It was hardly a disturbance. The young Germans at my table paid no attention. The English students inside the rest-house, behind glass, were talking competitively about Carter and Lord Carnarvon. But the middle-aged Italian group on the terrace, as they understood the rules of the game, became playful. They threw apples and made the children run far. Experimentally they broke up sandwiches and threw the pieces out on to the sand; and they got the children to come up quite close. Soon it was all action around the Italians; and the man with the camel-whip, like a man understanding what was required of him, energetically patrolled that end of the terrace, shouting, beating the sand, earning his paper piastres.
A tall Italian in a cerise jersey stood up and took out his camera. He laid out food just below the terrace and the children came running. But this time, as though it had to be real for the camera, the camel-whip fell not on sand but on their backs, with louder, quicker camel-shouts. And still, among the tourists in the rest-house and among the Egyptian drivers standing about their cars and minibuses, there was no disturbance. Only the man with the whip and the children scrabbling in the sand were frantic. The Italians were cool. The man in the cerise jersey was opening another packet of sandwiches. A shorter, older man in a white suit had stood up and was adjusting his camera. More food was thrown out; the camel-whip continued to fall; the shouts of the man with the whip turned to resonant grunts.
Still the Germans at my table didn’t notice; the students inside were still talking. I saw that my hand was trembling. I put down the sandwich I was eating on the metal table; it was my last decision. Lucidity, and anxiety, came to me only when I was almost on the man with the camel-whip. I was shouting. I took the whip away, threw it on the sand. He was astonished, relieved. I said, ‘I will report this to Cairo.’ He was frightened; he began to plead in Arabic. The children were puzzled; they ran off a little way and stood up to watch. The two Italians, fingering cameras, looked quite calm behind their sunglasses. The women in the party leaned back in their chairs to consider me.
I felt exposed, futile, and wanted only to be back at my table. When I got back I took up my sandwich. It had happened quickly; there had been no disturbance. The Germans stared at me. But I was indifferent to them now as I was indifferent to the Italian in the cerise jersey. The Italian women had stood up, the group was leaving; and he was ostentatiously shaking out lunch–boxes and sandwich wrappers on to the sand.
The children remained where they were. The man from whom I had taken the whip came to give me coffee and to plead again in Arabic and English. The coffee was free; it was his gift to me. But even while he was talking the children had begun to come closer. Soon they would be back, raking the sand for what they had seen the Italian throw out.
I didn’t want to see that. The driver was waiting, leaning against the car door, his bare arms crossed. He had seen all that had happened. From him, an emancipated young man of the desert in belted trousers and sports shirt, with his thoughts of Cairo, I was expecting some gesture, some sign of approval. He smiled at me with the corners of his wide mouth, with his narrow eyes. He crushed his cigarette in the sand and slowly breathed out smoke through his lips; he sighed. But that was his way of smoking. I couldn’t tell what he thought. He was as correct as before, he looked as bored.
Everywhere I went that afternoon I saw the pea-green Volkswagen minibus of the Italian group. Everywhere I saw the cerise jersey. I learned to recognize the plump, squiffy, short-stepped walk that went with it, the dark glasses, the receding hairline, the little stiff swing of the arms. At the ferry I thought I had managed to escape; but the minibus arrived, the Italians got out. I thought we would separate on the Luxor bank. But they too were staying at the Winter Palace. The cerise jersey bobbed confidently through bowing Egyptian servants in the lobby, the bar, the grand dining-room with fresh flowers and intricately folded napkins. In Egypt that year there was only paper money.
I stayed for a day or two on the Luxor bank. Dutifully, I saw Karnak by moonlight. When I went back to the desert I was anxious to avoid the rest-house. The driver understood. Without any show of triumph he took me when the time came to the timber hut among the palm trees. They were doing more business that day. There were about four or five parked minibuses. Inside, the hut was dark, cool and uncluttered. A number of tables had been joined together; and at this central dining-board there were about forty or fifty Chinese, men and women, chattering softly. They were part of the circus I had seen in Milan.
The two elderly Chinese sat together at the end of the long table, next to a small, finely made lady who looked just a little too old to be an acrobat. I had missed her in the crowd in Milan. Again, when the time came to pay, the man with the fat wallet used his hands awkwardly. The lady spoke to the Egyptian waiter. He called the other waiters and they all formed a line. For each waiter the lady had a handshake and gifts, money, something in an envelope, a medal. The ragged waiters stood stiffly, with serious averted faces, like soldiers being decorated. Then all the Chinese rose and, chattering, laughing softly, shuffled out of the echoing hut with their relaxed, slightly splayed gait. They didn’t look at me; they appeared scarcely to notice the hut. They were as cool and well-dressed in the desert, the men in suits, the girls in slacks, as they had been in the rain of Milan. So self-contained, so handsome and healthy, so silently content with one another: it was hard to think of them as sightseers.
The waiter, his face still tense with pleasure, showed the medal on his dirty striped jibbah. It had been turned out from a mould that had lost its sharpness; but the ill-defined face was no doubt Chinese and no doubt that of the leader. In the envelope were pretty coloured postcards of Chinese peonies.
Peonies, China! So many empires had come here. Not far from where we were was the colossus on whose shin the Emperor Hadrian had caused to be carved verses in praise of himself, to commemorate his visit. On the other bank, not far from the Winter Palace, was a stone with a rougher Roman inscription marking the southern limit of the Empire, defining an area of retreat. Now another, more remote empire was announcing itself. A medal, a postcard; and all that was asked in return was anger and a sense of injustice.
Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and had seen it as complete. But it was hard, travelling back to Cairo, looking with my stranger’s eye at the fields and the people who worked in them, the dusty towns, the agitated peasant crowds at railway stations, it was hard to believe that there had been such innocence. Perhaps that vision of the land, in which the Nile was only water, a blue-green chevron, had always been a fabrication, a cause for yearning, something for the tomb.
The air-conditioning in the coach didn’t work well; but that might have been because the two Negro attendants, still with the habits of the village, preferred to sit before the open doors to chat. Sand and dust blew in all day; it was hot until the sun set and everything went black against the red sky. In the dimly lit waiting-room of Cairo station there were more sprawled soldiers from Sinai, peasants in bulky woollen uniforms going back on leave to their villages. Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.
August 1969–October 1970
MODERN CLASSICS IN EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY
CHINUA ACHEBE
The African Trilogy
Things Fall Apart
ISABEL ALLENDE
The House of the Spirits
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
(in 1 vol.)
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Handmaid’s Tale
GIORGIO BASSANI
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
The Second Sex
SAMUEL BECKETT
br />
Molloy, Malone Dies,
The Unnamable
(US only)
SAUL BELLOW
The Adventures of Augie March
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Ficciones
RAY BRADBURY
The Stories of Ray Bradbury
MIKHAIL BULGAKOV
The Master and Margarita
JAMES M. CAIN
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Double Indemnity
Mildred Pierce
Selected Stories
(1 vol. US only)
ITALO CALVINO
If on a winter’s night a traveler
ALBERT CAMUS
The Outsider (UK)
The Stranger (US)
The Plague, The Fall,
Exile and the Kingdom,
and Selected Essays
(in i vol.)
WILLA CATHER
Death Comes for the Archbishop
(US only)
My Antonia
RAYMOND CHANDLER
The novels (2 vols)
Collected Stories
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everyman Chesterton
KATE CHOPIN
The Awakening
JOSEPH CONRAD
Heart of Darkness
Lord Jim
Nostromo
The Secret Agent
Typhoon and Other Stories
Under Western Eyes
Victory
ROALD DAHL
Collected Stories
JOAN DIDION
We Tell Ourselves Stories in
Order to Live (US only)
UMBERTO ECO
The Name of the Rose
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Sound and the Fury
(UK only)
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Great Gatsby
This Side of Paradise
(UK only)
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
The Bookshop
The Gate of Angels
The Blue Flower
(in i vol.)
Offshore
Human Voices
The Beginning of Spring
(in 1 vol.)
FORD MADOX FORD
The Good Soldier
Parade’s End
RICHARD FORD
The Bascombe Novels
E. M. FORSTER
Howards End
A Passage to India
ANNE FRANK
The Diary of a Young Girl
(US only)
GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER
Flashman
Flash for Freedom!
Flashman in the Great Game
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Collected Works
GÜNTER GRASS
The Tin Drum
GRAHAM GREENE
Brighton Rock
The Human Factor
DASHIELL HAMMETT
The Maltese Falcon
The Thin Man
Red Harvest
(in 1 vol.)
The Dain Curse
The Glass Key
and Selected Stories
(in 1 vol.)
JAROSLAV HAŠ EK
The Good Soldier Švejk
JOSEPH HELLER
Catch-22
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Farewell to Arms
The Collected Stories
(UK only)
MICHAEL HERR
Dispatches (US only)
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Ripley Under Ground
Ripley’s Game
(in 1 vol.)
JAMES JOYCE
Dubliners
A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man
Ulysses
FRANZ KAFKA
Collected Stories
The Castle
The Trial
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
The Woman Warrior and
China Men
(US only)
RUDYARD KIPLING
Collected Stories
Kim
GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI
LAMPEDUSA
The Leopard
D. H. LAWRENCE
Collected Stories
The Rainbow
Sons and Lovers
Women in Love
DORIS LESSING
Stories
PRIMO LEVI
If This is a Man and The Truce
(UK only)
The Periodic Table
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ
The Cairo Trilogy
Three Novels of Ancient Egypt
THOMAS MANN
Buddenbrooks
Collected Stories (UK only)
Death in Venice and Other Stories
(US only)
Doctor Faustus
Joseph and His Brothers
The Magic Mountain
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
The Garden Party and Other
Stories
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
The General in His Labyrinth
Love in the Time of Cholera
One Hundred Years of Solitude
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Collected Stories
CORMAC McCARTHY
The Border Trilogy
YUKIO MISHIMA
The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion
TONI MORRISON
Beloved
Song of Solomon
ALICE MUNRO
Carried Away: A Selection
of Stories
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lolita
Pale Fire
Pnin
Speak, Memory
V. S. NAIPAUL
Collected Short Fiction (US only)
A House for Mr Biswas
R. K. NARAYAN
Swami and Friends
The Bachelor of Arts
The Dark Room
The English Teacher
(in 1 vol.)
Mr Sampath — The Printer of
Malgudi
The Financial Expert
Waiting for the Mahatma
(in 1 vol.)
IRENE NEMIROVSKY
David Golder
The Ball
Snow in Autumn
The Couril of Affair
(in 1 vol.)
FLANN O’BRIEN
The Complete Novels
FRANK O’CONNOR
The Best of Frank O’Connor
GEORGE ORWELL
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Essays
Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, Coming Up for Air
(in 1 vol.)
ORHAN PAMUK
My Name is Red
BORIS PASTERNAK
Doctor Zhivago
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar (US only)
MARCEL PROUST
In Search of Lost Time
(4 vols, UK only)
JOSEPH ROTH
The Radetsky March
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Midnight’s Children
PAUL SCOTT
The Raj Quartet (2 vols)
ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN
One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich
MURIEL SPARK
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Girls of Slender Means
The Driver’s Seat
The Only Problem
(in 1 vol.)
CHRISTINA STEAD
The Man Who Loved Children
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
ITALO SVEVO
Zeno’s Conscience
JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI
The Makioka Sisters
JOHN UPDIKE
The Complete Henry Bech
Rabbit Angstrom
EVELYN WAUGH
The Complete Short Stories
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved
r />
One, The Ordeal of Gilbert
Pinfold (in 1 vol.)
Brideshead Revisited
Decline and Fall (US)
Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies,
Put Out More Flags (UK)
A Handful of Dust
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel
Writing
H. G. WELLS
The Time Machine,
The Invisible Man,
The War of the Worlds
(in 1 vol. US only)
EDITH WHARTON
The Age of Innocence
The Custom of the Country
Ethan Frome, Summer,
Bunner Sisters
(in 1 vol.)
The House of Mirth
The Reef
OSCAR WILDE
Plays, Prose Writings and Poems
P. G. WODEHOUSE
The Best of Wodehouse
VIRGINIA WOOLF
To the Lighthouse
Mrs Dalloway
RICHARD YATES
Revolutionary Road
The Easter Parade
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
(in 1 vol.)
W. B. YEATS
The Poems (UK only)
V. S. Naipaul, Collected Short Fiction
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