The Arabian Nightmare

by Robert Irwin

  The Dawadar continued, ‘Her charges have been corroborated and expanded by another witness, a public-spirited citizen, albeit crippled.’

  The slaves had lowered the sedan and one of them now opened the door. Saatih came tumbling down its steps. Saatih squelched and bubbled and cleared his throat. ‘Murder and the hunting of men with animals are the least of their crimes,’ he said finally. ‘These two men before us decided that God’s providence moves too slowly and conspired to give it a push—’ Here Vane cried out in anguished confusion, ‘But I thought that we and the lepers were on different sides!’

  ‘We were. Utterly.’ This was the Father, resigned.

  ‘On different sides and the same side.’ This was Cornu. ‘On different sides and the same side,’ Saatih agreed. ‘Made idle by cynicism, these two bored intelligences turned to the study of prophecy and magic. While still young they learned of each other’s existence and fame in such arts. They met secretly in Jerusalem and there they made a pact to perform an operation known to occultists as “Raising the Wind”. Then they separated and returned to their respective countries, where they patiently set to work preparing the operation. This operation (which has never ever been successfully completed) involves the selection of an ordinary human conflict by powerful magicians who recruit for its armies occult assistance and thereby raise the conflict to a higher power, investing it with apocalyptic significance. Finding Man’s story long and wearisome, they wished to force the coming of the Antichrist and, what must follow, the coming of the Messiah and the End of All Things. To slake their boredom they wished to stage Armageddon in front of the pyramids. The Father took the side of Islam, Cornu that of Christendom. The Father recruited healers; Cornu recruited the sick. The Father summoned up assistance from the Alam al-Mithal; Cornu struggled against the phantoms of the dream world.’

  ‘Which one fought for the True God?’ This was the friar, who had appeared among the gawping throng around the sedan.

  ‘Their Great Work is and will remain incomplete. No Messiah will come. If one may judge from the signs and portents they did succeed in raising amid us in Cairo, one should judge that the war in the universe is between two equally evil powers. However, the operation has failed. That it has failed is due largely to the excessive cunning and vanity of the Father of Cats. The Father did not trust his adversary. He suborned and corrupted many of Cornu’s followers and, in so doing, unbalanced the psychic forces. On the other hand, recently the Father has been unable to control his own legions.’ Saatih chuckled. ‘Disgusting things have been emerging from the Alam al-Mithal. The Arabian Nightmare is spreading. The Father himself was the source of the nightmare he pretended to cure.’

  Saatih gurgled and would have said more, but the Sultan motioned him silent and spoke himself.

  ‘These are incredible charges. I will not lightly accept such bizarre and far-fetched accusations against my old teacher and friend. What have you to say?’

  ‘I will not weary the Sultan’s ear or tax his limited powers of understanding. I am eager to be off,’ said the Father of Cats.

  Qaitbay almost choked. Gesturing furiously, he had Mas-rur, the Great Eunuch, come forward. Masrur forced the Father of Cats to his knees and, with a fine professional blow of the axe, cut the man’s head off. This done, he turned to Cornu, who had already composed himself to die, and cut his head off too.

  Saatih’s head revolved until it faced the Sultan. ‘That was wisely done,’ he said.

  Vane, Balian, the friar and now Bulbul stood at the front of a crowd of students of Sleep, servants of the house, lepers and mendicants. Qaitbay addressed them all. it would seem that, one and all, you have been more dupes than conspirators.’ (Vane scowled.) ‘My men will escort you to the Citadel, but you are not to regard yourselves as prisoners, for you shall all be my guests at dinner tonight.’

  The Sultan’s horse was led into the courtyard and he mounted it. Then they all filed out behind him.

  21

  Eating Well in Cairo

  Eat well and farewell! As promised, I shall make my appearance at the end of this final episode, but that will be only to signify the end of our companionship. So if I forget then, let me say now: farewell and sleep well. By the way my vote is cast for the banana...

  ‘Consider the banana. Consider its skin, which protects its virtues like a veil. Consider its shape, a muted bow, like a fine arched lady’s eyebrows. Consider its trinitarian segmental structure, which faithfully mirrors the threefold dialectic of Nature. Consider how the banana nourishes and cleanses the Third Eye.

  ‘Rice, rather, is the measure of all foods. It occupies the point of equipoise within the scale of taste—only through rice will it be possible to assess the merits of the meal. Without this staple we are adrift on a sea of gastric fantasy.

  ‘The monkey nut has many claims on our attention, not least the polarity within it between nut and shell, but those who speak of such things would do well to remember that the nut is not necessarily truer than the shell.

  ‘The wise men will appreciate the whole meal, taking care to balance its parts. Here we have an evening mode of cooking—the rapid alternation of sweet and sour provides it with the rhythm that intoxicates our senses.’

  Light battled against darkness in the cavernous banqueting hall. Pages bearing flambeaux created patterns of reflected light on the tiled arabesques of the walls and the dully glinting, low, bronze tables. Diners and waiters moved through limitless perspectives of horseshoe arches under eternal arcs of stone. The palm grove of marble columns dissolved at their heads into peacock’s fan vaulting which, as it ascended, broke into stalactitic ornament; this in turn shattered in its upper reaches into cubes of coloured crystal, which radiated like divine emanations from the centres of the domes. Stars, zodiacal numbers and the Names of God effaced the blankness of the walls and suggested the suspension of time in the Sultan’s treasure cave.

  The Jashinkir, the Ustudar and a regiment of sakis stood to serve at the Sultan’s table. On the stone platform behind the Sultan’s table were arrayed battle trophies recently won in Anatolia and, in their midst, wrapped in black silk, the heads of the Father of Cats and Jean Cornu reposed on bronze salvers. Convoys of slaves streamed into the hall bearing bowls and panniers—small birds, couscous, khashkhasiya, poppy seed cakes, sheep’s tail fat, Persian milk dishes, African fruits and rice. Conversation at the tables was elevated.

  ‘You say that Christ never slept. It is many years now since I made a study of this important question, but my teachers, I recall, maintained this opinion to be notorious heresy and a doctrine capable of rebuttal both in general and in particular!’

  The friar was unmoved by the vigour of Vane’s onslaught. ‘Then rebut it.’

  Vane knuckled his forehead in a parody of servile deference. ‘First, to raise the general objection, Christ was both God and Perfect Man and, being Perfect Man, must he not have taken upon himself of all Man’s qualities and attributes? So it is safest to believe that Christ had two hands, two eyes, a mouth and so forth and that, further, he laughed, cried, slept and dreamt as a man. Then, to take the particular article on which orthodox assent must be fixed, the Gospel tells us that Christ slept, for is it not related in the fourth book of the Gospel of St Mark that Jesus Christ was asleep in the rear part of a ship on the Sea of Galilee when a storm blew up and it was necessary for the disciples to awaken him before he arose to quieten the storm, and, since (as Artemidorus teaches us) sleep is nothing more than a vehicle for dreams, must we not suppose that Christ had dreams on that boat and in other places at other times? So it is certain that Christ slept and likely that he dreamt.’

  Vane grinned his wolfs grin.

  The friar smiled too. ‘You must persevere as a tomb robber, for you will never make your reputation as an exegete. You have put two arguments to me, but a single refutation undermines them both.

  ‘Sleep is not a quality but rather the absence of one, that is, wakefulness. No more is dr
eaming an attribute but rather the denial of one, that is, rationality. (It is as if one were to call a black man “coloured”, which is absurd, for what he actually suffers from is absence of colour for, as the Blessed Niko tells us, black is not a colour.) Like Evil, in that they constitute only absence and negation, sleeping and dreaming are no more to be accounted essential qualities in humanity than are one-leggedness, amentia, blindness or albinism. If Christ slept, then he was not Perfect Man and therefore neither Christ nor God, and, if not God, then the testimony of his disciple Mark might safely be accounted worthless. This would be both absurd and counter to orthodoxy.

  ‘But if we say, as I do, that Christ never slept on that storm-tossed boat, then how can we account for Mark’s testimony? In this way. We learn from that very same chapter of Mark that Christ never spoke save in parables. Shall we ascribe fatigue to God? What sane man will rebuke the wind? Should we credit the Galilean Sea with ears? Rather, it is certain that when we read of Christ sleeping we read of the acting out of parable. The sea that they sailed on was no real sea but the Sea of Dreams, and the sense of the parable is that it was not Christ but his Apostles that slept and he stilled their nightmare for them. To sleep is to be unconscious. Can God not be conscious? No. To dream is to be deceived. Can God be deceived? No. Dreaming is deception. Like magic, it is an imposture practised upon reason and the senses, and Christianity rejects dreams and magic alike.’

  ‘You scorn magic?’ Saatih dribbled and slobbered. It was horrid to watch him eat.

  ‘Magic is absurd. It is a system of thinking that does not work and does not get one anywhere,’ said the friar.

  ‘It works, but it does not get one anywhere,’ said Vane.

  ‘But it is very beautiful. Magic is an art which pleases the eye and the ear, ’ said Bulbul. ‘There is poetry in the pentagram and invocation. They seem to promise but cannot fulfil infinite bliss.’

  ‘Like Yoll’s stories,’ said the friar sighing. ‘I shall miss Yoll’s stories.’

  ‘Yoll is dead but his stories live,’ Bulbul replied. ‘I wrote them down at his dictation. I have entitled the manuscript “Alf Layla wa Layla”, that is, “One Thousand Nights and One Night”.’

  Here, a gipsy who was dining at the same table intervened. He was here tonight, he explained, because he understood that something extraordinary was due to happen.

  ‘Even in Saragossa, where I come from, Yoll’s stories were known of. Yoll was more than a storyteller, though, and his life signified something more. Each man carries his fate within him. Fate is a story written in his heart, his liver and his bones and it throws out his future before him. Somewhere within the viscera of every man sits his fate, painful like a kidney stone. It is kismet. It is a story which is writing man. Some men’s fates make small stories, others great stories, epics. The big stories eat the small stories. We are all here, ’ he said, glancing round, ‘almost all here anyway, episodes in someone else’s story.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Balian moaned. ‘It’s all so horrible and pointless. Things just keep coming round in circles.’

  Just then somebody screamed. Everybody turned. The head on one of the salvers was speaking through the sheath of silk. it is always a pleasure to be with the Sultan,’ the head of the Father of Cats was saying, ‘even if only in part.’

  ‘Spirit, may we question you?’ demanded the friar.

  ‘You may.’

  ‘Spirit, what is your present state?’

  ‘I longed for sleep, but even in death I have not found it.’

  ‘Even as it is written, “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”,’ replied the friar.

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Tell us now, what is or was the Arabian Nightmare?’ it is a disease, a curse, a fear and an ogre, these four things equally.’

  ‘That may be so. Yet it can hardly be any of these things in any common sense, for it seems possible to live under its thrall not only with equanimity but with happiness and well-being. Is it not perhaps an idea or a metaphor for a way of existing?’ The head was silent for a moment. Vane had meanwhile risen from the table and begun to creep towards the stone platform on which the head rested.

  Then the muffled voice resumed. ‘These questions are difficult. You are bold enough to suggest that the nightmare is only an idea. I do not wish to gainsay you. Reflect, however, that it is an idea that has killed—if it is an idea.’

  The Sultan trembled. Vane continued to inch forward. The friar returned to the attack.

  ‘Did the Nightmare kill the Venetian painter known as Giancristoforo Doria?’

  ‘The painter you name died at the hands of his callous fellow conspirators. The conditions of his imprisonment in the Arqana destroyed him. He died from a madness inherent within him. He committed suicide. He was killed by sorcery. The Arabian Nightmare took him. His death was determined and more than determined. There are always more causes than events in the Alam al-Mithal. This generates great pressure. Some of the determinations are contradictory. I cannot say more.’

  ‘Why did you have the Englishman known as Balian persecuted and hunted on his arrival in Cairo?’

  But the head was silent. Vane had reached the platform now. Removing the silk and raising the head by its wispy hair, he showed it to the hall.

  ‘The dead do not speak. Its lips are sealed. ’ Then, shouting, ‘The old man’s really dead!’ he booted the head as high as it would go over the heads of the hushed throng into the dark outer reach of the hall. Balian was following its trajectory when something at the corner of his eye attracted his attention. A dirty white turban.

  He nudged the friar. ‘That man over there in the dirty white turban, he is the ventriloquist of whom Yoll and I spoke.’

  The friar did not hesitate. He stood up and bellowed, ‘Stop that man! There is the charlatan responsible for this imposture!’

  But all was chaos as diners scattered to avoid the descending head and the man easily made his escape. When they sat down again they found that the gipsy had vanished too. The friar was calm.

  ‘Almost certainly a prank of the Laughing Dervishes. Let it pass. Now—’

  Here the Dawadar interrupted. ‘If we speak of the Laughing Dervishes, my daughter Khatun had the most extraordinary dream the other night. She dreamt that she was made love to by-’

  But here the friar interposed smoothly, ‘I was always taught that it was bad manners to talk of dreams or indeed to mention a lady’s name at table. Now, why should that be, I wonder?’

  ‘It could be that the dreams are boring and women depressing,’ growled Vane as he rejoined the company.

  The friar turned to Balian. ‘Now that your adventures are over, what will you do?’

  Somebody on the other side of the table dropped a glass. Balian, distracted, watched the glass intact upon the floor. He was uncomfortable. He did not feel that the climax in his story had been reached. Then, after too long an interval, the glass shattered.

  ‘I shall go and look for Zuleyka and ask her to marry me,’ he replied. ‘I shall convert to Islam if necessary.’

  ‘Zuleyka is insane. You wouldn’t like to marry my daughters instead or as well?’ asked the Dawadar hopefully.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity.’

  His mind was no longer with the Dawadar. Someone was shaking him awake.

  The hand that was shaking him felt curiously insubstantial.

  ‘Wake up,’ said the Ape. ‘I want to tell you another story. But first, give me a drink. I am exhausted.

  A Note on the Artist

  The illustrations in this book are by David Roberts.

  David Roberts, ‘the Scottish Canaletto’, was born in 1796, the son of a cobbler, in Stockbridge, near Edinburgh. After his first job as a house painter, he went on to paint the scenery for a travelling circus and then worked as a theatrical scene painter for Drury Lane. At the same time he had developed what was to be a life-long interest in the depiction of architecture and sce
nery. His early paintings included British, Spanish and fantastic pseudo-biblical landscapes, but in 1838 he went out to the Middle East in search of new subject matter.

  After landing in Alexandria in September, he went on to Cairo. ‘It was exactly as he had expected—long, narrow, crowded streets, little shops, tall houses, jutting corbelled balconies, lattice windows like bird-cages, heavy grilled doorways splashed with shafts of sunlit dust motes; mysterious too in deep shadowy courtyards and arches... ’ (Katharine Sim, David Roberts R. A., London, 1984). From Cairo he travelled up the Nile as far as the Second Cataract and painted and sketched the pharaonic monuments on his route. By Christmas he was back in Cairo, making studies of its architecture and street life.

  Individually, Roberts’s pictures of Cairo are remarkable for their detail and accuracy. Taken together, they constitute an unparalleled pictorial record of early nineteenth-century Cairo, a city which, visually at least, had changed very little since the fifteenth century.

  In February 1839 Roberts moved on to Sinai and from there to Palestine. He was back in London injuly 1839, and he never returned to the Near East. However, the studies and sketches he had brought back with him provided him with ample material for the more finished works he produced in the years that followed.

  The lithographs of his eastern travels were made by Louis Haghe, a Belgian artist who worked in close collaboration with Roberts. The publication of the lithographs in forty-one parts over the years 1842-9 confirmed Roberts’s fame and assured his income. He was elected to the Royal Academy and came to include Turner, Dickens and Thackeray among his friends. In 1855-6 Day and Son published photolithographic reproductions of all the plates in six volumes under the title The Holy Land, Syria, Idumaea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia. It is from that edition that the illustrations in The Arabian Nightmare have been reproduced.

  David Roberts died in 1864.

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