A Handful of Dust

by Evelyn Waugh

  “But look here, my dear fellow.”

  “Goodnight. Thank you for the dinner. Good luck to the excavations.”

  On his way out of the club he noticed that John Beaver of Brat’s Club was up for election.

  *

  “Who on earth would have expected the old boy to turn up like that?” asked Polly Cockpurse.

  “Now I understand why they keep going on in the papers about divorce law reform,” said Veronica. “It’s too monstrous that he should be allowed to get away with it.”

  “The mistake they made was in telling him first,” said Souki.

  “It’s so like Brenda to trust everyone,” said Jenny Abdul Akbar.

  *

  “I do think Tony comes out of this pretty poorly,” said Marjorie.

  “Oh I don’t know,” said Allan. “I expect your ass of a brother put the thing wrong.”

  Five

  In Search of a City

  I

  Any idea how many times round the deck make a mile?”

  “None, I’m afraid,” said Tony. “But I should think you must have walked a great distance.”

  “Twenty-two times. One soon gets out of sorts at sea if you’re used to an active life. She’s not much of a boat. Travel with this line often?”

  “Never before.”

  “Ah. Thought you might have been in business in the islands. Not many tourists going out this time of year. Just the other way about. All coming home, if you see what I mean. Going far?”

  “Demerara.”

  “Ah. Looking for minerals perhaps?”

  “No, to tell you the truth I am looking for a city.”

  The genial passenger was surprised and then laughed. “Sounded just like you said you were looking for a city.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was what you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought it sounded like that… well, so long. I must do another few rounds before dinner.”

  He paced off up the deck, straddling slightly in order to keep his balance and occasionally putting out a hand to the rail for support.

  Regularly every three minutes for the last hour or so, this man had come by. At first Tony had looked up at his approach and then turned away again, out to sea. Presently the man had taken to nodding, then to saying “Hullo” or “Bit choppy” or “Here we are again”; finally he had stopped and begun a conversation.

  Tony went aft to break this rather embarrassing sequence. He descended the companionway which led to the lower deck. Here, in crates lashed to the side, was a variety of livestock—some stud bulls, a heavily blanketed racehorse, a couple of beagles, being exported to various West Indian islands. Tony threaded a way between them and the hatches to the stern, where he sat against a winch watching the horizon mount above the funnels, then fall until they stood out black against the darkening sky. The pitch was more sensible here than it had been amidships; the animals shifted restlessly in their cramped quarters; the beagles whined intermittently. A lascar took down from a line some washing which had been flapping there all day.

  The wash of the ship was quickly lost in the high waves. They were steaming westward down the Channel. As it grew to be night, lighthouses appeared flashing from the French coast. Presently a steward walked round the bright, upper deck striking chimes on a gong of brass cylinders, and the genial passenger went below to prepare himself for dinner in hot sea water which splashed from side to side of the bath and dissolved the soap in a thin, sticky scum. He was the only man to dress that evening: Tony sat in the mustering darkness until the second bell. Then he left his greatcoat in the cabin and went down to dinner.

  It was the first evening at sea.

  Tony sat at the captain’s table, but the captain was on the bridge. There were empty chairs on either side of him. It was not rough enough for the fiddles to be out, but the stewards had removed the flower vases and damped the table-cloth to make it adhesive. A colored archdeacon sat facing him. He ate with great refinement but his black hands looked immense on the wet, whitish cloth. “I’m afraid our table is not showing up very well tonight,” he said. “I see you are not a sufferer. My wife is in her cabin. She is a sufferer.”

  He was returning from a Congress, he told Tony.

  At the top of the stairs was a lounge named the Music and Writing Room. The light here was always subdued, in the day by the stained glass of the windows, at night by pink silk shades which hid the electric candles. Here the passengers assembled for their coffee, sitting on bulky, tapestry-covered chesterfields or on swivel chairs irremovably fastened before the writing tables. Here too the steward for an hour every day presided over the cupboardful of novels which constituted the ship’s library.

  “It’s not much of a boat,” said the genial passenger, sitting himself beside Tony. “But I expect things will look brighter when we get into the sun.”

  Tony lit a cigar and was told by a steward that he must not smoke in this room. “That’s all right,” said the genial passenger, “we’re just going down to the bar. You know,” he said a few minutes later, “I feel I owe you an apology. I thought you were potty just now before dinner. Honestly I did, when you said you were going to Demerara to look for a city. Well, it sounded pretty potty. Then the purser—I’m at his table. Always get the cheeriest crowd at the purser’s table and the best attention—the purser told me about you. You’re the explorer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, come to think of it, I suppose I am,” said Tony.

  *

  It did not come easily to him to realize that he was an explorer. It was barely a fortnight ago that he had become one. Even the presence in the hold of two vast crates, bearing his name and labeled not wanted on the voyage—crates containing such new and unfamiliar possessions as a medicine chest, an automatic shot gun, camping equipment, pack saddles, a cinema camera, dynamite, disinfectants, a collapsible canoe, filters, tinned butter and, strangest of all, an assortment of what Dr. Messinger called “trade goods”—failed to convince him fully of the serious nature of his expedition. Dr. Messinger had arranged everything. It was he who chose the musical boxes and mechanical mice, the mirrors, combs, perfumery, pills, fish hooks, ax heads, colored rockets, and rolls of artificial silk, which were packed in the box of “trade goods.” And Dr. Messinger himself was a new acquaintance who, prostrate now in his bunk with what the negro clergyman would have called “suffering,” that day, for the first time since Tony had met him, seemed entirely human.

  Tony had spent very little of his life abroad. At the age of eighteen, before going to the University, he had been boarded for the summer with an elderly gentleman near Tours, with the intention that he should learn the language. (… a gray stone house surrounded by vines. There was a stuffed spaniel in the bathroom. The old man had called it “Stop” because it was chic at that time to give dogs an English name. Tony had bicycled along straight, white roads to visit the chateaux; he carried rolls of bread and cold veal tied to the back of the machine, and the soft dust seeped into them through the paper and gritted against his teeth. There were two other English boys there, so he had learned little French. One of them fell in love and the other got drunk for the first time on sparkling Vouvray at a fair that had been held in the town. That evening Tony won a live pigeon at a tombola; he set it free and later saw it being recaptured by the proprietor of the stall with a butterfly net…) Later he had gone to Central Europe for a few weeks with a friend from Balliol. (They had found themselves suddenly rich with the falling mark and had lived in unaccustomed grandeur in the largest hotel suites. Tony had bought a fur for a few shillings and given it to a girl in Munich who spoke no English.) Later still his honeymoon with Brenda in a villa, lent to them, on the Italian Riviera. (… cypress and olive trees, a domed church half-way down the hill, between the villa and the harbor a café where they sat out in the evening, watching the fishing boats and the lights reflected in the quiet water, waiting for the sudden agitation of sound and motion as t
he speed boat came in. It had been owned by a dashing young official, who called it Jazz Girl. He seemed to spend twenty hours a day running in and out of the little harbor…). Once Brenda and he had gone to Le Touquet with Brat’s golf team. That was all. After his father died he had not left England. They could not easily afford it; it was one of the things they postponed until death duties were paid off; besides that, he was never happy away from Hetton, and Brenda did not like leaving John Andrew.

  Thus Tony had no very ambitious ideas about travel, and when he decided to go abroad his first act was to call at a tourist agency and come away laden with a sheaf of brightly colored prospectuses, which advertised commodious cruises among palm trees, negresses and ruined arches. He was going away because it seemed to be the conduct expected of a husband in his circumstances, because the associations of Hetton were for the time poisoned for him, because he wanted to live for a few months away from people who would know him or Brenda, in places where there was no expectation of meeting her or Beaver or Reggie St. Cloud at every corner he frequented, and with this feeling of evasion dominant in his mind, he took the prospectuses to read at the Greville Club. He had been a member there for some years, but rarely used it; his resignation was only postponed by his recurrent omission to cancel the banker’s order for his subscription. Now that Brat’s and Brown’s were distasteful to him he felt thankful that he had kept on with the Greville. It was a club of intellectual flavor, composed of dons, a few writers and the officials of museums and learned societies. It had a tradition of garrulity, so that he was not surprised when, seated in an armchair and surrounded with his illustrated folders, he was addressed by a member unknown to him who asked if he were thinking of going away. He was more surprised when he looked up and studied the questioner.

  Dr. Messinger, though quite young, was bearded, and Tony knew few young men with beards. He was also very small, very sunburned and prematurely bald; the ruddy brown of his face ended abruptly along the line of his forehead, which rose in a pale dome; he wore steel-rimmed spectacles and there was something about his blue serge suit which suggested that the wearer found it uncomfortable.

  Tony admitted that he was considering taking a cruise.

  “I am going away shortly,” said Dr. Messinger, “to Brazil. At least it may be Brazil or Dutch Guiana. One cannot tell. The frontier has never been demarcated. I ought to have started last week only my plans were upset. Do you by any chance know a Nicaraguan calling himself alternately Ponsonby and FitzClarence?”

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “You are fortunate. That man has just robbed me of two hundred pounds and some machine guns.”

  “Machine guns?”

  “Yes, I travel with one or two, mostly for show you know, or for trade, and they are not easy to buy nowadays. Have you ever tried?”

  “No.”

  “Well you can take it from me that it’s not easy. You can’t just walk into a shop and order machine guns.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Still, at a pinch I can do without them. But I can’t do without the two hundred pounds.”

  Tony had, open on his knee, a photograph of the harbor at Agadir. Dr. Messinger looked over his shoulder at it. “Ah yes,” he said, “interesting little place. I expect you know Zingerman there?”

  “No, I’ve not been there yet.”

  “You’d like him—a very straight fellow. He used to do quite a lot, selling ammunition to the Atlas caids before the pacification. Of course it was easy money with the capitulations, but he did it better than most of them. I believe he’s running a restaurant now in Mogador.” Then he continued dreamily, “The pity is I can’t let the R.G.S. in on this expedition. I’ve got to find the money privately.”

  It was one o’clock and the room was beginning to fill up; an Egyptologist was exhibiting a handkerchief-ful of scarabs to the editor of a church weekly.

  “We’d better go up and lunch,” said Dr. Messinger.

  Tony had not intended to lunch at the Greville but there was something compelling about the invitation; moreover, he had no other engagement.

  Dr. Messinger lunched off apples and a rice pudding. (“I have to be very careful what I eat,” he said.) Tony ate cold steak and kidney pie. They sat at a window in the big dining room upstairs. The places round them were soon filled with members, who even carried the tradition of general conversation so far as to lean back in their chairs and chat over their shoulders from table to table—a practice which greatly hindered the already imperfect service. But Tony remained oblivious to all that was said, absorbed in what Dr. Messinger was telling him.

  “… You see there has been a continuous tradition about the City since the first explorers of the sixteenth century. It has been variously allocated, sometimes down in Matto Grosso, sometimes on the upper Orinoco in what is now Venezuela. I myself used to think it lay somewhere on the Uraricuera. I was out there last year and it was then that I established contact with the Pie-wie Indians; no white man had ever visited them and got out alive. And it was from the Pie-wies that I learned where to look. None of them had ever visited the City, of course, but they knew about it. Every Indian between Ciudad Bolivar and Para knows about it. But they won’t talk. Queer people. But I became blood-brother with a Pie-wie—interesting ceremony. They buried me up to the neck in mud and all the women of the tribe spat on my head. Then we ate a toad and snake and a beetle and after that I was a blood-brother—well, he told me that the City lies between the headwaters of the Courantyne and the Takutu. There’s a vast track of unexplored country there. I’ve often thought of visiting it.

  “I’ve been looking up the historical side too, and I more or less know how the City got there. It was the result of a migration from Peru at the beginning of the fifteenth century when the Incas were at the height of their power. It is mentioned in all the early Spanish documents as a popular legend. One of the younger princes rebelled and led his people off into the forest. Most of the tribes have a tradition in one form or another of a strange race passing through their territory.”

  “But what do you suppose this city will be like?”

  “Impossible to say. Every tribe has a different word for it. The Pie-wies call it the ‘Shining’ or ‘Glittering,’ the Arekuna the ‘Many Watered,’ the Patamonas the ‘Bright Feathered,’ the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make. Of course one can’t tell how a civilization may have developed or degenerated in five hundred years of isolation…”

  Before Tony left the Greville that day, he tore up his sheaf of cruise prospectuses, for he had arranged to join Dr. Messinger in his expedition.

  *

  “Done much of that kind of thing?”

  “No, to tell you the truth it is the first time.”

  “Ah. Well, I daresay it’s more interesting than it sounds,” conceded the genial passenger, “else people wouldn’t do it so much.”

  The ship, so far as any consideration of comfort had contributed to her design, was planned for the tropics. It was slightly colder in the smoking room than on deck. Tony went to his cabin and retrieved his cap and greatcoat; then he went aft again, to the place where he had sat before dinner. It was a starless night and nothing was visible beyond the small luminous area round the ship, save for a single lighthouse that flashed short-long, short-long, far away on the port bow. The crests of the waves caught the reflection from the promenade deck and shone for a moment before plunging away into the black depths behind. The beagles were awake, whining.

  For some days now Tony had been thoughtless about the events of the immediate past. His mind was occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many Watered, the Bright Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character, all vanes and pinnacles, gargoyles, battlements, groining and tracery, pavilions and terraces, a transfigured Hetton, pennons and banners floating on the sweet breeze, everything luminous and translucent; a
coral citadel crowning a green hill top sewn with daisies, among groves and streams; a tapestry landscape filled with heraldic and fabulous animals and symmetrical, disproportionate blossom.

  The ship tossed and tunneled through the dark waters towards this radiant sanctuary.

  “I wonder if anyone is doing anything about those dogs,” said the genial passenger, arriving at his elbow. “I’ll ask the purser tomorrow. We might exercise them a bit. Kind of mournful the way they go on.”

  *

  Next day they were in the Atlantic. Ponderous waves rising over murky, opaque depths. Dappled with foam at the crests, like downland where on the high, exposed places, snow has survived the thaw. Lead-gray and slate in the sun, olive, field blue and khaki like the uniforms of a battlefield; the sky overhead was neutral and steely with swollen clouds scudding across it, affording rare half hours of sunlight. The masts swung slowly across this sky and the bows heaved and wallowed below the horizon. The man who had made friends with Tony paraded the deck with the two beagles. They strained at the end of their chains, sniffing the scuppers; the man lurched behind them unsteadily. He wore a pair of race glasses with which he occasionally surveyed the seas; he offered them to Tony whenever they passed each other.

  “Been talking to the wireless operator,” he said. “We ought to pass quite near the Yarmouth Castle at about eleven.”

  Few of the passengers were on their feet. Those who had come on deck lay in long chairs on the sheltered side, pensive, wrapped in tartan rugs. Dr. Messinger kept to his cabin. Tony went to see him and found him torpid, for he was taking large doses of chloral. Towards evening the wind freshened and by dinner time was blowing hard; portholes were screwed up and all destructible objects disposed on the cabin floors; a sudden roll broke a dozen coffee cups in the music and reading room. That night there was little sleep for anyone on board; the plating creaked, luggage shifted from wall to wall. Tony wedged himself firm in his bunk with the lifebelt and thought of the City.