I wondered how John Lethman had got in and out last night, and why.
He came some half hour later. Whatever excursions he had undertaken during the night, they didn’t seem to have affected him. He looked alert and wide awake, the blurred look gone from his eyes, which were clear grey, and very bright. He moved with energetic precision, and greeted me almost gaily.
‘Good morning.’
‘Oh, hullo. Nice timing.’ I emerged from my door with my luggage – a handbag – packed and ready. ‘I was just coming to look for you and hoping the dogs had been shut up.’
‘Always by day. Did they wake you last night? It was a bit rough, I’m afraid. Did you sleep through it?’ Here his eyes went past me to the disorder of the room. ‘I say, rough was the right word, wasn’t it? What happened? Don’t tell me – the roof leaked?’
‘It certainly did.’ I laughed. ‘Did you decide to rate me third class after all? No, I’m only joking, I shifted the bed and managed quite a bit of sleep in the end. But I’m afraid you’ll find the mattress pretty wet.’
‘That doesn’t matter, it’ll dry in five minutes once it’s put outside. I’m terribly sorry, the roof gutter must be blocked again. Nasirulla swore he’d cleaned it. Did you really sleep?’
‘Fine, thanks, in the end. Don’t worry, just think it’s an ill wind that blows no good.’
‘Meaning?’
‘If I hadn’t come turning the household upside down, you’d have been the one under the water-spout.’
‘You’ve got something there. But believe me, you’re no ill wind. Your aunt was quite set up last night after your visit.’
‘Was she really? I didn’t tire her?’
‘Not a bit. She kept me talking quite a time after you’d gone.’
‘No change about Charles, I suppose?’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid, but give her time. You’re ready, are you? Shall we go?’ We moved towards the gate.
‘Did she keep you very late?’ I asked. ‘It seems hard, the way you burn the torch at both ends.’
‘Not very, no. I’d gone to bed before the storm broke.’
‘It woke you, I suppose?’
‘Not a flicker.’ He laughed. ‘And don’t think I’m neglecting my duty, will you? Your great-aunt thrives on disturbances like last night’s. She tells me she enjoyed it. She’d have made a wonderful Katisha.’
‘“But to him who’s scientific There’s nothing that’s terrific In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts”?’ I quoted, and heard him laugh again, softly, to himself. ‘Well, she’s got a point, I rather enjoyed it myself. At least, I enjoyed the aftermath. The garden looked wonderful.’
I caught a quick sideways glance. ‘You went out?’
‘Only for a moment; I went out to listen to the nightingales. Oh, look at the flowers! Is that because of the storm? More good from the ill wind, would you say?’
We were crossing the small courtyard where Hamid and I had waited yesterday. Here, too, the rain had washed the place clean, and the marble pillars dazzled white in the sun. At their feet the carved troughs were a blaze of red anemones, wide open and shiny as fresh blood in the long grass.
‘My Adonis Gardens,’ said Mr Lethman.
‘Your what?’
‘Adonis Gardens. I suppose you know the Adonis myth?’
‘I know Aphrodite met him in the Lebanon and he died there, and that every spring his blood stains the river and it runs red to the sea. What is it, iron in the water?’
‘Yes. It’s one of the spring resurrection stories, like Persephone, or the Osiris myth. Adonis was a corn-god, a fertility god, and he dies to rise again. The “Adonis Gardens” are – you might call them little personal symbols of death and resurrection; and they’re sympathetic magic as well, because the people who planted them and forced the seeds and flowers to grow as quickly as they could, thought they were helping the year’s harvest. The flowers and herbs sprang up and withered and died all in a few days, and then the “gardens” with the images of the god were taken, with the women wailing and mad with grief, down to the sea and thrown in. See? It was all mixed up, here, with the Dionysiac cult, and Osiris, and the rites of Attis, and it still persists – only in nice, pure forms! – all over the world, believe it or not.’ He checked, with a glance at me. ‘Sorry, rather a lecture.’
‘I’m interested, no, go on. Why did you plant the gardens here?’
‘No reason, except that this is the right time of the year, and it’s quite interesting to see how quickly they do spring up and die, here in Adonis’s own valley. Wouldn’t you say so?’
‘I would, sure. It’s the kind of romantic notion that appeals to me like anything. But why to you? I mean, what have Adonis and Co. got to do with psychological medicine? Or is this Aunt Harriet’s idea?’
‘With—? Oh, didn’t I tell you I was writing a paper? I was interested in the psychology of religious possession, and I’m touching on some aspects of the ecstatic religions of the near East – the Orphic myth and Dionysius and the Adonis story in its various forms. That’s all. I’ve got some quite interesting stuff locally.’ He grinned, perhaps a little shamefacedly. ‘I haven’t really let it slide, you know. Whenever I’m let off the chain I ride out and up into the hill villages. If you stay hereabouts for long you may—’
‘Ride?’
We were in the midan now, the big entrance court. He nodded across it. ‘There’s still a horse here. You know your great-aunt used to ride until only a couple of years ago? She really is remarkable – Hullo! The door’s still shut. Nasirulla’s not come over yet.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘He’s late. Half a minute while I open it and give Kasha some air.’
He pulled open the upper half-door, and latched it back to the wall with a rotten-looking wooden peg. In the dim interior a horse stood dozing, head down and ears relaxed. A chestnut Arab.
‘Do you wear Arab dress when you ride?’ I asked.
He looked surprised. ‘Usually, yes. It’s cooler. Why? Wait a minute – didn’t you say you’d gone to the Adonis Source yesterday? Did you see me up there?’
‘Yes, at some village beyond the fall. I recognised the horse. You had the dogs with you.’ I smiled. ‘You looked terribly romantic, especially with the salukis, I may tell you, you made my day.’
‘And now I’ve spoiled the picture? Not an Arab Emir after all with his hawk and his hounds after gazelle, just a drifter who’s found a lazy billet in the sun and will probably never have the nous to pull out of it.’
I didn’t answer, for the simple reason that I couldn’t think how to. The words were bitter, but were spoken without a bitter tinge; and even if I had wanted to, there was no comforting reply to make. John Lethman must know as well as I did that his job, such as it was, would expire with Great-Aunt Harriet. Or would it? Was he actually playing for Dar Ibrahim itself, and a ‘lazy billet in the sun’ here eventually on his own? He had said it was a ‘wonderful place to write in’, and however I might disagree with him, I could think of worse places for an unambitious man to settle in, for a dilettante life in a delightful climate, and with a houri thrown in … It might be that the dilapidation of the palace was due, not to lack of money, but to age and indifference. John Lethman might well be aware – none better – what means there would eventually be, not only to run part of the place comfortably, but to escape from it at need. Not a bad billet at all.
We were at the gate. There was no sign of Jassim, so Mr Lethman pulled back the heavy bolts and opened the bronze door. Outside, the sun blazed down white on the stony plateau. There was no one there.
‘Your driver isn’t here yet,’ he said. ‘If you’d rather come back in and wait—’
‘Thanks very much, but I think I’ll just walk down to meet him. And thank you for all you’ve done, Mr Lethman.’ I held out my hand and he took it, but when I would have gone on he protested very pleasantly that both he and Great-Aunt Harriet had enjoyed the visit very much.
‘And I really will
do what I can about your cousin, but if I can’t’ – he hesitated, and the light eyes met mine and slid away – ‘I hope you won’t feel too badly about it.’
‘I? It’s none of my business. How she lives is her own affair, and if Charles is really set on seeing her it’s up to him to find a way. Goodbye then, and thanks again. And I hope the paper goes well.’
‘Goodbye.’
The big door shut. The palace had sealed itself off once more behind me, silent walls of baked stone throwing back the glare from the white rock underfoot. In front of me the valley stretched in all the hard brilliance of morning.
The sun was behind me, and the cliff path was in shadow. Here, too, the effect of last night’s rain was immediately apparent. Even the rock smelled fresher, and the dust had caked into mud which was drying rapidly into a million cracks. I could have sworn that on some of the fig trees that clung to the face of the rock there were fresh green buds. I wondered if, when I got down to the foot of the cliff, I would see Hamid crossing to meet me.
But there was no sign of him, and when I reached the Nahr el-Sal’q I saw why. The river was in spate.
The ill wind had been at work here, too, and this time to no good that I could see at all. There must have been, high up in the catchment area, as heavy a fall as, if not heavier than, that which we had had in the valley. It may even have combined with melting snow on the high tops to come pouring down now into the valley, for the Nahr el-Sal’q seemed to have risen at least two feet, and to be coming down very fast indeed. Where yesterday afternoon the pile of stone that had flanked the old Roman bridge had stood at least a foot clear of water, now there was nothing to be seen but the angry white of broken water as the river, streaked with red mud, cascaded down to meet the Adonis.
There is something in all of us which cannot quite accept so sudden a reversal of circumstance. It did not seem possible that I could really be cut off on the wrong side of the river. It should be still as it was yesterday, swift but clear, and easily to be crossed if one could find the place. I stood there on the rocky edge which, this morning, seemed barely to clear the rushing level of the water, and stared about me rather helplessly. This must be why Nasirulla hadn’t turned up for work this morning. Even if Hamid did come for me – and there was as yet no sign of him – he couldn’t cross the river any more than I could. I was nicely imprisoned here between the roaring stream of the Nahr el-Sal’q and the still bigger torrent of the Adonis. Unless I could make my way up the valley between the two, and cross somewhere where the stream was a good deal narrower, I was certainly marooned. I supposed that, once the spate began to subside, it would fall as quickly as it had risen, but I had no means of knowing how soon this might be.
Meanwhile Hamid would certainly come to seek me from the village, so there was nothing much to do but sit beside the stream and wait for his appearance. Behind me the palace, standing back from the head of the cliff, was invisible, but ahead I had a clear view of the village strung high along the valley’s edge. I looked about me, found a flat boulder washed beautifully clean by the night’s rain, and sat down to wait.
It was then that I saw the boy.
There had been no movement; that I could swear. One moment, it seemed to me, I had been gazing idly at the torrential water and beyond it a stony bank full in the sun and ornamented with a few harsh green shrubs. The next moment I found myself looking straight at the boy, sturdy and ragged in his rustic kaftan, who could have been anything from twelve to fifteen years old. He was barefooted, and unlike most of the Arab boys that one saw, his head also was bare, covered with a shock of wild dark hair. His skin was dark brown. He was standing stock-still beside a bush, leaning on a thick stick.
He seemed to be staring straight at me. After a moment’s hesitation I got off my boulder and picked my way back to the river’s edge. The boy didn’t move.
‘Hullo there! Do you speak English?’ My voice whirled away and was drowned in the roar of the water between us, and I raised it and tried again. ‘Can you hear me?’
He nodded. It was a curiously dignified nod, the sort of gesture one might have expected from an actor, not from a herd-boy. That this is what he was I now saw; one or two of the goats that we had seen yesterday were moving slowly and at random down the slope behind him, cropping at the thin flowers as they came. Then with a movement that was all small boy, and not dignified at all, he thrust his stick into the stony earth, and pole-vaulted down towards his side of the stream. Now we were barely twenty feet apart, but with all the roaring of the Nahr el-Sal’q between us.
I tried again. ‘Where can I cross the water?’
This time he shook his head. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘I didn’t say when, I said where!’ But he had, in fact, answered my question. The implication was clear. The crossing place, probably the only crossing place, was here, and the river would take twenty-four hours to go down.
My dismay must have been obvious. He waved with the stick upstream towards the towering cliffs that barred the head of the valley, and then down to where the two rivers rushed together in a wrangle of white foam stained with red. ‘Bad,’ he shouted, ‘all bad! You stay there!’ A sudden smile, very boyish, showing two gaps in the even white teeth, ‘You stay with the Lady, huh? Your father’s father’s sister?’
‘My …?’ I worked it out yet again. He was right. And it was Nasirulla, of course, everyone in the village would know all about it by now. ‘Yes. You live in the village?’
A gesture, not to the village, but to the barren landscape and the goats. ‘I live here.’
‘Can you get a mule? A donkey?’ I had thought of John Lethman’s horse, but somehow that would be a last resort. ‘I would pay well!’ I shouted.
That shake of the head again. ‘No mule. Donkey, too small. You all drown. This is a bad river.’ After some thought he added in explanation: ‘There was rain in the night.’
‘You must be joking.’
He got the meaning, even though he couldn’t have heard me. The gap-toothed grin flashed again, and then he pointed towards the village. I hadn’t seen him look that way, but when I looked myself I saw Hamid, a slim figure in dark blue trousers and steel-blue shirt, detach himself from the dense shadow under the retaining wall that held the village to the cliff top, and start on his way down the path.
I turned back to the boy.
The goats were there, still grazing: the river roared; the distant village wavered on the cliff top in the heat; but down here on the rocky bank there was no sign of any boy. Only the liquid rocks shimmering up in the heat, and where he had been standing a shaggy black goat, staring at me with those cold yellow eyes.
A country where anything could happen.
‘By all the gods at once,’ I said aloud, ‘I could do with your keeping that promise, cousin dear, here and now, and no kidding.’
Some ten seconds later I realised that the small figure in the distance was not Hamid at all, but Charles himself, coming fast down the slope towards me.
7
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea …
Milton: Paradise Lost
CERTAINLY a country where anything could happen. After my disturbed night among the storybook paraphernalia of the palace – peacocks, mute servants, harem gardens – no touch of magic would have surprised me. What did faintly surprise me was that I should so immediately have distinguished Charles at such a distance from Hamid, whom I had been expecting. So immediately – and with such a calm uprush of pleasure.
I sat still on my boulder in the sun, watching him.
When he was still some way off, he raised a hand to greet me, then something seemed to catch his attention, for he paused and turned, apparently to address a patch of shade under a dusty bush. As I watched, the patch of shade revolved into a black goat, and squatting down cross-legged beside it the herd-boy, his stick lying at his feet in the dust.
The conversation lasted a minute or two, then the
boy got to his feet, and the two of them came down together towards the river bank.
I walked down again to my side, and we stood surveying one another across the twenty feet of turbid, red-streaked water.
‘Hi!’ said Charles.
‘Hi!’ I shouted. Then, not very brilliantly: ‘We’re stuck. It’s in spate.’
‘So it seems, Serves you right. Stealing a march. How’s Great-Aunt H?’
‘Fine. You’re early. How did you manage?’
‘Made it this morning. Hotel told me. Saw your driver this morning, told him I’d fetch you.’
‘You did? Fine, you go right ahead and fetch me! … Oh, Charles, the boy says it’ll be in spate till tomorrow. What are we going to do?’
‘I’ll come over,’ said my cousin.
‘You can’t! It’s hellish deep. Did you get rain last night in Beirut?’
‘Did I get what?’
‘Rain?’ I gestured to a flawless sky. ‘Rain?’
‘I can’t think why we’re standing twenty feet apart talking about the weather,’ said Charles, starting to undo his shirt buttons.
I yelled in alarm: ‘Charles, you can’t! And it wouldn’t help if you did—’
‘You can watch or not as you please,’ said my cousin. ‘Remember the good old days when we used to be dumped in the bath together? Don’t worry, I’ll manage this lot.’
‘I can hardly wait to watch you drown,’ I said tartly. ‘But if you’d only listen—’
He stopped unbuttoning and turned a look of inquiry. ‘Yes?’