I had taken to Cody when I was still in Hollywood and he had promised, when we next got together, to introduce me to Pecos Bill’s hairdresser. Sadly, Fate intervened. I was driven, willy-nilly, into Egypt. The hairdresser, I discovered when Cody and I met again years later, had shortly afterwards been killed by a disappointed customer up in the Texas Panhandle.
One has only to see Mr Dirty Spaghetti Eastwood to see where standards are today! I think it was one of the ways we maintained self-respect in the desert. No matter how gruelling the day’s journey and how little sleep we had had during the night, we always maintained a smart appearance.
Neither plain nor dunes revealing the slightest sign of a trail, we proceeded only with the aid of Kolya’s inexpert compass while he forever bemoaned his inattention during his army orienteering instruction as a cadet and cursed the British for having no talent for map-making. We were now heading more or less due south, towards the Tropic line. By this means, Kolya believed, we were certain to find Zazara or, if not, one of the slave roads which would lead us to the oasis. Under my friend’s baffled guidance I had rarely felt as exposed and vulnerable. With new fatalism, however, I sat comfortably on my camel as she followed Kolya’s up and down the great frozen wastes of the red Sand Sea. For some reason my female had been christened ‘Uncle Tom’ - actually Um-k’l-Thoum by Arabs, who cannot pronounce the letter ‘T’ any better than we can make that discreet throat-clearing sound they use in preference to the ‘k’ (and not so alien to a Russian as it is to a Briton). Still psychologically escaped into the Land of the Dead, I saw no sign of potential enemies in all the vast world around me. I had the tranquil satisfaction of my own company. I no longer had to caper and squawk to ensure my life. At first I was also glad to lose the burden of the five daily prayers; yet, paradoxically, after we had been moving across the dunes for a while and our pace had become steady, I began to miss the routine and discipline of the call to prayer and would gladly have resumed it. I now realised I had found a peculiar happiness and security with the caravans and felt homesick for them. I prayed our journey through the trackless Sahara would not be long, that we should soon meet another great caravan and travel with that all the way into the Maghrib. I asked Kolya if the Zazara were used only by slavers. ‘And drug-smugglers and gun-runners,’ he reassured me. ‘It will be good to give up a few of our prejudices for a while, eh?’
I protested I had not yet come to think of the people he described as my natural comrades. He grinned at this, remarking on the wonderful sense of piety in the ‘convent’ of Bi’r Tefawi. I knew instinctively that his sharp tongue betrayed, as they say, a soft conscience. I did not torment him further. My friend was of the Romanoff blood. It pleased him no better than I to consort with the riff-raff. We already had sufficient money, I said, to get a passage back to Genoa or Le Havre. From there we could return to America where I had a small fortune awaiting me. All Kolya could do was remind me that I was now a Spanish citizen, Miguel Juan Gallibasta, resident of Casablanca, born in Pamplona, and a Catholic. He pointed to the passport I had picked. I told him that I had preferred my American passport and would have been willing to take my chances. Free at last of the caravan’s security, we came close at that point to bitter quarrelling. Perhaps we allowed ourselves this release of tension knowing that to part now would increase considerably our chances of perishing. Frequently travellers died within a mile or less of the water whose location they had lost. I must admit, it did not seem to me to be an advantage to go from American to Spanish citizenship, especially since I had never set foot in my ‘home’ country.
How, I asked, would ‘Gallibasta’ prove himself ‘Peters’ back in Hollywood? Matters of identity were growing at once more complicated and less secure. The world looked up to an American film star. How could it make a myth of a Moroccan café proprietor? Kolya said that I was worrying over trifles. As soon as I presented myself back in the USA, with a tale of my capture, torture and escape, I would be a bigger hero than ever. My career was assured. I would be able to tour the country on the strength of my adventures. I said that I hoped my adventures would not be illustrated with film.
We were veiled, now, against a fine dust borne on an uncomfortably steady breeze. As yet we had to experience a full-fledged sandstorm. The Sudanese had warned that it was nearing the season of storms. Another reason, I suggested, for picking a different time to find the Lost Oasis. The Arabs adored such tales. Frequently books circulated among them -Where to find the Buried Gold of Egypt, The Sweet Wells of Nubia, and so on. They believed these much as Americans believed their National Enquirer or Australians their Sun. They told stories of men who had foolishly set off to look for these places. Even the Nazrini, the Sudanese had said, with their noisy machines, had failed many times to reach Zazara. I was conscious of the ghosts that must flock all around us, wondering how much the sand buried. How many souls had been driven like dew from the sun-withered corpses of men who had risked everything merely to prove the truth of a legend? I remembered the melting snows of Ukraine during the Civil War, that white purity hiding the evidence of a million tragedies, a million violent crimes. Perhaps now we rode over the final remains of all the travellers who had perished here in Africa, from the time of Atlantis to the present?
The ash of those dead Japanese drifts through Annaheim and settles on Pluto’s gigantic ears; the ash of Greeks and Egyptians and Arabs and Jews blows back and forth on Mediterranean winds; ash from the Congo and from India and China sweeps across the surface of oceans and continents. There is so much death, so many dead. Every breath we take carries human cells to our lungs, to our blood, to our brains. We can never be free of our ancestors. Perhaps the desert contains nothing else. I fell into the peculiar trance, that state between the sleep of ages and the alertness of the instant, when we come to contemplate the nature of existence and our fulfilment of God’s intentions. I blew the sand from my nostrils and spat, occasionally, on the ground. I hated to spit. I hated to lose even my urine or my sweat. I had an instinct to preserve any liquid, no matter how noxious, in the knowledge that it surely had good use in a waterless world. The dunes - great russet drifts in this part of the Sahara - glared in the heat of the day and little rivers of silver ran through them, always the mirage of water, to a point where by the time you actually saw water you had learned to ignore it. This, too, was how desert venturers met their end within very sight of the oasis. Once we passed a litter of camel and other bones, marks of a camp still in the sand, undisturbed for a century, perhaps, and a presentiment of our own slow death. Again I thought of the mummified corpses, the thoroughly preserved bodies of all those others who had sought Zazara and never found it. Why should we be favoured, when God had determined that the Zwaya’im and the Tebu’um, who were native to this region, had perished in the same quest?
My other fear, perhaps a more practical one, considering Kolya’s orienteering abilities, was not that we should become irretrievably lost in the desert but that we might turn in a curve and encounter to our embarrassment just the caravan we had quit with such discreet grace. Our discretion, accepting full responsibility for our decision, would have been admired by our companions. They would be suspicious, however, if we returned for no clear reason. I had begun to concoct a suitable tale involving overwhelming Tuareg attack when Kolya interrupted my train of thought with the somewhat unoriginal observation that we might, for all intents and purposes, be traversing the sands of Mars. From my reading of Mr Wells, I said, even the Martians had no great desire to live on their home planet! Why had we to remain any longer than necessary in an environment in which no sane man - or monster - would choose to spend more than a day of his life?
Everything I said amused my friend. Eventually his laughter became so frequent and so loud I suspected he had been too long exposed to the sun and the monotony. Soon I realised that my poor friend had lost his grasp on his reason, that he had probably been insane for some while. Ironically I had linked my fate with that of an obsessed
lunatic!
By the fifth day even the few distant bluffs had either disappeared or proved themselves far from unique. We roamed a trackless wilderness and all we knew for certain was the position of the sun and our relation to it. With Kolya cackling and roaring from his uneasy seat on his camel, breaking off occasionally to whistle a few bars from Lohengrin or Tannhäuser while my own sweet Uncle Tom growled and snapped with re-invigorated foul temper, as if she sensed we should never see water again, I once more reconciled myself to death.
The dust became grit, blowing steadily onto our lacerated faces. Every time I ventured to voice some trepidation Kolya would bark with laughter, informing me we were still in Senussi territory; the Tuareg would not dare attack us here. I would have welcomed a Tuareg, or anyone able to lead us back to a familiar track. Kolya said we were Bedouin now and must think like Bedouin, putting our souls into the hands of Allah. He reminded me that this was what Wagner had done and roared out some chorus from The Ring. Allah, I declared under my breath, I would trust rather more readily than my poor, singing fool. I should have stayed in Khufra and waited until I found a caravan heading towards Ghat, I thought, but I knew in my bones the best I could hope for without Kolya’s protection would be to become a Senussi slave. (The Senussi were known to be fair, though strict, and tended to adhere to the Koranic system of punishments. Their slaves were known, therefore, for their honesty as well as their plumpness.) I remained grateful to Kolya for his rescue of me from Bi’r Tefawi, but his characteristic over-confidence, a result no doubt of his aristocratic upbringing, was an increasing source of dismay. I gave up attempting to debate these matters with him. He bellowed some phrase from The Flying Dutchman. Since he automatically kept goading his mount forward, I let my camel follow him, though I began to regret this when he later took to composing long alliterative verses in Old Slavonic and sang snatches of folksong, or Greek liturgy, availing himself freely of a sudden supply of drugs which he had not previously revealed to me. No doubt he planned to sell these at Zazara or some other mythical oasis. On the first night we lost a sheepskin of water as two of our pack camels crushed against one another. We still had several more skins and a couple of tin fantasses slung over our camels’ humps, hidden under our equipment and trading goods. We could survive for at least a week. But the event depressed me. No man on earth can go without water for more than four days whereas a camel, far from plodding into infinity, can never be trusted to survive! Some will trudge for weeks, even years, seemingly the sickliest of animals, giving no hint of weariness; others, young, healthy and pretty, might decide to fall down and die for no apparent reason, their hearts suddenly stopped. My own belief is that the camel, a noble and independent beast by nature, has always been resentful of his role as carrier of Man and his goods. One of the few important choices he can still make for himself is his time of death.
Through days of relentless blue, under a sun which increasingly demanded obeisance, under a night of extraordinary, comforting darkness, in which the stars became identified, each an individual, whose intensity changed with the hours, over dune upon dune and rocky pavement or parched wadi, we trudged due west into the widest and least-travelled stretches of the Sahara, moving steadily away from any charted or inhabited region, so that we might indeed have accidentally crossed to some incompatible planet!
Ironically, I had ceased at last to be afraid. The desert, our animals, the sky, all had become marvellous and beautiful to my eyes, for I had discovered that composure of spirit which is the mark of every desert gentleman. Karl May described it. I was at one with Death and with God. My fate was already written by Allah. I trusted to the moment. I relished the moment. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades. I was reconciled to my destiny. I had won a kind of immortality. And Anubis was my friend.
* * * *
TWENTY-TWO
IN THE DESERT God came to me again and I no longer feared Him. We had suffered together, He said. Now He brought me comfort. I had not realised how thoroughly I had learned the habit of prayer, of giving myself up to my creator, of keeping faith in His plans for me. I was convinced that I was lost, that we must die in those endless dunes, but we trudged up one after another, losing our footing in the soft sand. God straightened my shoulders and cleared my eyes. He gave me back the dignity which that other abomination, that quintessence of falsehood, had stolen from me.
The back window of my flat looks out upon a great pollarded elm, protected by city isolation from the Dutch disease which destroyed his rural relatives. He stands like a triumphant giant, his head lowered, the bark of his oddly muscular arms gleaming in the misty sunshine, knotted fists of gnarled wood lifted like a champion’s while another thick branch juts from below like a petrified prick. This benign monster stood there, much as he does now, a hundred years ago, before the speculators thought to evict the gypsies and pig-farmers, to get rid of the tanneries and race-track, to clear the way for respectable middle-class London expanding into confident new comforts and sentimentality, begging a suburban tree or two be spared for old times’ sake.
Now the enduring elm is for me God’s most immediate symbol and evidence of my own belief in our ultimate redemption. In the desert, as one dies, it is easy to understand how one might worship the Sun, coming to believe it the manifestation of God, beginning that profound progress towards the conception of God as a unity. Nowadays it is not difficult to sympathise with the ancient Slavs, those Franks and Goths who worshipped God in the form of a tree. What is better? To worship God in the form of a Bank? Or even to worship Him in the form of a Temple? I speak, I suppose, as a kind of devil’s advocate. But I have never hidden my pantheistic sympathies.
In the city, sometimes, there is only the church or the public building in which to find peace to pray, but the Bedouin can create a tranquil sanctuary virtually from nothing. I have warned Christendom for many years of how Islam carries the barbarous blood of Carthage into the very veins of Europe and America. Yet I am no hater of the desert Arab. In his desert, the Bedouin is a prince, a model of gentlemanly dignity and manly humility. However, in the deadly element of some oil-founded sheikhdom, the traditions of absolute certainty by which he has survived (prospering only through blind luck) will make him everyone’s enemy. The noble Bedouin becomes a paranoid aristocrat. The great traditions of the Senussi, which brought law to the Libyan Desert, bring only bloodshed and chaos to Cairo. Jews and Arabs both are never entirely comfortable with political power. It is what makes them such dangerous enemies. Today it is fashionable to sneer at the philosophy of apartheid, as if it were a simple matter of black and white. For years the Arab practised it successfully. He had no problems until he himself began to break his own rules. The young today use those words like blunted weapons. They have no idea of the convictions lying behind them.
Until I arrived here I had not known that the British urban peasant is as stuffed with superstition, misinformation, prejudice, raw bigotry, self-deluding self-importance and low cunning as any inhabitant of a Port Said souk; he can also be quite as good-hearted, sociable, ferocious in word and kindly in deed as his Arab counterpart.
In Aristotelian terms, as I told the older Cornelius boy, about the only thing distinguishing the Briton from the Berber is that the Berber washes more frequently. But he is unteachable. Last week he admitted he had never heard of G. H. Teed, who knew more about the British Empire than Kipling! The boy despises his own heritage. Such shame, I told him, is useless. Britain could be a great imperial power again. He laughed at me. He guffawed in the face of his country’s finest traditions. Only in a truly decadent country would such irreverence go unchallenged. He says he does not hate me, only what I represent. Myself I represent I say, and God I represent. Is that what you hate? It is a mystery what he finds amusing. Mrs Cornelius has hinted more than once that his father was insane. It seems extraordinary that I was only forty when he was born. Two lifetimes.
Mrs Cornelius insists I was just as obnoxious at their age. I someho
w cannot see that.
Saa’atak muta qadima, as they say in Marrakech. She is very defensive of those children and yet they are a tremendous disappointment to her. They showed a few seconds from Ace Among Aces on the television a few weeks ago. There we were in the same scene, Max Peters, Gloria Cornish and Lon Chaney - a moment of exquisite camaraderie, of poignant memory. I telephoned Granada to ask if they would let me watch the whole film. They said it came from America. I got the name, something like When Hollywood Was King, but I never heard.