When the Going Was Good

by Evelyn Waugh

  A day or two afterwards he invited me to dinner at his house in Crater. A smart car with a liveried Indian chauffeur came to fetch me. We dined on the roof; a delicious dinner; iced vin rosé – ‘It is not a luxurious wine, but I am fond of it; it grows on a little estate of my own in the South of France’ – and the finest Yemen coffee. With his very thin gold watch in his hand, Mr Leblanc predicted the rising of a star – I forget which. Punctual to the second, it appeared, green and malevolent, on the rim of the hills; cigars glowing under the night sky; from below the faint murmur of the native streets; all infinitely smooth and civilized.

  At this party a new facet was revealed to me in the character of my host. Mr Leblanc the man of fashion I had seen. Here was Mr Leblanc the patriarch. The house where we sat was the top storey of his place of business; at the table sat his daughter, his secretary, and three of his ‘young men’. The young men were his clerks, learning the business. One was French, the other two English lately down from Cambridge. They worked immensely hard – often, he told me, ten hours a day; often half way through the night, when a ship was in. They were not encouraged to go to the club or to mix in the society of Steamer Point. They lived together in a house near Mr Leblanc’s; they lived very well and were on terms of patriarchal intimacy with Mr Leblanc’s family. ‘If they go up to Steamer Point, they start drinking, playing cards, and spending money. Here, they work so hard that they cannot help saving. When they want a holiday they go round the coast visiting my agencies. They learn to know the country and the people; they travel in my ships; at the end of a year or two they have saved nearly all their money and they have learned the business. For exercise we take little walks over the rocks together. Tennis and polo would cost them money. To walk in the hills is free. They get up out of the town into the cool air, the views are magnificent, the gentle exercise keeps them in condition for their work. It takes their minds, for a little, off business. You must come with us one day on one of our walks.’

  I agreed readily. After the torpid atmosphere of Aden it would be delightful to take some gentle exercise in the cool air. And so it was arranged for the following Saturday afternoon. When I left, Mr Leblanc lent me a copy of Gide’s Voyage au Congo.

  Mr Leblanc the man of fashion I knew, and Mr Leblanc the patriarch. On Saturday I met Mr Leblanc the man of action, Mr Leblanc the gambler.

  I was to lunch first with the young men at their ‘mess’ – as all communal ménages appear to be called in the East. I presented myself dressed as I had seen photographs of ‘hikers’, with shorts, open shirt, stout shoes, woollen stockings, and large walking-stick. We had an excellent luncheon, during which they told me how, one evening, they had climbed into the Parsees’ death-house, and what a row there had been about it. Presently one of them said, ‘Well, it’s about time to change. We promised to be round at the old man’s at half past.’

  ‘Change?’

  ‘Well, it’s just as you like, but I think you’ll find those things rather hot. We usually wear nothing except shoes and shorts. We leave our shirts in the cars. They meet us on the bathing-beach. And if you’ve got any rubber-soled shoes I should wear them. Some of the rocks are pretty slippery.’ Luckily I happened to have some rubber shoes. I went back to the chaplain’s house, where I was then living, and changed. I was beginning to be slightly apprehensive.

  Mr Leblanc looked magnificent. He wore newly creased white shorts, a silk openwork vest, and white espadrilles laced like a ballet dancer’s round his ankles. He held a tuberose, sniffing it delicately. ‘They call it an Aden lily sometimes,’ he said. ‘I can’t think why.’

  There was with him another stranger, a guest of Mr Leblanc’s on a commercial embassy from an oil firm. ‘I say, you know,’ he confided in me, ‘I think this is going to be a bit stiff. I’m scarcely in training for anything very energetic.’

  We set out in the cars and drove to a dead end at the face of the cliffs near the ancient reservoirs. I thought we must have taken the wrong road, but everyone got out and began stripping off his shirt. The Leblanc party went hatless; the stranger and I retained our topees.

  ‘I should leave those sticks in the car,’ said Mr Leblanc.

  ‘But shan’t we find them useful?’ (I still nursed memories of happy scrambles in the Wicklow hills.)

  ‘You will find them a great nuisance,’ said Mr Leblanc.

  We did as we were advised.

  Then the little walk started. Mr Leblanc led the way with light, springing steps. He went right up to the face of the cliff, gaily but purposefully as Moses may have approached the rocks from which he was about to strike water. There was a little crack running like fork-lightning down the blank wall of stone. Mr Leblanc stood below it, gave one little skip, and suddenly, with great rapidity and no apparent effort, proceeded to ascend the precipice. He did not climb; he rose. It was as if someone were hoisting him up from above and he had merely to prevent himself from swinging out of the perpendicular, by keeping contact with rocks in a few light touches of foot and hand.

  In just the same way, one after another, the Leblanc party were whisked away out of sight. The stranger and I looked at each other. ‘Are you all right?’ came reverberating down from very far ahead. We began to climb. We climbed for about half an hour up the cleft in the rock. Not once during that time did we find a place where it was possible to rest or even to stand still in any normal attitude. We just went on from foothold to foothold; our topees made it impossible to see more than a foot or two above our heads. Suddenly we came to the Leblanc party sitting on a ledge.

  ‘You look hot,’ said Mr Leblanc. ‘I see you are not in training. You will find this most beneficial.’

  As soon as we stopped climbing, our knees began to tremble. We sat down. When the time came to start again, it was quite difficult to stand up. Our knees seemed to be behaving as they sometimes do in dreams, when they suddenly refuse support in moments of pursuit by bearded women broadcasters.

  ‘We thought it best to wait for you,’ continued Mr Leblanc, ‘because there is rather a tricky bit here. It is easy enough when you know the way, but you need someone to show you. I discovered it myself. I often go out alone in the evenings finding tricky bits. Once I was out all night, quite stuck. I thought I should be able to find a way when the moon rose. Then I remembered there was no moon that night. It was a very cramped position.’

  The tricky bit was a huge overhanging rock with a crumbling, flaky surface.

  ‘It is really quite simple. Watch me and then follow. You put your right foot here …’ – a perfectly blank, highly polished surface of stone – ‘… then rather slowly you reach up with your left hand until you find a hold. You have to stretch rather far … so. Then you cross your right leg under your left – this is the difficult part – and feel for a footing on the other side … With your right hand you just steady yourself … so.’ Mr Leblanc hung over the abyss partly out of sight. His whole body seemed prehensile. He stood there like a fly on the ceiling. ‘That is the position. It is best to trust more to the feet than the hands – push up rather than pull down … you see the stone here is not always secure.’ By way of demonstration he splintered off a handful of apparently solid rock from above his head and sent it tinkling down to the road below. ‘Now all you do is to shift the weight from your left foot to your right, and swing yourself round … so.’ And Mr Leblanc disappeared from view.

  Every detail of that expedition is kept fresh in my mind by recurrent nightmares. Eventually after about one hour’s fearful climb we reached the rim of the crater. The next stage was a tramp across the great pit of loose cinders; then the ascent of the other rim to the highest point of the peninsula. Here we paused to admire the view, which was indeed most remarkable; then we climbed down to the sea. Variety was added to this last phase by the fact that we were now in the full glare of the sun, which had been beating on the cliffs from noon until they were blistering hot.

  ‘It will hurt the hands if you hang on too long,’
said Mr Leblanc. ‘One must jump on the foot from rock to rock like the little goats.’

  At last, after about three hours of it, we reached the beach. Cars and servants were waiting. Tea was already spread; bathing-dresses and towels laid out.

  ‘We always bathe here, not at the club,’ said Mr Leblanc. ‘They have a screen there to keep out the sharks – while in this bay, only last month, two boys were devoured.’

  We swam out into the warm sea. An Arab fisherman, hopeful of a tip, ran to the edge of the sea and began shouting to us that it was dangerous. Mr Leblanc laughed happily and, with easy, powerful strokes, made for the deep waters. We returned to shore and dressed. My shoes were completely worn through, and there was a large tear in my shorts where I had slipped among the cinders and slid some yards. Mr Leblanc had laid out for him in the car a clean white suit, a shirt of green crêpe-de-Chine, a bow tie, silk socks, buckskin shoes, ivory hairbrushes, scent spray, and hair lotion. We ate banana sandwiches and drank very rich China tea.

  For a little additional thrill on the way back, Mr Leblanc took the wheel of his car. I am not sure that that was not the most hair-raising experience of all.

  Next day – Sunday, December 14th – intolerably stiff in every muscle, bruised, scratched, blistered by the sun, I set out for Lahej, to spend two nights as the sultan’s guest and see the assembly of the tributary chiefs on Tuesday.

  We – Colonel Lake, the chief political officer, the driver, and I – bounced along in the sand, in a six-wheel army lorry, beside the remains of the track, which still clearly showed the corrugations where the sleepers had lain. It took us about two hours to reach the camp. The Aden Levy had arrived the day before. Great trouble had been taken with the alignment of the camp; an avenue of signalling-flags led up to its centre; the sites for the tents were symmetrically disposed round it. The tents themselves were causing some trouble, particularly a great cubic pavilion that was to be used for the Resident’s durbar; there was a high, hot wind blowing; grass and reeds had been scattered about to lay the driving sand, but with little success. Clouds of grit eddied everywhere.

  Just as we arrived they got the big tent fixed at last; they stood back to admire it. The subaltern in charge came to greet us. ‘Thank heavens we’ve got that done. We’ve been at it since five this morning. Now we can have a drink.’

  While he was still speaking, the tent bellied, sagged, and fell; the patient little Arabs began their work again, laying foundations of stones, three feet deep, to hold the pegs in the loose sand.

  We lunched in the mess-tent, dozed, and then, mounted on camels, Colonel Lake and I rode the remaining two miles into the town. It was a typical Arab town of dun-coloured, flat-roofed houses and intricate alleyways. The palace was European in conception, smaller than the Gebbi at Addis, but better planned and better kept; there were pretty formal gardens in front, and all round the town lay bright green meadows and groves of coconut and date-palm.

  A power station has lately been built and most of the principal houses installed with electricity. This is naturally a matter for great pride and, to draw his visitors’ attention more closely to the innovation, the sultan has conceived the rather unhappy plan of building the new guest-house immediately over the electric plant. Fortunately this was not yet finished, so that we were directed to the old guest-house, a pleasant, rather dilapidated villa of pseudo-European style, standing at the extremity of the town on the edge of the fields. Here Colonel Lake left me in the charge of the Arab butler, having elicited the fact that there were two other occupants of the house – German engineers in the sultan’s employ. Except for these there were no Europeans of any kind in the town.

  After about an hour they arrived. They were very young men – both twenty-two, I learned later – and they had come in overalls straight from work; they spoke English, one rather better than the other, but both very fluently, loudly, and unintelligibly. Their first concern was to apologize for their appearance. They would be ashamed to speak to me, they said, until they had washed and changed. They had fitted up a kind of shower-bath behind a curtain of sacking at the top of the stairs. Here they hid themselves and spluttered happily for some minutes, emerging later, naked, dripping, and better composed. They dried themselves, combed their hair, put on smart tropical suits, and called for dinner. They produced some bottled amstel from beneath their beds and put it under the shower-bath to cool, and opened a tin of greengages in my honour. They were a most friendly, generous pair.

  Dinner consisted of a highly pungent meat stew and salad. The cooking was not good, they explained, and they suspected the butler of cheating the sultan and themselves by confiscating their rations and substituting inferior purchases of his own; however, it did not do to complain; they were well paid and could afford to supplement their meals with biscuits and beer and tinned fruit; they would probably be the ultimate losers in any conflict with the butler. I should find, they said, that their food would make me rather ill. At first they suffered continuously from dysentery and nettle-rash; also the mosquito-curtains were too short and were full of holes. I should probably get a touch of malaria. The salad, they said, helping themselves profusely, was full of typhus.

  I retail this information simply and concisely as though it had come to me in so many words. As a matter of fact, it took the whole of dinner in telling, and half an hour or so afterwards. Both spoke simultaneously all the time, and, when the issues became confused, louder and louder. ‘We know English so well because we always speak it with our Dutch friends at Aden,’ they explained (but again at far greater length and with many misunderstandings and cross purposes). ‘It was largely from them that we learned it.’

  There were interruptions. Fairly frequently the light turned orange, flickered, and went out, on one occasion for so long that we all set out to the power station to see what had happened. Just as we left the house, however, we saw the lights go up again, and returned to our conversation. ‘Engineer,’ I realized, was a title covering a variety of functions. Three times messages came from the palace; once, to say that the water-closet had broken and that they were to come and mend it first thing in the morning; again, to say that one of Sultan Achmed’s (the Sultan of Lahej’s brother) new tractors was stuck in a water-course; a third, to remark that the lights kept going out. All these things were duly noted down for their attention.

  Next morning I had an audience with the sultan. His Highness was an impassive, middle-aged man, wearing semi-European clothes – turban, black frock coat, white linen trousers. As head of the Fadl family, the hereditary rulers of the Abdali tribe and, for a brief period, the former possessors of Aden, he holds by far the most influential position in the protectorate.

  His is, in fact, the only really secure house in Southern Arabia. There is no resident adviser at Lahej and no attempt at domestic control. Within his own territory the sultan’s power is limited only by the traditional law of his own people.

  We drank delicious coffee on the balcony overlooking the palace gardens and, with the aid of an interpreter, asked politely after each other’s health and the health of our relations. I commented on the striking modernity of his city – the electric light, the water-supply, the motor-buses; he remarked how much more modern these things were in London. He said that the Resident told him I wrote books; that he had not himself written a book, but that his brother had written a very good one, which I must see before I left Lahej. He asked after my comfort at the guest-house; I replied that it was luxury itself; he said not so luxurious as London. I was at the moment, just as the Germans had predicted, tortured with nettle-rash. I said that the tranquillity was greater than in London. He said that soon he would have more motor-buses. Then we took leave of each other and I was conducted to Sultan Achmed Fadl.

  His Highness’s brother lived in a small, balconied house on the further side of the main square. He was already receiving company. A British political officer was there, the subaltern who had supervised the collapse of the Resident’s
durbar tent, and the Haushabi Sultan; a secretary was in attendance and numerous servants and guards sat about on the narrow staircase.

  The Haushabi Sultan was an important young man finely dressed and very far from sane. He sat in a corner giggling with embarrassment, and furtively popping little twigs of khat into his mouth. It was not often that his womenfolk allowed him to leave his own district. Sultan Achmed was a good-looking man of forty, with high, intellectual forehead and exquisite manners; he spoke English well. His habit of life was pious and scholarly. He had private estates, almost as large as his brother’s, whose cultivation he supervised himself, experimenting eagerly with new methods of irrigation, new tractors and fertilizers, new kinds of crops – a complete counterpart of the enlightened landed gentleman of eighteenth-century England.

  He showed me his book: a history of the Fadl family from the remotest times until the death of his father (unfortunately shot by a British sentry during the evacuation of Lahej in 1915). It was written in exquisite script, illuminated with numerous genealogies in red and black. He hoped to have a few copies printed for distribution among his friends and relatives, but he did not think it was likely to command a wide sale.

  He suggested a drive. When he gave orders, his servants kissed his knees, and, whenever we stopped during the drive, passers-by hurried to salute him in the same way. His car was not new – I think it must have been one of those devised by the German mechanics from the débris of former accidents – but it carried a crest of ostrich plumes on the bonnet and an armed guard beside the chauffeur. We drove to his country house a mile or two away and walked for some time in his gardens – shrubs flowering in the shade of coconut-palms by the bank of a stream. He ordered a bunch of flowers to be prepared for me, and the gardeners brought a vast bundle of small, sweet-smelling roses and some great spear-shaped white flowers, sheathed in barbed leaves, which gave out a scent of almost stifling richness, reputed throughout Arabia, so the Germans told me later, to act upon women as an aphrodisiac. He also gave me twelve gourds of Dhala honey, eight of which were subsequently stolen by the butler at the guest-house, who thus, with unconscious kindness, relieved me of a particularly unmanageable addition to my luggage, without my incurring any possible self-reproach on grounds of ingratitude.