Jerusalem Commands

EIGHTEEN

LUXOR IS DOMINATED by her two greatest monuments. The dreaming ruins of Karnak and the confident edifice of the Winter Palace Hotel dwarf a miscellany of native houses, official buildings and hovels, the modern village. The hotel is the magnificent pride of all Englishmen and the envy of every other race; she is fully worthy of the ancient city. A huge white building, her wide, winding twin stairways to the long outer terrace dominate the river-front and look directly across to distant Theban mountains. From her flowery balconies you can see ancient temples, the dim battlements of Medinet Habu and the twin colossi who are all that remain of the lost temple of Amenhotep. Then come the dusty terraces of Deir el Bahari. Between these, on the cliff-side, is a curving honeycomb of nobles’ tombs. Then the great shoulder of the hill hides the Valley of the Kings, beyond which is the wide, unwelcoming desert and the hostile borderlands where wild Bedouin still rove and raid.

The hotel’s great garden faces east. One can almost forget Egypt, taking one’s meals in the company of other upper-class Europeans. With its imported shrubs and its tall walls, the Winter Palace is magically self-contained. All one sees of Luxor are the far-off eastern hills, blue and translucent as chalcedony in the morning light. The gardens boast every kind of familiar English flower - roses, carnations, pansies, irises, geraniums surrounded by smooth green lawns as sweet-smelling as any English cricket pitch, constantly tended by impeccably uniformed gardeners.

‘Luxor is the soul of Egypt,’ Malcolm Quelch insists. We sip our afternoon Darjeeling. (I had slammed the broken door swiftly that night but was convinced he had in that instant seen us both. He had chosen to pretend amnesia, perhaps to save us all embarrassment. Save for a single passing reference to his two years of medical training with the army and his willingness to use his skills to help any native who might be in discomfort, he did not attempt to explain the affair. Indirectly, I had let him know I was a man of the world and that Esmé had no notion of the world at all.) ‘Karnak is perfectly fitted for a great city, don’t you think? On the east we have the long stretch of rich plain, a shadowy changing green reaching to the very foot of the hills! To the west we have that wonderful view of the western plain. Then, between east and west is our sinuous Nile!’

With Esmé I had already taken to renting a kalash to explore the vicinity. We had trotted beside fair fields, dotted with palm thickets, through hills which rose low to the south before suddenly towering, knife-edged, to the Red Mountain -that huge and fantastic outcrop, scarred white as Odysseus’s old wound by a pathway descending from the ridge. ‘That mountain is as the ghost of the greatness of Thebes,’ declared Quelch, drawing closer, ‘as a liss of the Earth-gods, as a thunder-cloud advancing out of an open sky! Whether it be close upon you, grim, brown-red, hot, arid, impenetrable, rugged against all time - or far away, a mass of shimmering rose with paths of faint blue shadow in the early morning! And it is always immense and immediate, my dear friends, upon all things and all men!’

He has become emphatically lyrical since we disembarked. Far from avoiding Esmé or myself, he takes to seeking us out, as if needing to impose upon that graphic moment a different image of himself which we can respect and which might even erase all memory of it. His manner is more urbane, and increasingly avuncular. ‘No Ptolemy, no Roman, no Frenchman ever built anything as magnificent and practical as this hotel,’ continues Quelch as I begin to consider escape. ‘Monsieur Pierre Loti, in that peevish and decadent epitome of Anglophobia which he entitled The Death of Philae, murmurs fretfully against this hotel, you know. But don’t you find it has a fine presence? It dwarfs the modern village to forgetfulness. That alone is surely a valuable quality? I have said all this in my book. I was flattered to receive a personal letter from Thomas Cook’s and, before the War, could sign for anything I pleased at the bar or in the restaurant. The War lowered the tone of so much. What sort of Will was it that drove us to such terrible self-destruction?’

I admit it is a question I often ask. I hope to answer it through one of the photoplays I will write for our new company. The Folly would be set in a French garden invaded by soldiers of every country. Quelch thought that Sir Ranalf Steeton would leap at the idea - ‘especially if you include some love-interest. A young lady violated by the Boche, for instance.’

I intended my film to be above mere nationalism and felt Sir Ranalf must appreciate the universal appeal of my idea. He was after all dedicated to making pictures with an international flavour. He had affirmed this when he arrived on the train from Cairo, accompanied by three servants and a large amount of luggage. He had taken almost half a floor in the Winter Palace. Some of the rooms were for our film-making purposes, but I had the impression that servants, rather than Sir Ranalf, had been forced into more cramped accommodation.

Most of us were not, in fact, staying there, but retained our rooms on the moored boat, dining by special arrangement at the hotel. A modest account was kept in the company name and we received envelopes of cash for small transactions, but few of us felt any urge to buy souvenirs so had very few immediate needs. Accounts opened in our names by Sir Ranalf in the United Egyptian Bank received the bulk of our fees.

‘When the May blooms red ‘midst the green of the glade and the white May spreads and the white flowers fade, I shall recall our trysting plait, and seek the heart of the hawthorn’s stem to find our winding brands again,’ quoted Quelch by way of a companionable reference to a favourite Wheldrake, Love in the Dale, and with a gesture both romantic and mechanical rose to greet Mrs Cornelius who strode towards us through the garden followed by four little boys in bleached linen, their heads piled with what were evidently her purchases. ‘Good heavens, Mrs Cornelius! Have you a private income? Where on earth did you come by the cash? Or is it all on credit?’

‘Not me, perfessor!’ She laughed without rancour. ‘It’s not ser diffrent ‘ere from Petticoat Lane. Ain’t yer ‘eard o’ the baiter system? I got the ‘ole bloody lot fer a silk petticoat that wos a size too small fer me, an’ an ‘at that wos a size too big. Some local lady’s gonna look ther pride o’ the ‘arem ternight!’ And, passing us with a wink, she gave the boys kindly instructions in simple Arabic.

Quelch at least pretended to be amused. I understood that he seemed at his easiest when actually at his most anxious. ‘Fas est etab hoste doceri, as Ovid tells us. I must see what unwanted articles I have in my own wardrobe. Perhaps one of the native sheikhs would care for a pair of excellent galoshes?’

I did not in those days understand ‘galoshes’ and he was irritated by my query. ‘Actually,’ he continued with a sudden change of mood, ‘I suppose it’s a bit infra dig for a white man to bargain with the natives in that way.’

I said I saw no harm in it.

‘Well, perhaps just for the British. A foreigner, after all. . . A Russian.’ His smile threatened to disappear into his head. ‘A sort of neutral. No offence. The only English people who do that sort of thing in Cairo are the drunkards, the worn-out whores and the deserters. And, of course,’ he lowered his voice, ‘the nouveau-riche touristas.’

Until then I had not cared about my lack of spending money but, since Cook’s were unable to provide us with suitable cheques for our accounts in Port Said, I now saw a way to obtaining a few souvenirs. In our business transactions Quelch had been generous in his acceptance of IOUs from us all, and knew he would be repaid as soon as we returned to Cairo. In spite of his warnings about ‘face’ I nonetheless determined to find some more or less honest antiquarian and barter perhaps some of my jade and amber cigarette-holders for some mementos. I suspected Quelch’s own willingness to extend credit had much to do with wishing to ingratiate himself with us and gain a permanent situation in our company. Thus he made himself especially agreeable with me. I guessed he feared his secret would become generally known, so he seemed eager to be of help. I had in mind an Egyptian collar for my little girl and an elegant statue of Anubis, the jackal. Quelch expressed considerable approval of my taste but was pessimistic as to my chances of finding any original, though new tombs were always being sought by those who resented the Egyptian Society’s imperialist monopoly on antiquities. ‘Egypt exists because others honour her dead,’ he reflected. ‘Indeed, Egyptians honour only death. Nothing else is sacred to them. All they have left to sell is the contents of their tombs, and the manufactured replicas they bury for a year or so to give them the authentic suggestion of the Pit. What a peculiar heritage, Mr Peters! Do all old empires come to this? Will Russia and Britain one day have nothing to sell the world but their graveyards, their statues and their museums?’

I found his remarks fatuous at the time. The Bolsheviks’ current encouragement of the package tour and the sightseeing bus has vindicated Quelch in this at least, while it is obvious whenever I look out of my window how readily the hub of the British Empire has degenerated into a nation of shrieking street-arabs hawking the synthetic ikons of their exhausted glory.

Fifty years ago I was like any tourist. I wanted a good-quality souvenir of my visit. True, the film itself would of course ultimately be the best memento, but I itched to do a little bargaining. I remembered I had also accumulated a large variety of silk ties and handkerchiefs in the latest ‘jazz’ styles. I returned to where the Nil Atari was moored a little west of the hotel’s quay, to find the tradeable haberdashery and smokers’ accessories in my stowage. I then went back to the corniche, walking slowly down to the souk clustered at the very bases of Karnak’s ancient pillars, where a mosque had grown almost organically from ruins whose stones were used in its own nativity. This blend of architecture and scenery, the miscellaneous crowd representing a host of trades, professions and costumes, a glimpse of almost four thousand years of mankind’s history, was perhaps a symbol, as Quelch had implied, of every imperial fate. It was oddly sweet to look upon temples where people had worshipped the living Osiris, Amon, Set and Isis, in the blind faith of absolute belief. All manner of other momentary favourites, local deities, animals and the great Ra, were alive beneath Egypt’s eternal sun, the true source of her Glory. I looked at Coptic churches carved from the ruins of chapels originally dedicated to Horus and Sekhmet. Those early Christians believed they put the holy mark of God on the works of Satan. The warlike followers of Mohammed, who had next imposed their grim morality upon these buildings, hacked at the wholesome signs of gender and fertility until they became obscene. I inhaled the smell of the desert, the water, the palms, the spices, fabrics and aromatic woods; the less pleasant smells of human bodies and sewage. I would look suddenly into green or blue eyes staring from faces which might have belonged to hawkers or scribes or field-hands of the Eleventh Dynasty. I absorbed by touch and taste and scent, through my eyes and ears, the layered centuries of a capital which had ruled the mightiest empire of the ancient world. I did this as a welcome stranger at whom everyone smiled and offered their goods. I plunged into the embracing crowd as I might plunge into the legendary Pool of Time. This last was, for me at least, the sweetest of Luxor’s temptations.

Thrusting through narrow lanes of stalls and chattering salesmen, whose dark, sardonic eyes regarded me with a thousand separate calculations or were as frankly curious as their veiled women, hanging over balconies which perched crazily atop awnings, sometimes leaning to form archways for muddy alleys paved with old coffee-cans and excavated uneven stones sticking like hags’ teeth from the dirt to snag a camel’s hoof or trip a running child, I was at once absorbed. I lost sense of passing time. I grew increasingly fascinated, not with the variety of goods (save for the local foodstuffs they issued largely from the same rather unvaried cornucopia producing manufactured antiquities and poorly-printed pornography) but by the lack of urgency with which these people conducted their business. They say the Arab has nothing to spend but time. But that glib phrase scarcely described the value these people placed on the formalities and pleasures of conversation and barter. In Odessa’s Slobodka, too, there were important rituals involved in the buying, selling and trading of goods and services: this often in lieu of any other entertainment. Bargaining was clearly of greater importance to Luxor’s citizens than profit and doubtless it had been the same to her founders. Locally, certain histrionic gifts were much appreciated, highly applauded and well rewarded. The better a merchant’s pantomime of poverty, despair and sheer frustration with another’s stupidity, the more he was patronised. A culture which denies its people so many casual pleasures has created pleasure - even art - from the ordinary functions of daily life. Here the aesthetics of argument are displayed and criticised in the little cafes where men drink tea, or coffee, or smoke from the communal ‘hookah’ every proprietor provides. They comment on matters of the day - perhaps observing a group of drunken English soldiers shouldering their way through the mobs, shouting obscenities as they go, or making some amused comment upon the baffled crocodile of tourists brought to taste the realities of modern life and make trembling purchases at shops and stalls already come to some previous arrangement with their particular dragoman. The more refined people wear pale European suits and tarbooshes and read copies of The Egyptian Gazette or La Vie Parisienne as they sit in little chairs outside their premises filled with superb objects identical to those made thousands of years ago, carved by hands through which flows the blood of the original artists. There were people for sale in there, moreover, creatures of every age and trained in every humiliation. Slavery, when not an open part of a society, when it is made shameful and criminal and secret, becomes a dark thing. I heard this argument many times in the Muslim world and appreciated its logic, but I could not approve. The men in the souk’s shadows whisper to me, displaying an intimate knowledge of my desires. They offer me all they know to be forbidden. But I push them away. They offer me disease and death, I say. They offer me shame. Shuft, effendi. Shuft, shuft, effendi. Murhuuba, aiwa? They touched me; they grinned and made smacking noises with their lips. They made little gasping sounds and they winked and flirted. This was not what I had come for, I told them. La, la! U’al! Imshi! Imshi! But they were relentless. They had an idea that a lone European only came to the souk seeking sexual digression. While I did not find this especially offensive, I grew impatient with their persistence. Attempting to avoid a rouged boy, I found myself in a little cul-de-sac formed by three tall houses, their walls covered with awnings shadowing stalls selling fish over which black masses of flies crawled like a heaving canopy. I turned to seek a way out, pushing through the youths and little boys whose hands clutched at my arms, their opportunist nails digging into my flesh. Behind me, as if following me, I saw a tall European, wearing a rich gelabea and a kefta. His deeply tanned face was alight with laughter at my plight. His teeth were white, as startling as his eyes and as familiar as his hands which now quickly pulled the veil about his lower features before he wheeled about. I was still in a state of profound shock. I saw him move swiftly to merge with the crowd. Almost sick with disbelief I found the use of my limbs and paid no attention to the squealing children who still picked at my clothing and my person.

‘Kolya!’ I cried at last, stumbling forward. ‘Kolya!’

It was none other than my oldest and closest friend, my teacher, my exemplar! Shura had said he was in Egypt, on a mission for his new employer. Why had he followed me? Certainly he had recognised me. There was therefore some good reason why he did not wish me to know him. He could easily be working not for Stavisky at all but for a foreign government.

The little boys were brushed aside, the begging girls smacked back as with sudden unthinking energy I continued in hasty pursuit of my friend. I did not consider at that moment his good reasons for not wishing to meet. Separation from Kolya had been an agony I had feared to admit and now here was a chance to be free of it. This friend and evangelist of my youth had been, in so many ways, the creator of my adult self. I had despaired ever to experience again his languid, aristocratic ambience, his perfect poise and diction, his amusement with the world and all its works! I longed to know why he was separated from his wife, that bloodless Frenchwoman who, I suspect, had been behind my own undoing. How long was he in Egypt? Where and when would it be possible to meet? Of course he would not be as eager to see me, but I never doubted his affection, perhaps even his love, for me. I was certain I had seen pleasure in his eyes for a small instant. I could still see the vivid gelabea ahead until, like a conjurer dismissing an illusion, he had swirled himself into the agitated body of the crowd and vanished. The truth of Professor Quelch’s assertion was becoming rapidly apparent. Egypt was indeed a land of illusion and hallucination; she depended on both for her survival. Yet that moment’s recognition had been no insubstantial mirage. Even with its deep tan, his handsome face could not be mistaken. I knew every line of it and remembered every gesture, every muscle, every tiny movement of his body. Forcing my way on, careless of all protests, I looked desperately for the blue and gold gelabea, the dark blue headdress, but they had vanished. I might as well pursue a genie on the desert wind as hope to find my friend in any of the surrounding warrens. My next desperate thought was to try the cafes fringing the souk. These were frequented chiefly by Europeans but I could find neither a tall ‘Arab’ nor Count Nikolai Petroff in more conventional dress. My next thought was to try the hotels, starting with the Winter Palace, the most likely. I called for a child, offering it a coin to lead me out of the maze. Only then did I realise that my little bag of ties and cigarette-holders had gone. The boy was an honest guide and I was soon in the lobby of the Winter Palace. I searched every corner, before dashing into the garden as tea was being served. I could not find Kolya but Mrs Cornelius and Esmé, in the shade of a large palm, were sharing a glittering table and a pot of Earl Grey. It was a pleasure to see them comrades at last and I wanted to tell Mrs Cornelius my splendid news yet hesitated to interrupt the start of a greater understanding between the two women. So, suppressing my natural eagerness, I passed discreetly behind them and, while I had not planned to eavesdrop, overheard a fragment of conversation.

‘ ‘E’d pull ‘is socks off fer ya any time you wos ter say,’ Mrs Cornelius declared. ‘Them blokes is orlways a bit weird, though. Take my word for it. It’s the schools. I’ll admit, ‘e makes me shudder orl over. Me ol’ mum warned me abart ‘em. Chilly-arses, she corled ‘em. Wot ever they wos doin’ to ycr, she reckoned, their bums never got warm.’

‘Sir Ranalf is an English gentleman, I think.’ Esmé had not entirely caught Mrs Cornelius’s drift. ‘He is a wealthy man. Of course I do not find him attractive, but Maxim has said one must be agreeable.’

‘Indeed, that is true, little sweetheart.’ I leaned to kiss my startled little girl. ‘Is there a point, Mrs Cornelius, to alienating the man upon whom all our fortunes now depend? We must surely be diplomatic.’

‘There’s a diffrence, in my opinion, between diplomacy an’ total surrendah.’ She shrugged, dismissing the topic.

I was not at that point especially interested in these social nuances. ‘I have astonishing news, Mrs Cornelius! I have seen my old friend - our old friend, Esmé - Count Nikolai Petroff!’

‘Kolya!’ Esmé’s eyes grew large first with delight and then, I thought, with alarm. She frowned. ‘Why is he here? With Sir Ranalf?’

‘He has nothing to do with Sir Ranalf. Shura mentioned his business in Cairo. I told you.’

‘He was not in Tripoli?’

‘No - in Alexandria. And now in Luxor. I will ask at the desk to see if he is staying here. Won’t it be marvellous if he is!’

Esmé seemed confused and before she could reply burst suddenly into smiles at someone else’s approach from behind me. ‘Sir Ranalf! How pleasant!’

‘My dear! My dears! My good companions! How perfectly wonderful to find you all together! My three stars! I have come to ask a favour.’ The weighty baronet paused to mop beneath his hat.

Mrs Cornelius withdrew into a cloud of perfumed pink silk, her cloche casting a shadow, like a veil, across her face until only her narrowed eyes were faintly distinguishable. Seemingly oblivious of her dislike Sir Ranalf again raised his panama, put away his handkerchief, kissed their fingers and clapped me upon my shoulder. For my part, I was impatient to leave, to discover Kolya’s whereabouts. ‘I have just come from our good Director’s company.’ Sir Ranalf waved a chubby hand to indicate how he had been communing with the somewhat difficult genius. ‘And we are to begin shooting tomorrow in the Valley of the Kings. Which means we must all be up by five in the morning and, I fear, on our way by six.’

‘For the light, I suppose,’ said Esmé with a miserable gasp.

‘My tender bud - for the heat! It will be unbearable by ten. Only the natives work after lunch. The light? The light is always perfect. Thanks to our influential friends we have received special permission to film in the Valley and its surrounds. This means we will not be troubled by random tourists. Some of my business partners in town have been of considerable help to us.’

Until now we had been unaware of Sir Ranalf’s partners, but were not particularly surprised to hear of them. His understanding of the politics and customs of this country was considerable and no doubt he had diplomatically included some local members of the Egyptian Society on his board, so ensuring us a carte blanche amongst the monuments. Our affairs were in the hands of a clever and practical man who, for all his dandyism and his affectation, clearly had a cool brain. I saw him as one of those people who like to present a misleading idea of themselves to the world. Mrs Cornelius, after all, supplied no evidence for her prejudice against him and I had not yet learned how much to respect her judgement. Today, I would follow it without question. Then, I was merely uncomfortable when she sniffed at Sir Ranalf’s statement that he was in a dilemma for the evening. He needed, he said, a female escort, someone to impress his partners with her wit, beauty and talent. His smile upon my little girl was the smile of a good-hearted patriarch. ‘We have to be up early tomorrow, of course, so the night would not go on for very long.’ He turned humorously pleading eyes to me. ‘I would bring her back before midnight, good Sir Max, I promise. She would be such an asset! She could double our budget.’

My mind upon Kolya, I was only too pleased to be relieved of my sweetheart’s company. After all, it might take me all evening to find Kolya.

‘It would make such a wonderful impression, if I could introduce my friends to our leading lady.’ He bowed. This brought Mrs Cornelius to her feet with a disgusted snort to rival a camel’s. ‘I think I’ll go back ter me cabin an’ git art o’ these cloves,’ she said. ‘It’s really gettin’ a bit niffy, orl in orl, doncha fink, Ivan?’

I wished I had given her more support, but I was in her wake, heading for the reception desk, as she moved with dignified fury towards the electric lift. I understood her fury. She, not Esmé, was the featured star. Now she saw she had lost her last chance to appear in a romance with Barrymore, Gilbert or Valentino. Doubtless because of confusing messages from Goldfish, Sir Ranalf seemed a little unclear about the man’s identity. Irené Gay’s part would be nothing like as large as Gloria Cornish’s. While I had every sympathy for Mrs Cornelius, my attention was still upon my missing comrade and I did not want to lose my momentum. By the time the receptionist was able to check the register for me and tell me with fulsome regret that Prince Petroff was not yet with the Winter Palace, Mrs Cornelius was gone. I turned back to ask where a gentleman might otherwise stay and after a pause it was suggested I try the Karnak or, failing that, perhaps the Grand.

Luxor is not a large town and consists primarily of her ruins and her tourist establishments. Most of the good hotels were close to one another along the corniche and it took no more than half-an-hour to enquire if they had Kolya as a guest. Soon it became clear that even if he were staying in Luxor, my old comrade was not registered under his own name. It then occurred to me he might well be staying with one of the British officials so I set off for the Consulate. This proved to be a fairly unremarkable house surrounded by a high wall. When I asked at the gate for the Consul, I was told he would not be available until the next day. When I asked if they had any news of a Count Nikolai Petroff the concierge scratched his head and let his jaw hang in a pantomime of idiocy which was the local way of bringing a line of enquiry to a halt. I told him I could not come back tomorrow morning, that I would be working, but this failed to impress him. Eventually I returned to the centre of the town to ask after my friend at the smaller pensions until an English police sergeant, who had been chatting with the Greek proprietor of a small rooming-house behind the Telegraph Office, had a joke with me about looking for a Russian spy, at which point I realised I was in danger of betraying my friend. I decided instead to seek Sir Ranalf Steeton’s help and refrained from visiting every steamboat moored at the various quays along the corniche. By now it was dark and most of the shops had closed. There was some sort of curfew the British insisted upon, although the cafes and more respectable places were allowed to remain open, their candle-lanterns and oil-lamps casting a wonderful glow across the little alleys and cobbled squares. A sort of lazy tranquillity settled upon the town and by ten o’clock the tourists were gone and the only white faces belonged to a few soldiers on leave. The cafes remained full of local men and I chose one of the cleanest whose view of the street went down as far as the corniche and the green glow of the river. I ordered coffee of the thick, sweet Turkish type, and forced myself to relax, to watch. But Kolya still did not pass by. Reluctant to get into conversation, I was nonetheless eventually joined by two fluent Egyptian English-speakers, in well-cut suits and neat tarbooshes. They were from Alexandria, with business in Aswan, and had a scheme to reproduce the ruins of Luxor in a special park in Cairo, ‘for those tourists without the time to go up the Nile’. This scheme has been initiated since in Italy and Greece, but the Egyptian Government, such as it was, never displayed much initiative in encouraging local enterprise. They preferred merely to talk, to engage in empty rhetoric blaming all their ills on the British as earlier they had blamed the Turks. Suez was the last attempt of a British government to follow the urges of idealism rather than expediency, but the Egyptian had to extend the blame to a more general conspiracy of ‘imperialists’. Their flirtations with the Bolsheviks were, I suppose, inevitable. But these people make and break alliances faster than a Borgia prince - faster, indeed, than Adolf Hitler, whose example they all once sought to follow. That was never a quality of Hitler’s I admired.

These well-bred natives assured me they were more interested in public works than personal power, yet to join the Wafd you had to be interested in power. ‘Once they have challenged the British successfully, they will challenge the King and his ministers and eventually set up their own dynasty. Confrontation is all they understand. We need more politicians of the English sort, whose chief interest is in public hygiene, street lighting and decent burial for the poor. Dull fellows, perhaps, but usually effective, what?’ This was Mr Ahmed Mustafa. With his companion, Mr Mahareb Todrus, he had spent two years in England - ‘for languages and business’. They believed themselves very decently treated, they said, and were gratified to discover that most English people of the better class could easily distinguish an Egyptian from a nigger. They were fortunate in that they were well-connected. Their uncle Yussef was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace and Ten Downing Street and, of course, this gave them an entree into the very best Belgravian society. ‘Trade is a great demolisher of the class system, don’t you think?’

What, they asked, was my own business in Luxor? It was twofold, I said. I was here to meet a friend, a tall Slavic gentleman, perhaps given to Arab dress. I was a writer and actor with a film company beginning work here tomorrow. They were impressed. ‘Is it a thriller? Do you know Sexton Blake?’ They already knew Steeton’s name and were flattered to have the ear of someone like myself who could perhaps advise them on their own rather insignificant projects. They supposed they too might also be considered a branch of the theatrical profession. I said I would be happy to help them on some other occasion. My priority, that evening, however, was to find my friend. At this these two good-hearted souls determined to help me. Realising the advantage of companions who could speak fluent English, Arabic and perhaps certain local dialects, I accepted, although it was already beginning to nag at my conscience that Kolya might have a reason for not wishing to be seen by me. As we departed the first of several bars, I told my acquaintances that it would probably be best if we left our quest for another time, but they were by now insistent. With that attitude of daring only Muslims possess when reaching a hand towards alcohol, they had downed several glasses of the local brandy. It occurred to me, even then, that no other religion so clearly reflects the prejudices of a single neurotic semi-barbaric bigot. One only achieves ‘submission’, it appears, by means of ‘repression’. Or is submission what they secretly seek, all of them, by means of challenge and confrontation, like a sado-masochistic marriage? Islam is the religion of a people fundamentally addicted to defeat. And we all know how dangerous such a religion is when a well-meaning power makes the gestures of compromise rather than threat. I have written to the Foreign Office about this. The world would be a very different place today if France and Britain had held to their original plans over Suez. The fellaheen do not much notice the faces within the uniforms.

The drunker my native comrades became, the darker and danker the bars they sought out. I think they were trying to find a particular kind of brothel, but it was not clear to me what they wanted. They assured me, however, that Count Petroff was bound to be in such a place. Europeans, in particular, liked these establishments. People, they said, would be less cautious of me if I asked its location. They themselves might be mistaken for officials. The bar was never discovered. It was almost dawn when I came suddenly to my senses. I had not only been stupid but selfish in spreading Kolya’s name all over Luxor. My companions were by now completely incoherent and although I knew we were somewhere on the outskirts of the town, it should not be hard to get back to the corniche and the Winter Palace. If necessary I would stop the nearest kalash. Those horse-drawn taxis are still, I hear, a basis of Egyptian city-life. The streets were lit only by the faint pearl of the approaching dawn, and chiefly populated by dogs and cats who emerged every night in bestial pantomime of the human day. I could imagine them bickering and bartering and howling over some rotten scrap, some fly-fouled morsel in imitation of rituals their masters performed over a piece of fresh-cast junk or some wretched donkey splattered in mud to disguise its disease. Yet these night-time denizens were altogether better-mannered and none tried to bar my way. At length, I recognised the spire of a mosque in the sky ahead. I could not be far from the Temple of Luxor where I could find my way back to the hotel. Perhaps Kolya was hiding in a Moslem musrum. What deep disguise had my friend adopted so that he could pass at will into forbidden sanctuaries of the Faithful? I was growing sleepy and my eyes were blurred. The various concoctions imbibed with my Egyptian friends were taking their toll. My legs were weak and inclined to directions of their own, but my brain was still in control and I set a determined course for the mosque, even scaling a high wall in order to keep my bearings rather than go round it and risk losing sight of the only building I recognised. I got over the wall with ease and found myself in a cubist moonscape. As the dawn turned to pale blue I saw that the crazy angles were formed by blocks of masonry left by everyone who had ever systematically destroyed the place in search of building materials, treasure, or immortal glory. As I stumbled over the blocks I made out the taller pillars of the temple itself and stepped, I thought, on firm ground to trip instead and fall forward with a loud cry of pained surprise onto a broken pillar lying where Time or some passing vandal had left it. Echoed through the temple, my cry was transmogrified into a strange, almost sweet note of mingled innocence and grief, as if a child mourned its imminent death. This version of my own voice sent a terrifying shudder through me. My heart began to beat rapidly as panic came, and I scrambled to my feet and ran up a long avenue of shadowy sphinxes towards a gate which I vaulted while a drowsy nightwatchman shouted after me in outraged Arabic. The dawn was now shading to pink across the river and the palms grew from black to the deepest green while birdsong surged from the town’s every cranny. The water grew paler and richer, its colours seen through a subtle mist where waterbirds hunted and shouted in the stillness, where two or three white sails already bent to the faintest of cool breezes. The steps of the Winter Palace were transformed to some dream of ancient wonder. I heard the muezzin begin the calling of the first prayer. I would come to know it by heart. Allah akhbar, Allah akhbar. Ash’had an la ilah ilia ‘llah we-Muhammad rasul Allah. Ash’had an la ilah ilia ‘llah we-Muhammad rasul Allah. Hay’y ila s’salat hay’y ila l-felah. Hay’y ila s’salat hay’y ila l’felah. Es-salat kher min en-num. Es-salat kher min en-num. Allah akhbar. Allah akhbar. La ‘llah ilia ‘llah. Prayer is better than sleep. There is no god but God. I might have argued with the first sentiment as I entered the hotel in time to see all my colleagues, even Esmé, arrived and ready to take their breakfast. Reminded of my professional duties, I had time to return to the boat, bathe, change my clothes, equip myself with plenty of Professor Quelch’s finest cocaine, return at some speed to the hotel and even take a cup of coffee and a piece of toast before we all departed, in high excitement, for the ferry which awaited us at the hotel’s private quay.

As we selected places on the polished oak bench seats under the launch’s awning, Esmé came to settle her warm little body against mine. She was at her sweetest this morning and did much to dispel my mood of fatalistic gloom at the dawning realisation that I was to begin work in enormous heat having failed to get even a moment’s sleep. ‘I hope you did not miss me, darling,’ she said. I felt a pang of guilt. I assured her that, of course, I longed for her, but sometimes duty took precedence over personal needs. She frowned for a moment before she shrugged and began to sing a little song she had learned in Paris. For some reason this caused Mrs Cornelius to raise her eyebrows as she nodded good-morning to us on her way to the back of the boat where, she said, she could stretch out a bit and get the best of the morning sun before it threatened to touch her. The sun, in those days, was a serious threat to the complexion. It is only in recent years, with the rise of the Beach Bunny in a mongrelised Los Angeles, that the Tan has become a sign of health, wealth and sexual prowess. I wonder why the Americans got rid of the Mexicans in the first place when they now spend their leisure trying to make themselves look indistinguishable from them! This is what I mean when I say standards are slipping in every sector of human life. I remember when Watts was a pretty little village of neat lawns and flowers. Now, I understand, it is a warren of burning tenements with every available space filled with bizarre sculptures in place of trees, where negroes lope, hyped on heroin and rock and roll, performing primaeval rituals of puberty and manhood, of magic, and hunting and murderous revenge. It is hard to believe it could alter so much in a matter of twenty-five years! I spoke to an American I met in the Portobello Road. His opinion was that the slaves not only should not have been freed but did not want to be free. The worker bee, he told me, dies if it cannot work. The negro goes mad. He was, I gather, a famous writer and editor in his own country. He was over here for a Convention, he said. This was in 1965. I do not know what kind of Convention. Perhaps a Convention of Sane People! That would be an original idea. But we know they had no effect so far upon the world.

It seemed that Esmé had also had a poor night, perhaps pining for me. I felt sorry for her. While I had embarked on a harebrained personal chase, she had been working to help our company. Did Mrs Cornelius appreciate how much all our fortunes depended upon my little girl? I remember that the ferry ride was conducted in a mood of general conviviality, especially since our crew was growing increasingly more anxious to complete their work and get back to Hollywood. They had had enough, they said, of the local colour. Most had had bouts of dysentery. Professor Quelch made some dry joke about ‘crossing the River of Death’ while Seaman, who was better read in Egyptology than the rest of us, looked about him and asked where ‘Turnface the Ferryman’ had got to. I believe he referred to Sir Ranalf. We were all in high spirits as we disembarked and mounted the donkeys which were to take us to the valley of the Tombs. Helped by courteous boys we mounted the little animals, surprised to discover that their saddles were relatively comfortable. Suddenly we were trotting up a long, dirt road into a low line of hills, the burial caves of the pharaohs and their favourites. It was already warm. I was glad of my wide-brimmed straw hat, my dark glasses. We had not gone half-an-hour, with the dust of the road beginning to rise like mist behind us, obscuring our view of a distant line of tourists, before I had the urge to remove my jacket, but decorum disallowed me from taking it off until I saw others doing the same. Behind us the Nile had become a path of grey silver through the red-brown clay, through the dark yellows and the untidy clumps of green, of rocks and palms, while Luxor was a ghost on the far shore, distance as usual undoing the damages of time. My little girl, prettily sidesaddle on a donkey more her size than mine, seemed entirely at her ease, jogging at the rear, chatting to Professor Quelch, while Mrs Cornelius rode beside me, a billowing cloud of white linen and lace. A sunshade over one shoulder, a gloved hand upon her donkey’s pommel, she could not maintain her ill-temper but shrieked with pleasure every time the donkey’s hooves struck an uneven part of the path. ‘Y’d pay an effin’ fortune for a ride like this at Margate!’ But she admitted she would be relieved when we got to what she was insisting on calling ‘Tooting Common’. His long legs brushing the ground, Wolf Seaman bounced moodily in her wake, glancing at his watch and looking up at the sun, while the rest of the crew trailed back along the path, commenting on the scenery and waving away the occasional group of children who appeared from nowhere to offer us reed fans, straw scorpions, huge living lizards harnessed with string or the usual figures of Bast and Osiris. I began to think the whole area hid a troglodytic city, a warren of caves where these children skulked and their goods were manufactured. Could that barren landscape deceive the eye and support human life in subterranean tunnels? Was all of Egypt living, literally, with its dead? But I knew this to be fanciful. The villages were behind us and to one side. That was where the bony children originated. Everything else here was dedicated to Death and the Netherworld. How careful had these people been to ensure their immortality! How vulnerable, in the end, that immortality was proven! When the day came for the souls of the dead to return to their bodies, there would be nothing for them to occupy but the temporal forms of huge German Hausfraus in sturdy cotton walking-suits or slender French homosexuals in the latest Paris cut. One could imagine them feeling a certain amount of confusion.

The Valley of the Kings is itself a somewhat disappointing sight. It was, after all, picked for its isolation rather than its beauty. It is a wide, shallow wadi in the walls of which, over the centuries, tombs were bored and into these tombs had been placed the mummies of kings, some of which survived until the twentieth century when, with our more sophisticated methods, we succeeded in disturbing the rest of what were probably the last untroubled dead. Cook’s and the Egyptian Society had built sets of iron or wooden stairs to some tombs so that the thousands of tourists who came here every year to peer, without much interest, at what the looters had spared (mostly wall-paintings) and giggle or gape at the oddness of it all, might save themselves even the discomfort of a modest scramble. There were only a few tourists here before us, most of whom belonged to Thackeray’s German Touring Group which had pitched its tents overnight, perhaps in the delicious hope that the spirits of Tutenkhamun or Horemheb might be tempted to return to earth by the smell of canned frankfurters and sauerkraut. These Germans did not look as if they had seen ghosts and as we approached were finishing a hearty selection of breakfast meats. O. K. Radonic, who was our best German-speaker, went up to explain what would be happening, asking merely that they did not stray into camera-shot. I noticed that many of the campers had been looking rather sullen and actually cheered up at his news, taking rather more interest in our Company than in the ringing tones of Miss Vronwy Nurture who addressed them, in clear, precise schoolroom English, on the lineage of the Egyptian God-Emperors. Even in Germany, that bastion of culture, there are those who would rather watch a modern movie crew at work than absorb the wisdom and revelations of ancient stones or admire the beauty of an unnamed artist whose skills were dedicated only to an unearthly posterity.

There would be time to inspect the tombs later, said Seaman. For the moment he wanted some good outside shots. Later that afternoon, Sir Ranalf would send a party of fellaheen to us. These we would dress as slaves to carry the mummy into the tomb. We had not yet decided whose tomb to use. Radonic said we seemed to have come a long way to get a take we could have gotten better in Death Valley. Seaman, who had invested so much of his reputation in this film, asked him pompously not to display his philistinism but just to turn the camera when he was commanded. Radonic, who had been losing patience with Seaman as his boredom increased, told him there was only one place he was prepared to point his camera at that moment whereupon Seaman began to utter his familiar self-pitying squawks, like a gannet discovering a damaged nest.

‘ ‘E’s started early,’ observed Mrs Cornelius with a placid smile. ‘I ‘ope that means we finish early, too. It’s gonna get effin’ ‘ot soon, Ivan.’

There came, as if in concert, a high-pitched wailing from the entrance of the valley where an enormous dust-cloud began to thrash upwards obscuring the sun. The children dropped back, knowing an afrit when they saw one. The wail dropped to a roar and then a cough, almost lion-like, as through the dispersing sand came a monstrous Rolls Royce half-track, the kind I had last seen abandoned on the Odessa road as we retreated to the sea. This one was not camouflaged but vivid with scarlet and yellow livery, with a great Ibis in outline above a motto reading Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo scrolled in elegant Gothic and above its head the angular words Egyptian universal moving picture co. Sir Ranalf Steeton himself sat at the wheel while behind him two servants held tightly to a rope-lashed mummy-case poking at an uneasy angle across two sets of back seats.

As it rolled to a rasping halt its tracks threw up a huge curtain of sand, which fell back to half-bury the Thackeray camp. ‘Don’t worry, sweet lads and lasses,’ Sir Ranalf assured us as he dusted his own coat free of the beige-coloured dust. ‘I’ve seen them here before.’ He glanced up briefly as the campers flapped over collapsed canvas. ‘They’re only Krauts. Well, what do you think? Isn’t she a beauty? The real McCoy, too, though I’m not so sure she’s a Queen exactly. Will she do? The slaves are coming by a separate route.’ And with a rap of his cane upon the mummy-case the little man, almost a pantomime pig in tropical whites, crossed the sands to help my Esmé free herself from her donkey, to flick a wisp of cotton from where it had caught on the saddle, to kiss her upon the cheeks and to pat her little head while Mrs Cornelius (dismounting with all the easy skill and grace of Buck Jones about to confront troublesome rustlers) called out to nobody in particular, ‘It’s orl right everybody, ther bloody star’s passed ‘er ordishun.’

If she thought to alert me to anything, she failed. Instead I was shocked and upset by this unseemly display of petty jealousy and spite from a woman whose integrity and judgement I habitually respected above all others. As she strode towards Professor Quelch, he looked almost in panic from her to Sir Ranalf. She paused beside him, clearly expecting moral support, but he peered over her shoulder and smiled apologetically at an expectant Steeton, who showed evident satisfaction at this display of equivocation. I wondered what had caused Quelch to change allegiances. As Mrs Cornelius stalked disgustedly across the sand in my direction I, too, found myself offering a placatory grin to our new master. And in betraying Mrs Cornelius, just for that instant, I knew in my heart I had betrayed myself.