Jerusalem Commands

TWELVE

LAND OF RUINS, and of dreams, and death; land of dust and ghosts. Here all the great civilisations of the earth were born and here they come to die. Here, the British Empire perished, without honour, without nobility, without friends, like the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks and the French before them. For the British, too, inhaled the dusty seeds of Carthage and found them sweet and carried them home to England where, as Rosebay Willow Herb was once Pompei’s Fireweed, the seed was given a more familiar domestic name and soon took hold. There are two lessons that temporal empires never learn. The first: It is self-destruction to march against Moscow. The second: Never annex Egypt. Napoleon, Alexander’s only military and philosophical equal, might have survived if he had made only one of those mistakes. I hold no brief for the ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’, the myth which had brought us to Egypt in the first place, but belief in such curses reflects a deeper truth. Any other nation which tries to tamper in the affairs of Egypt attracts a curse. She is a fierce old mother and she punishes interference in her enjoyment of her declining years; especially she punishes those who would wish to ‘revive’ her. She is too tired for revival. She wishes only to be left alone, to live in her memories and the remains of her glory. By her own scale, she could live at least another thousand years.

Much of this Professor Quelch explained to me next morning as we walked to the special platform of Robert Stephenson’s magnificent railway station (the only monuments the British ever raised to rival the temples and tombs of the Pharaohs). I was a little the worse for wear. I had enjoyed many glasses of port with those fine English chevaliers of His Majesty’s Protective Government, it being Christmas Day. They, of course, were granted leave for that peculiarly English holiday, Boxing Day, in which all able-bodied men appear on their village greens and engage in violent fisticuffs. At that moment I was never more glad, as I made my dazed way through the confusion of beggars, porters, guides and the sellers of every conceivable kind of fakery, that I had not been born an Englishman. I pitied my comrades of the previous night their sporting ordeal. But perhaps they were made of heartier stuff and were already preparing for the fight with an enthusiasm which in another race would be unquestionably sexual? Certainly many of their repressions were set aside that night and their language as well as their anecdotes became increasingly colourful, so that Grace the Hairdresser and Wolf Seaman made their excuses and left. I grew nostalgic, I told them, for the mess of my old brigade. I told them how I had belonged to one of the last Cossack regiments to stand against the Reds. I described the Red atrocities in Kiev and Odessa. I said how cheap life had become, how the most beautiful girls of good homes were prepared to prostitute themselves for a twist of salt or a handful of potatoes. They believed, they said, that Odessa sounded better than Port Said. Port Said was said to be even more of a sink of iniquity than Alexandria, the flourishing centre of a white slave-trade into Africa and the Middle East about which little could be done, since none had sufficient authority over either the whoremasters or their human cattle. One learned to live with such things, they murmured, and thanked God that they had nothing like it to contend with in England. They spoke too soon! That was before the disease had been brought home. Today half of London is indistinguishable from the filthiest souks of the Levant and young girls and boys hawk the most perverse pleasures quite openly. My acquaintances in the Egyptian police would have been horrified by what I see every day in the Portobello Road. And it is so familiar to us that nobody even mentions it any more. When will they tire of their ‘progress’ and see it for what it is? Year by year the beast grows; year by year it becomes harder to find common justice, common kindness and humanity. Where will it end?

Professor Quelch, who had not attended the dinner, told me he was certain that some of the English police were now quite as corrupt as the Egyptian. ‘Bribery is rife in certain departments. I have it on the best authority.’ When I mentioned the white slave-trade, he shrugged. It continued to prosper partly because the chief men in the business were protected by high-ranking officers who received a share of the profits and their pick of the boys and girls. ‘Of course, most of the high-ranking British officers are ignorant of this. They believe everything’s in order. Besides, they know how difficult it is to control the European women and their pimps. The police can only enter a brothel, for instance, accompanied by a representative of the country of which the madam is a national. Every time the police get hold of the appropriate consular official, the nationality of the madam changes. They tried to round up the pimps a few years ago. In Cairo they have their own Pasha, a grotesque individual by the name of Ibrahim el-Ghar’bi, a fat, massive nigger who dresses like a houri out of the Arabian nights. I know him quite well. He’s a man of considerable wit and education. If, my dear boy, you have any “special requests”, then el-Ghar’bi is the chap for you.’

I told him that I had no need of such services, but I was becoming impressed by the profundity of Malcolm Quelch’s knowledge of Egypt and her customs, old and new. I now fully understood why Captain Quelch had been so determined to have his brother look after us.

As we walked beside the great green and gold train towards the first-class compartments, Quelch raised for a second time the matter of his fees. ‘There has been no agreement, as yet. I was wondering who to approach. Who, as it were, is our quartermaster?’

I believed Captain Quelch had already agreed fees with Seaman. I was sure the professor could be paid on any basis he chose.

‘As a rule,’ smiling, he pointed to our carriage with his cane, ‘I arrange for my fee to be forthcoming on a daily basis for an agreed period of time. If, for some reason, you should break that agreement, then I am to be paid the full amount I should have earned. Since you were recommended by my brother, I had a fee of three guineas a day in mind. All found, of course.’

This seemed reasonable to me. Quelch was also to act as a technical adviser and historical consultant when we began filming. He was clearly flattered to learn he would receive a credit.

‘And I would require some sort of letter making it clear to all concerned that I am part of your company.’ He made a nervous, dismissive gesture. ‘To keep everything above-board, you know.’

I had not heard of an illicit trade in archaeological information, but I assured Quelch that Seaman was bound to meet all his requirements. Even that unimaginative Swede would be able to see that Quelch was going to be of enormous value to us, especially when it came to negotiating with Egyptian officials who were, Quelch and the other English people had told us, growing increasingly ‘bolshy’. ‘Since we started giving in to them, there’s been virtual anarchy.’ He referred to the nationalists of the so-called Wafd, who had gained soft-hearted concessions from their protectors after considerable rioting in the streets which only stopped when the British were forced to shoot a few of the thousands demonstrating against them. He was about to say more when the green and gold locomotive let forth a vast, manly sigh, an awakening giant; the pace of loaders, guards and conductors suddenly doubled as they rushed to their positions and the last-minute passengers, some arguing violently with their night-shirted guides and porters, began to arrange themselves on board. Wicker luggage was forced through doors and windows. Mothers and nannies wailed or screamed for lost children; lost children responded in kind and husbands and wives shouted last-minute orders to their departing spouses. I was glad that a special carriage had been ordered for us and that we should not have to compete against the stink and the pressure of weather-beaten English matrons, ill-natured Egyptian businessmen and soldiers, both white and native, who fought to get the best possible positions for themselves before the train started. The rest of our party was already aboard, having arrived by bus from the hotel. Quelch and I had, at his insistence, visited Pompey’s Pillar, a rather unremarkable piece of polished granite erected in memory of an earlier and less lucky colonialist, whereupon he had mentioned his fees for the first time. I realised he was using this opportunity to raise the question as delicately as possible and assured him I would speak to Seaman.

Of our party, only Mrs Cornelius was honestly glad to be on the move again. Seaman kept to himself at the far end of the opulent carriage, with the hung-over film-crew, wincing at the jingling chandeliers, between ourselves and himself. He stared through the windows as if already planning his first shots. I asked Mrs Cornelius what was wrong but she insisted he was merely moody. ‘ ‘E’s offen like this when ‘e’s startin’ a picture. On ‘Er ‘Usband’s Mistress ‘e ‘ardly said two words ter me, even when I was s’posed to be in front o’ ther bloody camera. Or on me ‘ands an’ knees wiv Mr Willy up me bloody backside. It’s restful in a way, though.’

In spite of this I went up to the front and sat down across from Seaman who turned on me eyes so full of loathing that I was startled. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘what have I done? Shot your favourite dog?’

He apologised. He was already, he said, imagining me in my role as the High Priest who seduces Mrs Cornelius away from her duties and brings about the chain of events culminating, thousands of years later, in the tragic death of two modern lovers. I had written the part myself. I reminded him that I saw the High Priest as a victim as well as a villain. The point of my scenario was that Fate has no heroes or heroines, no favourites. However, there would be ample time to debate the interpretation of the role. I mentioned my chief reason for interrupting him, the matter of Quelch’s fees. Seaman frowned. ‘You’re sure we need him? He seems a charlatan. No better than his brother.’

I refused to respond to this unreasonable assessment, save to say that I had every assurance that Quelch was ideal for us. We would be hard-put to find someone of his expertise and general usefulness at less than thirty guineas a week. He shrugged at this, promising absently to draw up the necessary letter. Meanwhile, Quelch could have his first couple of days’ pay as soon as Seaman contacted Cook’s in Cairo, with whom Goldfish had already made an arrangement. I returned to our group. Mrs Cornelius had attached herself to Professor Quelch while Esmé, festooned with her purchases of the past two days, sat sipping a pensive glass of lemonade brought to her by our own tarbooshed steward, whose name he told us was Joseph. He was a Copt, with healthy light-brown skin and almond eyes, scarcely more than fifteen, I would have guessed, and with the cheerful disposition, the dignified manner of many Egyptian Christians, in complete contrast to the rabble we had encountered everywhere in Alexandria. His nails, for instance, might have been manicured in one of Rue Sharif Pasha’s exclusive salons. He positively reeked of strong soap and rosewater. Lunch, he said, would be at 12.30 and he showed us the folding tables that could be raised between our seats. Privately, I reflected on the irony of my situation. It had not been long since I had been riding under such trains, or lain hidden in goods wagons praying that the railroad bulls would not find me! All my life I have known heights and depths. I am not sure I could say I regret such extremes of experience. They have taught me, at least, a certain humility and encouraged me to identify with the underdog.

Somewhat off-handedly, Esmé asked Professor Quelch how long he had lived in Egypt.

‘Since the beginning of the War, dear mademoiselle. It was the War which brought me here, in fact. I was attached to British Intelligence. I dealt chiefly with the Turkish underground in Cairo.’ He dropped his voice to a throaty whisper, giving his remarks a mystery and significance which meant little to us.

‘Don’t you adore it?’ Dreamily, Esmé stared out at the bright leafy streets of the passing suburbs.

Professor Quelch’s smile was forgiving. ‘Egypt may be a country that one is predisposed to adore, mademoiselle, but adoration, in the face of the facts, changes very soon to reaction, even to detestation, for there is much in Egypt that evokes material, and not merely theoretical, detestation! You have arrived here in the winter when the climate is at its best. Spring, summer and autumn, however, are an endless trial! They are detestable. The insects are detestable the whole year through, and lethal in the hot weather. What’s more Cairo, in the spring, is infested by even more detestable dust-raising winds. A year, and you will detest all you now find attractive.’

‘You are a cynic, m’sieu!’ laughed my child.

‘Far from it, mademoiselle. When one is not plagued by the weather and the wild-life, one has the common Cairene to deal with. I refer not to the native of the countryside, nor to the better-class Egyptian - many of these, of either kind, are worthy and decent people, with many virtues; but what visitor ever makes their acquaintance? No, I mean the Cairo native of the lower class. Of him, mademoiselle, there is little good to be said. He is a noisy, rude, excitable pestilence. The cosmopolitan conditions of Cairo life, combined with the natural tolerance and justice of the regime he has enjoyed for so long, have not tended to improve him. It is safe to say that the average European (we must except the English, whose business it is to like the native) abhors him. And he returns the sentiment in most cases. I will grant you he is at his most trying in the more European parts of the city. To the east and to the south of Cairo (his own haunts) it must be granted he is usually more dignified, quieter, polite and helpful. But the foreign atmosphere seems to throw him off balance. Egypt is not in itself a white man’s country and so conditions for white men are abnormal and artificial.’

‘But ther sights!’ said Mrs Cornelius attempting to lighten the proceedings. ‘Yer gotta grant the sights, prof!’

He accepted this. ‘Perhaps. In my view the scenery and the elements, if one may so call them, of the country are also artificial. The Delta is a large market-garden, intersected by canals. Upper Egypt is a market-garden on either side of the Nile. The rest is the rock and sand of the desert. And the features of the country are not, I find, in themselves attractive. When you have seen a village, a village mosque, a grove of palms, the desert hills, processions of men on camels, and a few other such things, you have seen about all there is to see, and everything becomes very much the same. Summa: it would seem that Egypt is, save for her history and her art, a distinctly uninteresting and even detestable country.’

‘Then why do so many people visit Egypt?’ Esmé’s question was almost innocent.

Professor Quelch had a ready answer for her. ‘White men come to Egypt for their work. They are naturally disposed to make the best of where they work. They are not going to say there is nothing in Egypt for them, so they say the scenery is marvellous. And others believe them. But, believe me, mademoiselle, Egypt is an entirely artificial land. Europe can be exquisite. England is sacred to those who know her. Compared to Europe Egypt has nothing save the beauty that may be found in the disposition of hills and water and fields. What dreams can you find on an Egyptian hillside, or in an Egyptian cotton-field or in an Egyptian canal? You may find the fullest force of solitude, but it is objective, never subjective. You may admire it, but you cannot enter into it unless you choose to surrender yourself to it without condition.’

‘It looks orlright ter me,’ said Mrs Cornelius doubtfully. ‘That sunset larst night was a joy ter be’old.’

Professor Quelch nodded as if in agreement, then leaned forward to speak in an authoritative murmur. ‘The beauty of Egypt, Miss Cornish, depends upon illusion. The theatrical illusion of the fitting moment, the accident of disposition. You, of all people, surely understand the reasons how one can see beauty in anything that is wholly man-made. You must see what beauty you can in Egypt and be thankful for it. My father, the Reverend Quelch of Sevenoaks, although he never visited Egypt, wrote an excellent book on Islamic architecture in which he pointed out the flaws and fallacies of such buildings, showing how the infirmities of the Moorish arch, for instance, reflect the moral sand, as it were, on which Islam itself is built.’

Esmé and Mrs Cornelius were growing visibly bored with Quelch’s idiosyncratic judgements. We had as yet seen nothing to support his arguments, but one doubtless had to live in Egypt a number of years before one understood him. He was, he said, an author himself. He had written on the subject of Egypt and been published in England. I asked him for titles. He was modest. He said he used a pseudonym. He had also been published by several Cairo firms and felt he had contributed substantially to the subject of aesthetics. Mrs Cornelius, challenged by this one gesture of discretion, insisted that he tell her under which name he published. Eventually, his entire angular face growing a deep and alarming red, he admitted that his best-known nom-de-plume was ‘René France’. He admitted his feeling that such a name gave authority to pronouncements which ‘Quelch’ did not. We approved his choice and told him that we would look out for his books the moment we arrived in Cairo. At this, he said he would be glad to help us obtain copies. He was sure he could get any title we wanted at a substantial trade discount.

Esmé remarked in French that the professor was clearly no romantic. He answered with a shrug.

‘I assure you, mademoiselle, that you will find the beauty of Egypt brille par son absence. Primarily it is the invention of the last century’s more sensational painters, exploiting our European greed for the exotic.’

These were sentiments unacceptable to almost any woman and to the majority of men. We had come to Egypt to film the exotic and to make an art of it. We did not wish to hear Professor Quelch’s cynical assessment of a country he admittedly knew very well. I did my best to change the subject. Even at that age I understood the plurality of human nature and how so many apparently conflicting views can exist quite cheerfully in one individual. Thus it is unjust to make immediate judgements upon one’s fellows. I am uneasy with the way youngsters these days so readily condemn or praise people they have never met, as if they were their own family. I have learned to bide my time. I judge people not by their opinions or how they present themselves, but by their actions. Finally, the only truth is in action, when they understand how their actions have effect. I judge by how they work to understand and control their actions, how careful they are not to do major harm to others. If all they have learned in life is how to justify those actions, no matter how subtly, then I grow quickly irritated with their company. The world is a dull enough place, these days, without having to listen to an old fraud inventing the reasons he was morally obliged to steal some other old fraud’s chickens. Circulus in probando as one of the Quelches would say. Iz doz mikh? Ikh farshtey. Ikh red nit keyn ‘philosophiespielen’.

‘What well-ordered streets Alexandria has.’ I nodded towards the suburbs.

‘As artificial as the rest of Egypt,’ Quelch maintained relentlessly and waved with contempt towards the vivid David Roberts postcards which Esmé had purchased at the hotel and which she now presented as proof against his argument. ‘Exactly what I have said. Those colours were never so vivid, those ruins never so artfully re-arranged. Roberts was out here for a year. Before he came he had discovered that a career could be made from a special subject. Thus he lived for the rest of his life on sketches he had made in his youth. Even at the time those sketches were exaggerated, fanciful. If that is the Egypt you want, p’tite ma’mselle, no doubt your rose-coloured glasses will provide it. But do not be disappointed if the grandeur of Roberts’s fantasy is not quite matched by the squalor of the actuality.’

‘But that is only Cairo,’ I argued. ‘Further up-river it is less spoiled, perhaps?’

‘Less spoiled? Is an old harlot less spoiled because she services a handful fewer soldiers? Egypt, Herr Peters, has been spoiled by a succession of conquerors; by Bedouin savages, by Greeks, Romans and Jews, by Christians, pagan Arabs, Moslems, Turks, Italians, Frenchmen. And now the English, with their nostalgia for anything faded and valueless, are here to offer romantic overtures to the crone! Every passing footsoldier in history has left his urine and his initials somewhere on some proud Egyptian monument. Foreign dams have poisoned the Nile and infected the fellaheen, who can no longer work and so smoke hashish to help them forget their miseries. As in China, the British managed, in a matter of decades, to destroy Egypt’s last important resource: her hardy, cheerful working people. Now she must survive only because she provides a quick route to India for our Empire’s peace-keeper, good old Tommy Atkins.’

Mrs Cornelius chuckled. ‘Yore soundin’ more like a bloody bolshevik orl ther time, prof!’

‘My views are indeed somewhat radical,’ he agreed. ‘But I prefer to think of them as independently arrived at. I am not, I think, spouting mimicry, madam.’

‘Oh, yore orl right!’ she said, and held out her glass to Joseph for another cocktail. ‘I must say I’m glad ter be orf that effin’ boat. Know any songs, perfessor? Ower than ther Red Flag, that is?’

Normally this would have served to have broken any ice, changed the topic and got us all into a more relaxed mood, but Professor Quelch was resistant to my old friend’s social powers. He drew back in his seat and pursed those large thin lips under the promontory of his nose so that he began to resemble, in profile, one of the stranger birds said to wade in the up-river reeds.

Mrs Cornelius did not follow this line. For some reason she liked Quelch and wanted to see the best in him. She leaned forward and patted his knee. ‘Didn’t mean ter get up yer nostrils, prof. Go on wiv wot yer wos sayin’, abart the Imperialists an’ that.’

He responded with a small smile, his cheeks softening and sagging. ‘I am not attacking Imperialism, madam. Merely describing its realities. An Empire is not maintained by kind words and a fatherly manner, as the Boy’s Own Paper insists. It is maintained by force. Sometimes by terror. Usually only by the hint of terror. It’s rather like most marriages, in that respect.’

So much bitterness did he express in this last remark that Mrs Cornelius became instantly curious. Even Esmé looked up from her toys. But Mrs Cornelius knew enough not to pursue the matter immediately. I watched with fascination as she charmed and calmed him. With a mixture of flattery, wit and gesture, she brought the leathery skin to a sort of glossy glow, the nearest it had been in many years to the bloom of youth. Within half-an-hour he was trying to recall the words of It Reely Woz a Wery Pretty Garden. I was full of loving admiration at my friend’s ability to discover the best in people. Soon he began to speak with some lyricism about his childhood in Kent, his envy of his brothers, who lived so often in a world of their own, his loneliness at home, his enjoyment of school. He had been sent to some famous establishment on the coast not far from where he was born and from there had gone to Cambridge where, in the family tradition, he had read Classics. ‘I am an archaeologist by vocation,’ he told us with some pride, ‘not, as it were, by degree.’ Divinity, he said, had never attracted him.

Mrs Cornelius, asking him if he knew London, saw him pause and begin to fade. Some harsh memory, some unwanted recollection. Quickly, she brought him back to the sunshine again, to ask him what he thought of China and India, where he had gone shortly after leaving England for the last time. His dismissive answers were brief and witty. He had enjoyed his time with the bank in Macao, he said. The Portuguese were very easy to work with. He had been lucky, sharing quarters with a cultured Lisbonite enduring a spell in the family business before returning to the Portuguese capital and a desk he would never use. ‘Manuel is a celebrated poet now. But like so many people these days he involved himself in politics. A dangerous game in the modern world. Where politics was once a worthwhile occupation for gentlemen, even in England the professional politician now holds sway. It’s the death of democracy, of disinterested representation. Their only alternative is mob rule. One day soon London will be like Alexandria. And serve her right.’

Again that wave of wounded outrage bandaged by dismissive cynicism.

‘Are you sure you won’t ‘ave a drink, love,’ said Mrs Cornelius. ‘Maybe just a lemonade?’

Like an old, abandoned cat gradually being reminded of the pleasures of the fireside, of regular meals and a loving hand upon his fur, he allowed himself to be coaxed. Even I, watching this performance, felt bathed by the same warmth, embraced by the same intensity of interest emanating from Mrs Cornelius. She was an Earth goddess. She was Isis.

‘I began life as something of a Graecophile.’ The lemonade in his thin fist, Quelch folded himself like a stick-insect joint by joint back into his seat. ‘But Athens has become impossible since the War.’

‘It reelly ‘as, ‘asn’t it?’ Mrs Cornelius convinced us all that she had known Athens since the beginning of Time. She had visited the city once, I believe, with her Persian playboy.

‘And after all that terrible business around Lawrence. The scandal and so on. Well, it was hushed up, of course, but that didn’t stop people here talking. I tried to get a publisher interested. There are several who do my little pamphlets, and I wrote to Seeker in London, but apparently these days he is only interested in elegant fictions. They’re what pay, I suppose. Ecstatic texts by followers of Goethe and Freud. You know the sort of thing.’

‘Awful,’ she agreed.

Esmé was watching Mrs Cornelius in a new way, almost like a tennis-player watching a fellow sportswoman’s serve. I remained filled with disappointment that these two wonderful women could not be friends. It was not as if they competed for the same man! Esmé had me. Mrs Cornelius had Wolf Seaman, who currently cast the occasional gloomy glare along the carriage’s sun-dappled luxury as our train left Alexandria behind to begin the journey across the fields, marshes and canals of the peninsula, where wild birds were startled by our loco’s arrogant bark and old men straightened up from ancient wooden ploughs to display fleshless arms and toothless grins. I sympathised with the wretches doomed to such an existence, when even the advent of the Cairo Express was more interesting than any other event in their lives. Yet the success of our cinema was based on such people, all over the world. At last the illiterate mass possessed a great art form of its own! It is no wonder that the most prolific cinema industries in the world are based in Egypt, Hong Kong and India. And it has become a means of controlling us. Now the peasant has no incentive to read at all. He finds the titles merely diverting. That is why the tycoons and their stooges make so much of violent action being the natural expression for film. It is no more the ‘natural’ function of film than it is of the novel. We have made an aesthetic theory from the realities of commercial necessity and political chicanery. Now the new directors in Hollywood can explain in the language of academia why the husband is knifed, the wife raped and the villain hunted down and killed during a car chase. I have asked the Cornelius girl if the opposite of ‘free speech’ is ‘imprisoned speech’ - or perhaps ‘imprisoning speech’. It is the kind of speech used to justify and maintain opinions no longer of relevant use or moral value in the world. We imprison ourselves by means of words far more frequently than we free ourselves. Vi heyst dos? Ikh red nit keyn ‘popsprecht’. Tsidiz doz der rikhtiker pshat? I watch these TV programmes. Every night I have to listen to the English explaining why they are superior to everyone else in the world. Turkish television is not, I would guess, so different now.

I asked Esmé to show me her postcards, the little treasures she had bought for a few piastres from the various sellers of antiques manufactured in Pharaonic Birmingham and the Eleventh Dynasty’s factories along the Upper Ruhr. She had a little brass ibex, the bust of some nameless queen, a black cat of lacquered stone. She handled them with the delicacy and pleasure of some Egyptologist coming at last upon the treasures of Rameses Il and for her they clearly had at least the same value. Esmé’s simple enjoyment and Mrs Cornelius’s enthusiasm were bringing me a happiness I had not experienced for some time. I began to feel that America had restricted me, that I had forgotten the attractions and advantages of Europe and, now, the Middle East. Russia became a torture-chamber and a graveyard. The Comintern butchers struggled amongst themselves for Lenin’s mantle and spilled still more blood in the process. But at least there were parts of Europe, such as Italy, which were reviving, finding new idealism and hope, new strength to continue the work so many in those days knew to be our destiny. I do not say that I condone every one of Mussolini’s actions, but he was setting an example to the rest of Europe in the hope they might decide to follow. Other nations were sinking into fashionable despair, reading self-indulgent novels and watching introspective plays, writing music no one wished to hear, poetry no one could understand, painting pictures reflecting only the hideous turmoil of their uncertain souls. For me this lassitude was generally lacking in America. But that she lacked one thing did not mean she automatically possessed another. I had found vitality there, and optimism and political courage, I had found wealth and good friends, but I had forgotten what it was to live in a land where every tree and hill bore some reference to mankind’s urge to tame its own nature and the world around it. Then America was truly called the New World and it was a new coin struck in the currency of Hope. How valuable that currency might have become! Of course it did not happen. The coin of American idealism is worthless now. America became what I most feared. Washington is no longer the capital of the United States. New York rules the entire continent. Michob Ader need no longer fear immortality. Now he has the most powerful nation on Earth to comfort him. There Christ is conquered, yet elsewhere Christ is merely sleeping. He is worshipped and remembered by the Bolshevik’s enslaved millions. Christ is simply awaiting the moment of His return. They say the Second Coming is a thousand years late, but we shall now see it in the year 2000. Then I shall be a hundred years old or perhaps dead. How is it one Power pretends to testify for God and yet is increasingly brought under the rule of Satan, while the other claims it has abolished God, yet cannot destroy the love and the need of its people for Christ? Which, I ask any of you, is the strongest Church, the true Church? Could it, after all, be the first and oldest Church, the Byzantine Church, ever closest to the Source, to the origins of our history? I will let the Baptists and the Presbyterians explain how their Church has become a tool of Carthage while the Church of Greece remains the last great challenger to Satan’s persuasions. In 1926, of course, I had not returned to the Church and remained open-minded on this subject as well as on many others. My only certainty was in my own vocation, my need to help ease the suffering of all mankind by whatever means were available to me, whether through the miracle of engineering or through the exercise of my artistic gifts. Mrs Cornelius certainly recognised this in me, just as she recognised in Malcolm Quelch a cruelly tormented human being whose love of the world had been associated, perhaps, with the love of a certain woman. Some London beauty who had rejected him, or ruined him? This is what women can frequently see in a man that another man cannot. I was to be grateful, always, for the insights of women. If they made my life both harder and easier they always enriched it. I cannot always understand the arguments of the feminists. Like them, I love women. I admire women. I believe women have many virtues which men do not, many qualities which men cannot ever possess. On innumerable occasions they have been both a comfort and an inspiration to me. Sometimes, it is true, a woman can be a burden or a nuisance, perhaps a little bit of a strain, when she wants attention at a time you cannot give it. Does that make me an enslaver of women? A monster? I hope not. I was raised to respect and honour women. Yet this somehow makes me worse than some hippy journalist who looks like an extra from The Squaw Man carrying around on his arm some ‘chick’ who looks herself like the original squaw! This is progress? I saw a great deal of similar progress in Cairo.

The luncheon tables were raised. We passed through flat, grey country which certainly fulfilled all Professor Quelch’s remarks about the dullness of Egypt. The fields were relieved by a few oxen, the occasional donkey and its driver, some brown children and women bent over their crops, a thatched hut or two and sometimes a mud village. More rarely were the modern structures of authority to be seen, for the British maintained the policy which the police today call ‘low-profile’. They were already promising the natives full autonomy and self-government within the Commonwealth. Perhaps they had to. The War had depleted their manpower. It was becoming considerably more expensive to maintain an empire.

‘We’ve gone from gunboat diplomacy to revolver diplomacy in a couple of generations.’ Malcolm Quelch demonstrated how to fill the local pitta bread with foul and take it into one’s mouth. ‘Soon all we’ll have is chocolate-box diplomacy! And we all know how far that gets you, dearie!’

Mrs Cornelius lifted the dripping pitta up to her lovely mouth. Her eyes gave him her full attention. ‘A nice box of chocolates always worked with me,’ she said. Her mouth closed over the hors d’oeuvre, some of which dripped down her pink chin. She dabbed at it with a dainty finger. ‘But I suppose you’d fink me a bit old-fashioned.’ She sucked her finger.

In another Malcolm Quelch’s gesture might have been courtly, but the professor’s muscles were unused to so much spontaneity and his bewildered spasm jerked his glass of lemonade solidly into his lap. As his white trousers spread with yellow, he slowly cranked fastidious hands to Heaven. ‘Ugh!’

‘Oh, blimey!’ Mrs Cornelius was at once ready with her napkin. ‘Pore fing! Don’t worry. It’s not a tragedy.’

Malcolm Quelch did not respond to her. Instead, arms still in an attitude of surrender, he stared hopelessly down into his water-logged crotch, where pieces of ice glinted and winked.

Then, with the air of a man who has received some unequivocal signal from an unsympathetic God, Quelch fell back with a resigned sigh as Mrs Cornelius dabbed genteelly at his lap.