Assuming that you were thus nestled, unhurt, on the bosom of this interminable slough (whose stench came to your nostrils while you were still a thousand feet above it), and assuming that you had in your plane a radio transmitter through which you contacted Khartoum, giving your position and other details, you might, if you were naïve, expect something to happen. But nothing would, because nothing could.
Boats cannot move in the Sudd, planes cannot land in it, men cannot walk in it. In time a plane would arrive, circle a few times and drop provisions, but unless the aim of the pilot were such that he hit a part of your plane directly with his packet of manna, you would have gained nothing. If he did hit it, you would have gained little.
It is, of course, conceivable that, given enough food via bombardment, you might live to a ripe old age and achieve the ultimate in privacy while doing it, but it is more likely that those little minstrels of misery, the mosquitoes, not to say the Devil’s own amphibian armada (crocodiles populate the Sudd), would discourage you long before your hair turned grey — a matter, I should think, of about two weeks.
In any case, the anticipation of such doleful prospects on the part of those civilian pilots permitted by the R.A.F. to chance the Sudd had led to extraordinary caution, and consequently there have been few, if any, lives lost in it.
Our flight contributed no new anecdote about the Sudd. During the four hours we flew over it, Blix and I spoke very little. The Leopard Moth had a closed cabin, and so conversation was possible, but we were in no mood for it.
Our silence was not an awed silence; I think we were simply depressed beyond words with the business of hanging for so long a time under such a flat blue sky and above such a flat virescent swamp. It was hardly like flying. It was like sitting in a plane which, by the aid of wires, dangled equidistant between the floor and the ceiling of a stage-set conceived without benefit of imagination.
Shortly after we left Juba, Blix, in the accepted dormouse style, roused himself long enough to mumble, ‘I smell the Sudd! ‘ — and then he was silent again until the Sudd was gone and both of us could smell the desert.
Beyond the Sudd there is the desert, and nothing but the desert for almost three thousand miles, nor are the towns and cities that live in it successful in gainsaying its emptiness. To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.
And after the desert, the sea. But long before we reached the sea, Blix and I had found that men alone can be more tiresome and give more hindrance than all the sand and all the water that may stretch over a quarter of the globe.
Malakal, Khartoum, Luxor — cities to their inhabitants, islands of regeneration to us. We stopped at each of them, and at each were blessed with that great triumvirate of blessings to the traveller — hot water, food, and sleep. But it was at Cairo that we were surfeited with these. After a flight of three thousand miles in three days, we were detained for an entire week by the majestic workings of the Italian Government. It was one of the incidents which Abdullah Ali had neglected to predict.
Abdullah Ali was in charge of the customs office at Alamza, the Cairo airport. He was also in charge of a small department in the Realm of Things to Come; he told fortunes, and told them well. He loved aviators with a paternal love and, in his way, he gave them guidance that put to shame even their compasses. He was a tall, spare column of a man, dark as a mummy and almost as inscrutable. He fumbled through our papers, glanced at our luggage, and affixed all the necessary stamps. Then he led us outside the customs shed, where the official glint faded from his eyes and in its place came the esoteric glow that illumines the eyes of all true seers. He kneeled in the yellow sand of the huge aerodrome and began to make marks upon it with a polished stick. ‘Before she leaves,’ he said, ‘the lady must have her fortune.’
Blix sighed and looked wistfully toward the city. ‘I’m dying of thirst — and he tells fortunes!’
‘Shh! That’s blasphemy.’
‘I see a journey,’ said Abdullah Ali.
‘They always do,’ said Blix.
‘The lady will fly over a great water to a strange country.’
‘That’s an easy prediction,’ mumbled Blix, ‘with the Mediterranean just ahead.’
‘And she will fly alone,’ said Abdullah Ali.
Blix turned to me. ‘If I am to be abandoned, Beryl, couldn’t you make it a little closer to a bar?’
Abdullah Ali heard nothing of this irreverent comment. He went on making circles and triangles with his wizard’s wand and unravelling my future as if it were already my past. His red fez bobbed up and down, his slender hands moved against the sand like foraging sparrows against snow. He was not really with us nor with the fortune either; he was back there under the shadow of the half-built Sphinx, making marks in the selfsame sand.
When we left him, the polished stick had disappeared and a pencil had taken its place. Abdullah Ali too had disappeared — or was at least transformed. That thin Egyptian with the grey suit and red fez, stooping as he walked through the door of the shed, was only a customs man.
‘Do you believe him?’ said Blix.
A taxicab had scurried across the airport to take us to Shepheard’s Hotel. I got into the car and relaxed against the leather seat.
Who believes in fortune-tellers? Very young girls, I thought, and very old women. I was neither of these.
‘I believe it all,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
XXI
Search for a Libyan Fort
IN NINETEEN-THIRTY-SIX YOU COULD not fly over any Italian territory without permission from the Italian Government. It is true that you have to clear customs at each international border in any case, but the Italian idea was different.
The Italian idea was based upon the wistful suspicion that no foreigner (certainly no Englishman) could fly over Libya, for instance, and successfully resist the temptation to take candid camera shots of the newly contrived Fascist forts. The Italians, under Mussolini, would have been hurt indeed to know that a pilot existed (and many of them did) who had less curiosity about the Fascist forts than about the exact location of a bar of soap and a tub of hot water. The official reasoning seemed to run about like this: ‘An aviator who shows an interest in our fortresses is guilty of espionage, and one who does not is guilty of disrespect.’ I think the latter crime was, of the two, the more repugnant to the legionnaires of the flowing tunic and the gleaming button.
The symbols of war — impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships — all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway. I sometimes think it must be extremely difficult for the Italian people to remain patient in the face of their armies’ unwavering record of defeat (they looked so resplendent on parade). But there is little complaint.
The answer must be that the country of Caruso has lived a symbolic life for so long that the token has become indistinguishable from the fact or the deed. If an aria can suffice for a fighting heart, a riband draped on any chest can suffice for a general — and the theory of victory, for victory itself.
The one highly placed Italian I knew, and for whom I had respect — as did everybody else who knew him — was the late General Balbo. Balbo was a gentleman among Fascists, and, as such, his death was an act of Fate doubtless designed in the interests of congruity.
He was Governor of Tripolitania at the time Blix and I flew to England, but he had gone into the Southern Desert on routine inspection and so could not intercede, as he had twice done for me, in the matter o
f speeding our exit from Egypt into Libya.
However futile the Italian military, there is real striking power behind the rubber stamps of petty Italian officials — or there was. They kept Blix and me at Cairo, day after day, withholding our permits to cross the border into Libya. They had no reason, or gave none, and their maddening refusal to do anything whatever except to sit (I think literally) upon our passports, brought the profound observation from Blix that ‘there is no hell like uncertainty, and no greater menace to society than an Italian with three liras worth of authority.’
It brought Blix to more than that. It exposed him to an incident that might have shattered the nerves of a less steady man.
Blix left Shepheard’s Hotel each night well after dinner and disappeared into the honeycombs of Cairo. He is a gregarious individual who loves his fellows and hates to be alone. It is one of the minor tragedies of his life that, no matter in what gay companionship the night begins, not many hours pass before he is alone again — at least in spirit. His friends may still be at his side around a table still graced by an open bottle — but they are mute and recumbent; they no longer finger their glasses, they no longer mutter about the vicissitudes of life, nor sing the joys of living it. They are silent, limp, or lachrymose, and in their midst sits Blix the Unsinkable — a monument of miserable sobriety, bleak as a lonely rock jutting from a lonely sea. Blix leaves them at last (after paying the bill) and seeks comfort in the noises of the night.
One night in Cairo Blix came across an old friend and a gentleman of doughty stock. He was the younger brother of Captain John Alcock (who, with Lieutenant Arthur Brown, made the first successful Atlantic flight), and moreover he was a crack pilot for Imperial Airways. Alcock the younger, who has rarely if ever been put hors de combat by anything that can be poured from a decanter, was the realization of one of Blix’s most fervent hopes — a man to whom the undermost side of a table was an unexplored region.
At some bar — I cannot remember which, any more than Blix or Alcock could if they were asked — there began an historic session of comradely tippling and verbose good-fellowship which dissolved Time and reduced Space to an anteroom. On the table between those good companions the whole of history was dissected and its mouldy carcass borne away in an empty ice bucket. International problems were solved in a word, and the direction of Fate foreseen through the crystal windows of two upturned goblets. It was a glorious adventure, but the only part I had in it came close on the dawn.
I was asleep in my room at Shepheard’s when a fist hammered at my door. Ordinarily I should have climbed out of bed and groped for my flying clothes. Ordinarily that knock would have meant that somebody had forced-landed in a cotton field, probably in the middle of Uganda, and that they had communicated with Nairobi asking for a spare part. But this was Cairo, and that insistent fist must be the fist of Blix.
I groped for lights, got into a dressing-gown, and let fly a few whispered maledictions aimed at the head of Bacchus But what I saw before me, when I opened the door, was no reeling Blix, nor even a swaying one. I have seldom seen a man so sober. He was grim, he was pale, he was Death warmed over. He shook like a harpstring.
He said: ‘Beryl, I hated to do it, but I had to wake you. The head rolled eight feet from the body.’
There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’) and then scream — remembering always that the scream is of secondary importance to the book-end.
Shepheard’s in Cairo is one of the most civilized hotels in the world. It has everything — lifts, restaurants, an enormous foyer, cocktail rooms, a famous bar and ballroom. But it has no book-ends. At least my room had no book-end. It had a green vase with an Egyptian motif, but I couldn’t reach it.
‘The damned fools just stood there,’ said Blix, ‘and stared at the blood.’
I went back to my bed and sat on it. This was our sixth day in Cairo. Almost hourly either Blix or I had telephoned to see if our papers had been stamped for passage into Libya and each time we had got ‘no’ for an answer. It was wearing us down, both in cash and nerves, but I had thought that the most redoubtable White Hunter in Africa would have survived it a little longer. And yet, as I sat on the edge of the bed, there was Blix leaning against the wall of my room with the vitality of a bundle of wrinkled clothes awaiting the pleasure of the hotel valet. I sighed with the sorrow of it all.
‘Sit down, Blix. You’re a sick man.’
He didn’t sit. He ran a hand over his face and stared at the floor. ‘So I took the head,’ he muttered, in a low voice, ‘and brought it back to the body.’
And so he had, poor man. He found a chair at last, and, as the daylight grew stronger, he grew stronger too, until finally I got the whole of what was in fact a tragic happening, but whose coincidence with Blix’s homeward journey from his rendezvous with Alcock gave it, nonetheless, a comic touch.
Blix had not been left alone that night. Drink for drink and word for word, he had been met and matched according to the rules of his own making. At about four o’clock in the morning, hands were clasped and two suspiciously vertical gentlemen took leave of each other. I have Blix’s word for it that he walked toward Shepheard’s in a geometrically straight line — an undertaking that no completely sober man would even attempt. Blix said that his head was clear, but that his thoughts were complicated. He said that he was not given to visions, but that two or three times he had humanely stepped over small, nondescript animals in his path, only to realize, on looking back, how deceptive shadows can be in a dimly lighted city street.
It was not until he was within two blocks of Shepheard’s, and doing nicely, that he saw at his feet a human head completely detached from its body.
Blix’s presence of mind never left him on safari, nor did it here. He merely assumed that, being a little older than he had been, all-night revelry left him more shaky than it used to do. He squared his shoulders and was about to carry on when he saw that other people stood in a circle on the concrete walk — all of them staring at the severed head and babbling so idiotically that it came to Blix with violent suddenness that neither the people nor the head was an hallucination; a man had fallen across the tramlines in the path of an onrushing car and had been decapitated.
There were no police, there was no ambulance, there was no effort on anybody’s part to do anything but gape. Blix, used to violence, was not used to indifference in the face of tragedy. He kneeled on the walk, took the head in his arms, and returned it to its body. It was the body of an Egyptian labourer, and Blix stood over it pouring Swedish imprecations on the gathered onlookers, like an outraged prophet reviling his flock. And when the authorities did arrive, he left his gruesome post, stole through the crowd, with his lips clamped tightly together, and came to Shepheard’s.
All this he told me while he slumped in a chair and the morning traffic of Cairo began to hum beneath my windows.
After a while I ordered some coffee and, while we drank it, I thought that anyway there was hope for the world so long as the fundamental decency of a man was strong enough to triumph over all that the demon rum could do with six hours’ start — and more cooperation than any demon has a right to expect.
‘Are you giving up all-night parties, Blix?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh, but I think that would be so very rash and so very unsociable. Walking home from them is the thing to avoid — I promise you!’
About noon on the sixth day of our stay in Cairo, the Italian authorities, having convinced themselves that our entrance into Libya would not result in a general uprising, returned our passports, and on the following morning we left, flying north to Alexandria, then west to Mersa Matruh, and on to Sollum.
From Sollum to Amseat is ten minutes by plane. Amseat is a post on the Italian Egyptian border; it consisted then of wind, desert, and Italians, and I understand the wind and de
sert still remain. You had to land there before proceeding to the interior. The post is on a plateau and the landing field is merely a piece of Libya bounded by imaginary lines.
We landed and were at once brought to bay by six armed motorcyclists who plunged toward the plane as if they had lain in wait behind the dunes for many anxious days before springing their trap. This advance guard had barely dismounted before about thirty other cyclists roared smartly across the sand, surrounded the Leopard, and thus completed what, for them, was apparently a military manoeuvre of singular brilliance. Only one detail of organization seemed to have been ignored: they lacked a leader. They all spoke, argued, and waved their arms at once with great energy, displaying a tendency toward republican methods that would have been highly significant to a keen political observer. It looked for a moment as if the first rift in Il Duce’s tight-seamed order was taking place right in front of our eyes. But not at all. Eventually a swart soldier announced in a firm tenor voice that he spoke English, which was an exaggeration, but which served to quell the ripples of hysteria instantly.
‘I will have this papers,’ said the swart soldier. He extended his hand and collected our passports, special permits, and medical certificates.
The sun was hot and, after Cairo, we were impatient, but the inquisitor with the tenor voice was unhurried. With most of the Amseat garrison peeking over his shoulder, he stared at our papers while Blix swore first in Swedish, then in Swahili, and finally in English. This is not an inconsiderable ability, but it passed unnoticed. After half an hour or so, a man leapt to the saddle of his motorcycle and spluttered away across the desert. He was back in five minutes with a portable canvas chair which was unfolded and set up in the sand. Everybody waited in solemn silence. Blix and I had got out of the plane and we stood leaning against it, under the savage sun, thinking harsh thoughts. Minutes had begun to accumulate into an hour before still another machine arrived, complete with side-car, and out of which popped an officer draped in a long blue cloak that bore enough medals to afford about the same protection, during the heat of battle, as a bullet-proof vest. The man who supported all this glory also supported, we observed, the official posterior for which the canvas chair had been spread. He sat down and began to study our papers.