The Alexandria Quartet

  ‘Now this Baron — whom you would certainly find a strange and imposing figure, heavily bearded and with big teeth like the seeds of a corn-cob — this Baron had … ah! my dear Balthazar, had actually produced ten homunculi which he called his “prophesying spirits”. They were preserved in the huge glass canisters which they use hereabouts for washing olives or to preserve fruit, and they lived in water. They stood on a long oaken rack in his studio or laboratory. They were produced or “patterned”, to use his own expression, in the course of five weeks of intense labour of thought and ritual. They were exquisitely beautiful and mysterious objects, floating there like sea-horses. They consisted of a king, a queen, a knight, a monk, a nun, an architect, a miner, a seraph, and finally a blue spirit and a red one! They dangled lazily in these stout glass jars. A tapping fingernail seemed to alarm them. They were only about a span long, and as the Baron was anxious for them to grow to a greater size, we helped him to bury them in several cartloads of horse-manure. This great midden was sprinkled daily with an evil-smelling liquid which was prepared with great labour by the Baron and his Turk, and which contained some rather disgusting ingredients. At each sprinkling the manure began to steam as if heated by a subterranean fire. It was almost too hot to place one finger in it. Once every three days the Abbé and the Baron spent the whole night praying and fumigating the midden with incense. When at last the Baron deemed this process complete the bottles were carefully removed and returned to the laboratory shelves. All the homunculi had grown in size to such an extent that the bottles were now hardly big enough for them, and the male figures had come into possession of heavy beards. The nails of their fingers and toes had grown very long. Those which bore a human representation wore clothes appropriate to their rank and style. They had a kind of beautiful obscenity floating there with an expression on their faces such as I have only once seen before — on the face of a Peruvian pickled human head! Eyes turned up into the skull, pale fish’s lips drawn back to expose small perfectly formed teeth! In the bottles containing respectively the red and blue spirit there was nothing to be seen. All the bottles, by the way, were heavily sealed with oxbladders and wax bearing the imprint of a magic seal. But when the Baron tapped with his fingernail on the bottles and repeated some words in Hebrew the water clouded and began to turn red and blue respectively. The homunculi began to show their faces, to develop cloudily like a photographic print, gradually increasing in size. The blue spirit was as beautiful as any angel, but the red wore a truly terrifying expression.

  ‘These beings were fed every three days by the Baron with some dry rose-coloured substance which was kept in a silver box lined with sandalwood. Pellets about the size of a dried pea. Once every week, too, the water in the bottles had to be emptied out; they had to be refilled (the bottles) with fresh rainwater. This had to be done very rapidly because during the few moments that the spirits were exposed to the air they seemed to get weak and unconscious, as if they were about to die like fish. But the blue spirit was never fed; while the red one received once a week a thimblefull of the fresh blood of some animal — a chicken I think. This blood disappeared at once in the water without colouring or even troubling it. As soon as this bottle was opened it turned turbid and dark and gave off the odour of rotten eggs!

  ‘In the course of a couple of months these homunculi reached their full stature, the stage of prophecy — as the Baron calls it; then every night the bottles were carried into a small ruined chapel, situated in a grove at some distance from the house, and here a service was held and the bottles “interrogated” on the course of future events. This was done by writing questions in Hebrew on slips of paper and pressing them to the bottle before the eyes of the homunculus; it was rather like exposing sensitized photographic paper to light. I mean it was not as if the beings read but divined the questions, slowly, with much hesitation. They spelled out their answers, drawing with a finger on the transparent glass, and these responses were copied down immediately by the Baron in a great commonplace book. Each homunculus was only asked questions appropriate to his station, and the red and blue spirits could only answer with a smile or a frown to indicate assent or dissent. Yet they seemed to know everything, and any question at all could be put to them. The King could only touch on politics, the monk religion … and so on. In this way I witnessed the compilation of what the Baron called “the annals of Time” which is a document at least as impressive as that left behind him by Nostradamus. So many of these prophecies have proved true in these last short months that I can have little doubt about the rest also proving so. It is a curious sensation to peer thus into the future!

  ‘One day, by some accident, the glass jar containing the monk fell to the stone flags and was broken. The poor monk died after a couple of small painful respirations, despite all the efforts made by the Baron to save him. His body was buried in the garden. There was an abortive attempt to “pattern” another monk but this was a failure. It produced a small leech-like object without vitality which died within a few hours.

  ‘A short while afterwards the King managed to escape from his bottle during the night; he was found sitting upon the bottle containing the Queen, scratching with his nails to get the seal away! He was beside himself, and very agile, though weakening desperately from his exposure to the air. Nevertheless he led us quite a chase among the bottles — which we were afraid of overturning. It was really extraordinary how nimble he was, and had he not become increasingly faint from being out of his native element I doubt whether we could have caught him. We did however and he was pushed, scratching and biting, back into his bottle, but not before he had severely scratched the Abbé’s chin. In the scrimmage he gave off a curious odour, as of a hot metal plate cooling. My finger touched his leg. It was of a wet and rubbery consistency, and sent a shiver of apprehension down my spine.

  ‘But now a mishap occurred. The Abbé’s scratched face became inflamed and poisoned and he went down with a high fever and was carried off to hospital where he lies at present, convalescing. But there was more to follow, and worse; the Baron, being Austrian, had always been something of a curiosity here, and more especially now when the spy-mania which every war brings has reached its height. It came to my ears that he was to be thoroughly investigated by the authorities. He received the news with despairing calmness, but it was clear that he could not afford to have unauthorized persons poking about in his laboratory. It was decided to “dissolve” the homunculi and bury them in the garden. In the absence of the Abbé I agreed to help him. I do not know what it was he poured into the bottles but all the flames of hell leaped up out of them until the whole ceiling of the place was covered in soot and cobwebs. The beings shrank now to the size of dried leeches, or the dried navel-cords which sometimes village folk will preserve. The Baron groaned aloud from time to time, and the sweat stood out on his forehead. The groans of a woman in labour. At last the process was complete and at midnight the bottles were taken out and interred under some loose flags in the little chapel where, presumably, they must still be. The Baron has been interned, his books and papers sealed by the Custodians of Property. The Abbé lies, as I said, in hospital. And I? Well, my Greek passport has made me less suspect than most people hereabouts. I have retired for the moment to my tower. There is still the mass of masonic data in the barns which the Abbé inhabited; I have taken charge of these. I have written to the Baron once or twice but he has not, perhaps out of tact, replied to me; believing perhaps that my association with him might lead to harm. And so … well, the war rolls on about us. Its end and what follows it — right up to the end of this century — I know: it lies here beside me as I write, in question and answer form. But who would believe me if I published it all — and much less you, doctor of the empiric sciences, sceptic and ironist? As for the war — Paracelsus has said: “Innumerable are the Egos of man; in him are angels and devils, heaven and hell, the whole of the animal creation, the vegetable and mineral kingdoms; and just as the little individual man may b
e diseased, so the great universal man has his diseases, which manifest themselves as the ills which affect humanity as a whole. Upon this fact is based the prediction of future events.” And so, my dear friend, I have chosen the Dark Path towards my own light. I know now that I must follow it wherever it leads! Isn’t that something to have achieved? Perhaps not. But for me it truthfully seems so. But I hear that laughter!

  ‘Ever your devoted Da Capo’.*

  ‘Now’ said Clea, ‘oblige with the laughter!’

  ‘What Pursewarden’ I said ‘called “the melancholy laughter of Balthazar which betokens solipsism”.’

  Balthazar did indeed laugh now, slapping his knee and doubling himself up like a jack knife. ‘That damned rogue, Da Capo’ he said. ‘And yet, soyons raisonnables if that is indeed the expression — he wouldn’t tell a pack of lies. Or perhaps he might. No, he wouldn’t. Yet can you bring yourself to believe in what he says — you two?’

  ‘Yes’ said Clea, and here we both smiled for her bondage to the soothisayers of Alexandria would naturally give her a predisposition towards the magic arts. ‘Laugh’ she said quietly.

  ‘To tell the truth’ said Balthazar more soberly, ‘when one casts around the fields of so-called knowledge which we have partially opened up one is conscious that there may well be whole areas of darkness which may belong to the Paracelsian regions — the submerged part of the iceberg of knowledge. No, dammit, I must admit that you are right. We get too certain of ourselves travelling backwards and forwards along the tramlines of empirical fact. Occasionally one gets hit softly on the head by a stray brick which has been launched from some other region. Only yesterday, for example, Boyd told me a story which sounded no less strange: about a soldier who was buried last week. I could, of course, supply explanations which might fit the case, but not with any certainty. This young boy went on a week’s leave to Cairo. He came back having had an enjoyable time, or so he said. Next he developed an extraordinary intermittent fever with simply huge maximum temperatures. Within a week he died. A few hours before death a thick white cataract formed over his eyeballs with a sort of luminous red node over the retina. All the boy would repeat in the course of his delirium was the single phrase: “She did it with a golden needle.” Nothing but these words. As I say one could perhaps strap the case down clinically with a clever guess or two but … had I to be honest I would be obliged to admit that it did not exactly fit within an accepted category that I knew. Nor, by the way, did the autopsy give one anything more to go on: blood tests, spinal fluid, stomach etc. Not even a nice, familiar (yet itself perhaps inexplicable) meningeal disturbance. The brain was lovely and fresh! At least so Boyd says, and he took great pleasure in thoroughly exploring the young man. Mystery! Now what the devil could he have been doing on leave? It seems quite impossible to discover. His stay is not recorded at any of the hotels or army transit hotels. He spoke no language but English. Those few days spent in Cairo are completely missing from the count. And then the woman with the golden needle?

  ‘But in truth it is happening all the time, and I think you are right’ (this to Clea) ‘to insist obstinately on the existence of the dark powers and the fact that some people do scry as easily as I gaze down the barrel of my microscope. Not all, but some. And even quite stupid people, like your old Scobie, for example. Mind you, in my opinion, that was a rigmarole of the kind he produced sometimes when he was tipsy and wanted to show off — I mean the stuff supposedly about Narouz: that was altogether too dramatic to be taken seriously. And even if some of the detail were right he could have had access to it in the course of his duties. After all Nimrod did the procès verbal and that document must have been knocking around.’

  ‘What about Narouz?’ I asked curiously, secretly piqued that Clea had confided things to Balthazar which she had kept from me. It was now that I noticed that Clea had turned quite white and was looking away. But Balthazar appeared to notice nothing himself and went plunging on. ‘It has the ingredients of a novelette — I mean about trying to drag you down into the grave with him. Eh, don’t you think? And about the weeping you would hear.’ He broke off abruptly, noticing her expression at last. ‘Goodness, Clea my dear’ he went on in self-reproach, ‘I hope I am not betraying a confidence. You suddenly look upset. Did you tell me not to repeat the Scobie story?’ He took both her hands and turned her round to face him.

  A spot of red had appeared in both her cheeks. She shook her head, though she said nothing, but bit her lips as if with vexation. At last ‘No’ she said, ‘there is no secret. I simply did not tell Darley because … well, it is silly as you say: anyway he doesn’t believe in that sort of rubbish. I didn’t want to seem stupider than he must find me.’ She leaned to kiss me apologetically on the cheek. She sensed my annoyance, as did Balthazar who hung his head and said: ‘I’ve talked out of turn. Damn! Now he will be angry with you.’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ I protested. ‘Simply curious, that is all. I had no intention of prying, Clea.’

  She made a gesture of anguished exasperation and said: ‘Very well. It is of no importance. I will tell you the whole thing.’ She started speaking hastily, as if to dispose of a disagreeable and time-wasting subject. ‘It was during the last dinner I told you about. Before I went to Syria. He was tipsy, I don’t deny it. He said what Balthazar has just told you, and he added a description of someone who suggested to me Nessim’s brother. He said, marking the place with his thumbnail on his own lips: “His lips are split here, and I see him covered in little wounds, lying on a table. There is a lake outside. He has made up his mind. He will try and drag you to him. You will be in a dark place, imprisoned, unable to resist him. Yes, there is one near at hand who might aid you if he could. But he will not be strong enough.”’ Clea stood up suddenly and brought her story to an end with the air of someone snapping off a twig. ‘At this point he burst into tears’ she said.

  It was strange what a gloom this nonsensical yet ominous recital put over our spirits; something troubling and distasteful seemed to invade that brilliant spring sunshine, the light keen air. In the silence that followed Balthazar gloomily folded and refolded his overcoat on his knee while Clea turned away to study the distant curve of the great harbour with its flotillas of cubist-smeared craft, and the scattered bright petals of the racing dinghies which had crossed the harbour boom, threading their blithe way towards the distant blue marker buoy. Alexandria was virtually at norm once more, lying in the deep backwater of the receding war, recovering its pleasures. Yet the day had suddenly darkened around us, oppressing our spirits — a sensation all the more exasperating because of its absurd cause. I cursed old Scobie’s self-importance in setting up as a fortune-teller.

  ‘These gifts might have got him a bit further in his own profession had they been real’ I said peevishly.

  Balthazar laughed, but even here there was a chagrined doubt in his laughter. His remorse at having stirred up this silly story was quite patent.

  ‘Let us go’ said Clea sharply. She seemed slightly annoyed as well, and for once disengaged her arm when I took it. We found an old horse-drawn gharry and drove slowly and silently into town together.

  ‘No damn it!’ cried Balthazar at last. ‘Let us go down and have a drink by the harbour at least.’ And without waiting for answer from us he redirected the jarvey and set us mutely clip-clopping down the slow curves of the Grande Corniche towards the Yacht Club in the outer harbour of which was now to befall something momentous and terrible for us all. I remember it so clearly, this spring day without flaw; a green bickering sea lighting the minarets, softly spotted here and there by the dark gusts of a fine racing wind. Yes, with mandolines fretting in the Arab town, and every costume glowing as brightly as a child’s coloured transfer. Within a quarter of an hour the magnificence of it was to be darkened, poisoned by unexpected — completely unmerited death. But if tragedy strikes suddenly the actual moment of its striking seems to vibrate on, extending into time like the sour echoes of some great g
ong, numbing the spirit, the comprehension. Suddenly, yes, but yet how slowly it expands in the understanding — the ripples unrolling upon the reason in ever-widening circles of fear. And yet, all the time, outside the centre-piece of the picture, so to speak, with its small tragic anecdote, normal life goes on unheeding. (We did not even hear the bullets, for example. Their sullen twang was carried away on the wind.)