works! I longed to know why he was separated from his wife, that bloodless Frenchwoman who, I suspect, had been behind my own undoing. How long was he in Egypt? Where and when would it be possible to meet? Of course he would not be as eager to see me, but I never doubted his affection, perhaps even his love, for me. I was certain I had seen pleasure in his eyes for a small instant. I could still see the vivid gelabea ahead until, like a conjurer dismissing an illusion, he had swirled himself into the agitated body of the crowd and vanished. The truth of Professor Quelch’s assertion was becoming rapidly apparent. Egypt was indeed a land of illusion and hallucination; she depended on both for her survival. Yet that moment’s recognition had been no insubstantial mirage. Even with its deep tan, his handsome face could not be mistaken. I knew every line of it and remembered every gesture, every muscle, every tiny movement of his body. Forcing my way on, careless of all protests, I looked desperately for the blue and gold gelabea, the dark blue headdress, but they had vanished. I might as well pursue a genie on the desert wind as hope to find my friend in any of the surrounding warrens. My next desperate thought was to try the cafes fringing the souk. These were frequented chiefly by Europeans but I could find neither a tall ‘Arab’ nor Count Nikolai Petroff in more conventional dress. My next thought was to try the hotels, starting with the Winter Palace, the most likely. I called for a child, offering it a coin to lead me out of the maze. Only then did I realise that my little bag of ties and cigarette-holders had gone. The boy was an honest guide and I was soon in the lobby of the Winter Palace. I searched every corner, before dashing into the garden as tea was being served. I could not find Kolya but Mrs Cornelius and Esmé, in the shade of a large palm, were sharing a glittering table and a pot of Earl Grey. It was a pleasure to see them comrades at last and I wanted to tell Mrs Cornelius my splendid news yet hesitated to interrupt the start of a greater understanding between the two women. So, suppressing my natural eagerness, I passed discreetly behind them and, while I had not planned to eavesdrop, overheard a fragment of conversation.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 33