Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY-FOUR

THE ILLUSION ONE CREATES in the cinema is not always easy to live up to in reality. Fame brings responsibility as well as power. The Pasha and his guests were returning from an antelope hunt. On our ride to the Glaoui kasbah at Tin’rheras, while an honoured visitor from the Hollywood heavens, I regretted that discretion demand I say nothing of stuntmen to the worshipping Lieutenant Fromental. Instead, I explained an uneasy seat as residual symptoms of my old friend, malaria.

The lieutenant showed brotherly concern at this news. He thought a Czech physician was soon to be a guest of the Pasha (who made the most of his Western acquaintances during his frequent visits to Paris). Perhaps the eminent Doctor N. could be persuaded to do something for me?

Grateful as I was, I said, for this suggestion, I merely had to ride out the disease. I was sure that in a few days (when I secretly planned to be entrained for Casablanca or Tangier) I would be as right as rain. Clapping me on the back the young Frenchman assured me we would be at the kasbah by the following evening. Meanwhile, if my health improved, I was welcome to join him for a gallop over the tundra while it was still possible. ‘After Tafi’lalet, once we get into the Atlas,’ Fromental indicated the ochre foothills of a substantial mountain range now filling the northern horizon, ‘we’ll have to pick our way along those damned tracks, and rock shelves which pass for tracks, above a succession of abysses. We’ll be lucky to ride at all.’

Not for the first time since I had left California the prospect of an abyss or two was far preferable to my present predicament. It remains my belief (call it a betrayal of my Cossack blood) that the horse was merely a rough-and-ready stopgap we used while we were inventing the internal combustion engine. By some strange quirk, my native blood called not for the stallion’s forceful gallop, but the camel’s rolling plod.

The true power-holder in Morocco, thanks to his own consummate sense of strategy, El Glaoui was an animated little man in whom Arab, Negro and Berber, the three major races of this region, had married to produce a thoroughly nondescript pudgy little face which, save for his rather scrubby beard, might have been found on any bank clerk from Bangkok to Threadneedle Street. The vivacity which lit his eyes engaged one’s immediate attention, however, and sometimes his whole face seemed to shine like the sun - not always with joy, but with shame or contempt or fury, perhaps, at some cosmic injustice. His self-esteem endowed him with a kind of beauty. He understood that he was what most men aspire to and what most women desire. He had proven his judgement in politics and in battle. He had conquered the South and accomplished the great pilgrimage to Mecca, thus definitively demonstrating his courage and his piety. Now he displayed his cultural sophistication, his scholarly curiosity in all that the world had to offer.

El Glaoui was by no means the first Moslem princeling to aspire to the mantle of Haroun al-Raschid or even Saladin, but for a while he alone most nearly achieved the reality. I would say he did this through his quick intelligence, personal charm and ruthless practicality. Savage as he was to his enemies, he could also be generous to those he defeated. He had the gentle but elaborate manners of the Berber nobility, a sense of quiet irony which pleased women, and a clever, self-deprecating manner which immediately made you his admirer. It was as well for Europe that the enchanting T’hami el Glaoui, Thane of this remoter Cawdor, had no greater ambition than to rule, through his French allies, one small part of the Maghrib! He was a Napoleon! An Alexander! And those who now slight him or tell me that he was nothing, that he never existed save as a Frenchman’s shadow, have swallowed the official opinion of the victorious but rather less charismatic Sultan, who now calls himself a king. The truth is only ever what the dominant power declares it to be.

This is what they did to Makhno and Mosley. (Not that I admired them, as men, for anything but their audacity.) We turn these bold outlaws into goblins, driven by a will to Evil, even when we have previously used them for our own gain. Next we belittle and forget their achievements. It was the Pasha of Marrakech, not the Sultan of Morocco, nor the Bey of Algiers, who was a welcome and familiar guest in all the drawing-rooms and, indeed, the boudoirs, of the West End. Winston Churchill called him a fellow-spirit. Charles Boyer became his friend, Noel Coward wrote his famous submarine film in Marrakech and based one of the characters on El Glaoui, who was far more popular than King Farouk or the Aga Khan. He was considerably more cultured. I am the first to insist that I bear him no grudge. (We would both be victims of the same miserable Iago. But, as usual, I was not given the opportunity to explain my situation. People have no humanity, these days. Even the interrogators lack the patience of the old Tsarist professionals.)

In his domain, especially in one gorgeous room, the Pasha allowed the pace of life to remain civilised while ensuring that his guests had every modern comfort, including the latest in gramophone records and three-reeler movies, mostly French. He had a magnificent pianola and all the up-to-date rolls. I heard this from Lieutenant Fromental as we rode through a Moorish paradise, through groves of dark-green date palms whose long shadows fell across little lagoons and streams, against a flawless deep blue sky beneath which red dust blew across wind-eroded terracotta hills topped by the crenellated towers of a dozen petty chieftains, all of them vassals to our host, all of them subject to his will on pain of death. There was a wonderful silence to the place. Here was the reason for the Pasha’s self-confidence, this demonstration of his immense security.

I envied him such feudal power. Yet even then I knew the cost of such power. To possess it one must also fight, second by second, to keep it. Amongst desert tribespeople, just as in modern business, there are always young contenders waiting for that one sign of weakness. Their moral behaviour is separated from the battle rituals of the stag only in the extent of the unthinking damage it does to the surrounding world. Yet still El Glaoui was a Renaissance prince. Had it not been for the French betraying him, he would have founded a dynasty as famous and as colourful as the Borgia. He, too, would have given his people prince and pope in one person.

He had formed the impression that we were American movie people in a borrowed balloon who had accidentally landed in his domain. He took it that we had come from Algeria. It suited neither of us to disillusion him, especially since it explained a movie camera he might, with his suspicion of Italian ambitions, have chosen to see as proof of our spying. Rose had offered some tale which he had accepted. He welcomed us to his court as artists and insisted we become his personal guests while in Marrakech.

His court already consisted of politicians, poets, actors and personalities from around the world. Our hunting party included Mr A. E. G. Weeks, the Sapper, late of the Royal Engineers, who was here with a tender for a set of new defences to quell any potential power bid from the Sahara Berbers, many of whom still refused to accept El Glaoui as their liege lord, and Count Otto Schmaltz, a serving officer of the Free Corps German Army in Exile, paying a courtesy visit from Constantinople to the Pasha. He was a Captain and a Count of the old, easy-going South German school, with only a veneer of his Prussian military education. He had studied at Heidelberg, he told me later that day, and had some good scars to prove it. El Glaoui, who had been riding in attentive silence nearby, remarked easily how ritual scarification was now only practised amongst the more primitive of his nomad tribes. When did the Germans over there hope to stamp the custom out? Which set the ruddy young Count to roaring, his face a fresh-quartered melon, and swearing what a good fellow the Pasha was, even as his host signalled adieu and rode on to join Miss von Bek, who he had been relieved to find was not Italian. She had refused to speak to me since we began our journey towards the mountains. At first I believed she was letting the little Moor pursue her in order to make me jealous, then I began to guess that she was determined, since I had proven nothing more than a clever imitation, to acquire for herself an authentic Arabian prince. At which point I lost emotional interest in her. My wounds were too fresh. I knew only one means of escaping the pain I had experienced at Esmé’s betrayal. I reconciled myself to relying wholly upon my own resources until I had a chance at least to see Mr Mix alone.

Mr Mix, I now knew, had used his experience and acquaintance with me to find employment with the potentate. He had become El Glaoui’s personal film director and official cameraman to the Court. He was always busy with his camera - the very latest Pathé - which he had lashed in a kind of cradle to his body, enabling him to turn the crank even as we moved. It seemed a shame to me that Mix’s film was only intended for the Pasha’s private viewing. Those reels would have been the most popular travelogues in the world, confirming every Western notion of Arabian opulence and decadent extravagance harnessed to omnipotent power against backgrounds of almost unbelievable romance as we reached the palm groves, streams and pools of the Tafi’lalet oasis. The little thatched villages, the timeworn castles and hills, the brightly-dressed women and simple dignified men, recalled some wonderful novel of Scott, Kipling or F. Marion Crawford, where nobility of soul and selfless courage were recognised, where at any moment Karl May’s Kara ben Nemsi might come galloping on his white camel across the packed sand or Alan Quatermain rise from behind a rock to welcome us. We might be greeted by a chivalrous Saracen from Bohemian romance, some mediaeval French gentleman, honoured by the Moor as a hero. I have seen it in film after film. This is what made Lawrence of Arabia such a laughing-stock in nomad circles, I hear, and Mrs Fezi in Talbot Road merely laughs when I mention it. ‘It is all a joke,’ she says in Arabic. She enjoys speaking to someone who understands her. Even the Egyptians, she says, pretend to be baffled sometimes. She refuses to be shamed, she says, by those Jew-loving bastards, though she grants piously that we should all be tolerant and help one another, even benighted Christians like myself. Because I like her I repeat the prayer with her. It is a comfort to us both. I do not regret my time in the desert. It is not how one worships God but how one obeys Him, I say. But she will not speak the Lord’s Prayer I wrote out for her. I do not blame her. She is a peasant, while I am heir to the blood of kings.

Anyway, I say, where would we be without the Jews in the first place? Whereupon she refuses to listen. She becomes tactful in the way that Russians do when you mention Stalin. Perhaps, after all, Stalin was not only a Georgian warlord but also an Oriental god? Perhaps, after all, Jesus was our first true prophet, in which case I am wasting my time with what I call my counter-missionary work. If these people wish to come to the West to make for themselves an Eastern slum, perhaps I should not try to improve their lot. But are they happy? In their own world, at least, they are not despised for their appearance or their beliefs. We are invaded at every turn by the Middle Ages. There is a War of Time violently taking place all around us and we pretend it is not there. We would rather talk about the quality of the fish and chips. Who are these nomads of the time-streams, bursting over the borders, flooding out of non-existent countries into the glaring realities of Paris and London and Amsterdam? Our values are the very antithesis of their own. It occurs to me that all the crimes committed against the ignorant and the innocent down the years have come home to roost in the nations of the rich. Their spirits are the ghosts haunting the treasury of our inheritance. We cannot enjoy our wealth and not be possessed by them all. War has an infinite price. We are never free of its victims. Generation upon generation is tainted by war. Generation upon generation pays the worst price of all - to watch paradise slowly slipping from its grasp. I remember Munich. I still do not believe the Führer was insincere.

I am of that generation which argues ‘there are no victors in war’ and I believe we have proven that contention. Yet T’hami el Glaoui would have thought me mad had I made such a statement as he rode with all the glory of his complicated retinue, its wagons and pack-animals and flags and soldiery, towards the granite seat of his family’s original power. ‘A great laird,’ proclaimed Mr Weeks, whose mother had been a Mackenzie, ‘and a gentleman through and through.’

We camped that night in a village of our own creation rather than suffer the cramped hospitality of the dignitaries who displayed the offerings of the local people, mostly lambs and goats, as daifa in the traditional rituals of welcome. Before our eyes they set to slaughtering an entire herd for our pleasure which was then roasted on spits over pits in the sand. Later, we feasted, as entertainers were brought in to sing those impossibly melancholy Berber love-songs having the substance and effect of the music they now call Cowboy and Western and which springs from similar peasant roots. These celebrations of cosmic self-pity were followed by a troupe of drummers, whose monotony would rival any modern Top of the Pops jungle dancing. Bad taste is truly universal. I sat on one side in the company of Lieutenant Fromental, Mr Weeks and Count Schmaltz while Rose von Bek was decidedly on her own with the Pasha. Both were oblivious to the music and I envied them this. The other local kai’ds and their retainers seemed as discomfited by the entertainment as the rest of us. Only Mr Mix gave every appearance of relishing the whole thing, filming them and us from every angle, his massive cart of batteries powering the floodlights necessary to capture anything but a flickering shadow (as it was he had to ask them to repeat their performances against that impossible background the next morning while the rest of us were packing to leave). Still I had failed to get the negro to one side. I almost wondered if he avoided me until it occurred to me that filming must be a genuine vocation for the intelligent africain.

Since he wished to return home to America, Mr Mix doubtless hoped to direct films for the race market. There was a thriving business in such films, which were sold throughout the African and Oriental world. I contented myself, knowing that sooner or later my old comrade would let me into his confidence.

I was still not entirely at ease with Rose von Bek’s behaviour. It seemed to me that the essential man, not the name he uses, is all that is ever important. But perhaps she had thought me more powerful than I was, while T’hami el Glaoui was certainly everything a potentate should be, even if he lacked my looks and peculiar skills. I suspected that our relative power was something she had weighed up with all the speed of the practised adventuress. Grateful that I had invested little real idealism in her, merely friendship, I made the best of things, taking comfort in the company of those boisterous, manly comrades, their jokes and private conversations. It was no surprise, after the feasting and folklorique were done, that Rose von Bek did not tip-toe from the Pasha’s tent to her own until a little before dawn. I buried all memory of pleasure. It had become second nature to me. The stiff upper lip is not the Englishman’s prerogative. The next day, as we entered the last phase of the journey to his kasbah, the Pasha made a point of calling out for me to join him at the head of the party. Observed by genuflecting peasants, we rode along an avenue of palms. Rose was nowhere in sight, confined, I was told, to one of the wagons, suffering from the privations of our balloon journey. The balloon itself followed in another of the supply wagons. ‘I gather you are something of an engineer as well as a film star, Mr Beters.’ Like most Arabic speakers he had trouble with the letter ‘p’, but he was charming. His gentle courtesy won me over at once.

‘I am lucky enough to hold a degree or two in the sciences,’ I confirmed. ‘My colleague Lalla von Bek has been betraying my secrets, I fear.’

He appreciated my use of the Arabic title. ‘Lalla von Bek explained the extraordinary nature of your meeting. In disguise, you came out of the desert like a Bedouin legend, Mr Beters, and rescued a fair maiden! Be careful, they will be brinting your adventures in the benny dreadfuls.’ He then launched into some second-hand anecdote he had overheard on the Quai d’Orsay concerning Buffalo Bill’s embarrassment at the fictions perpetrated in his name. ‘Did you ever see a Wild West Show, Mr Beters?’

I admitted that I had only known Cody’s nephew, but I had rubbed shoulders with some fairly rough types ‘out West’. ‘Believe me, Your Highness, there are worse villains in real life than we ever dare show on the screen.’

‘I can believe it, Mr Beters. However, until I again have the bleasure of watching your wonderful film escabades, I must make do with the reality of your combany. What is your sbecial field?’

I quickly explained that I was by profession an inventor. I had to my credit a string of recent experimental machines, from airships to the latest dynamite car. In the pipeline were plans for great ships to carry tourists to the desert where they would learn something of the dignity of the nomad life. This of course would increase the region’s wealth. It was this latter idea that intrigued him. I described further details of my Desert Liner. From there we got on to aeroplanes, for which he was a great enthusiast ‘Do you know anything about building aeroblanes, m’sieu?’

‘I am the first Russian to fly,’ I informed him. ‘I flew a one-man craft over Kiev long before such things were thought possible. It was for my originality in this area that I was awarded my special medal from St Petersburg.’

‘Ah, Betersburg. Your real name, I take it? And yet you gave ub such an exciting career to be an actor?’ He found this a trifle puzzling.

I scarcely knew where to begin his enlightenment. ‘I am not,’ I said, ‘like so many modern Westerners, desperate to slot myself into one narrow groove and roll along it for the rest of my life. I take opportunities where they arise. It is how I have always survived. The medium of the cinema intrigues me. For a while it suited me, I suppose, to make that medium my own. Now my chief pursuits are more intellectual. I possess at present a catalogue of aircraft which I have, over the years, designed. To make it a reality the catalogue only requires an enlightened backer. But, sadly, there are few such visionaries in these troubled times.’

‘I flew in 1913,’ said the Pasha with some pride. ‘It was interesting, though not terrifying. Some of my beoble did not enjoy the exberience, but I made them take it. Ha, ha! Could you berhabs build a small air fleet, m’sieu, if funds were at your disbosal?’

Taken aback, I nodded, silently. I could think of nothing to say. But this response seemed to satisfy him. He told me that we would discuss the idea further, when we got to Tafouelt.

The rest of the morning, as the tracks became steeper and we were sometimes forced to go in single file, I spent in some euphoria. Had Leonardo at last found his Prince? Perhaps this was where I was destined to begin my march back to respectability, to recover all my honours? In time I would be able to travel to Paris and make it evident that I was not some second-rate share-floater but an honest inventor. T’hami had the ear of the most powerful politicians in France. In Marrakech, I thought, I might redeem myself entirely and then, my reputation restored, make my way to Italy where, I was now convinced, I would discover my ultimate destiny. I said nothing of Italy to El Glaoui, whose dislike of that country was an obsession. So optimistic had I become, so full of plans for my improving future, that I hardly noticed as we climbed to the brow of a low hill and was astonished at the sight of the great oasis of Tafi’lalet. This was a vast valley - or series of shallow valleys - some twelve miles long and nine miles wide, where crops of red rock jutted from fertile grazing lands, from fields of wheat and barley, from every shade of green. Green blazed brighter than the valley’s lakes and rivers. Green was the Holy Colour. We paused to honour it.

At length we continued on up a winding trail which took us suddenly to the gates of a large crenellated castle, built of pink piste, with a drawbridge and portcullis and all the trappings of a working mediaeval fortress. Tafi’lalet was one of the Glaoui family’s chief forts, belonging, Fromental whispered, to T’hami’s nephew, whom everyone called The Vulture. Though T’hami was head of the family, Si Hammon held the real power in this region of the High Atlas, controlling half the wealth of Southern Morocco, and T’hami, despising his relative, embarrassed by him, had every reason to keep his peace with him.

Into this gloomy fortress we now filed on weary, still-stumbling horses. When I looked back through the archway I saw a panorama of the whole Tafi’lalet valley and it was easy to understand why the great kasbah had been built there. It controlled the entire area and could never be secretly attacked. As the last gaudy warriors passed over it, the drawbridge was taken back up on a pully and a rope drawn by a complaining donkey. The place stank chiefly of dung while the courtyard was piled with old rags, junk and household waste which black slaves were burning slowly in mouldering heaps.

We dismounted and were led into a wide, high hall where T’hami’s slaves ran forward to take our outer clothing and a majordomo led us up narrow, curving staircases to our somewhat chilly rooms. My window looked back over what the Moors called hammada, a pebble desert, and from here, clearly, any attack could be anticipated. My room was furnished with an ornate provincial French bed, a toilet stand in modern bamboo and a table which seemed Spanish in origin. At the glassless windows were heavy shutters and obscuring these were curtains in English chintz. A slave brought me hot water and a full change of clothing. This was far superior to my own desert finery. Soon I knew again the luxury of soap and scented silks. That night our feasting differed only by virtue of being under cover, but the hall amplified the orchestra and especially the livelier wails of the plump ladies who led the choruses and the hand-clapping. The heat of the place, coupled with the smells of half-cured ancient skins, burning garbage and roasting meat, brought on a blazing headache which I cured, at last, with so much morphine that I passed out, to be taken tenderly to bed by a concerned Fromental who carried me easily in his giant’s arms and assured me they were all sympathetic. They had forgotten how desperate had been my desert ordeal.

In the morning, when we left the brooding kasbah and began the long descent into that wonderful valley, Lieutenant Fromental shook his head, wondering what fool would ever want to leave this paradise. ‘I am thinking a man could retire here,’ he said. ‘Perhaps farm a little.’

‘I understood you were planning to follow the great route to Timbuktu when you retired,’ Otto Schmaltz reminded him as he rode to join us on the path.

‘That too, perhaps.’ Fromental frowned. He had little time for the young German. The Frenchman’s father and brother had both been killed at Ypres.

We descended for a while in silence until the trail widened and became easier. We no longer had to concentrate. Soon the trail grew into a mud road leading between date palms and olive trees. I had never, even in Egypt, seen such natural richness. Here, as before, the Berber villagers came from their work and their houses to cheer and sing as we passed by. I might have been part of some boyar’s entourage in Old Russia or participating in a knightly progress through 12th-century France. Quite clearly El Glaoui was making a discreet display of his power. These lands were by no means secure for the French while they remained, Fromental told me, under the Vulture’s wing.

By that evening we had crossed the great valley and entered the mountains, accepting the hospitality of a local caïd who, incidentally, sold the Pasha several black slaves he had come by in, he said, a special purchase. He seemed oblivious to a disapproving (but diplomatic) Fromental or to the laws forbidding such barbarism. At no time had El Glaoui approached me to continue our conversation. He was clearly preoccupied with Rose von Bek.

On the third day of our journey, we entered the forbidding mountains of the High Atlas proper where the trails turned into steep narrow tracks curving around the sides of those ancient crags and I only became properly aware of my surroundings as I stood to rest on a wide ledge overlooking a series of broad dales running between gentle hills rising to form the sides of great, grey cliffs. I found myself gasping at what I saw! Valley upon valley, in all directions, was a jewelled infinity of wild flowers. In their vivid variety they glowed, reflecting the light of the afternoon sun. They pulsed and undulated like an ocean of rainbows.

I had never in my life been prepared for such intense beauty, coming so suddenly after the loss of the green oases, the stark crags. It was a glimpse of a different heaven, this hidden place of peace and beauty where death was nothing but a wonderful promise, where the miraculous proof of God’s existence was confirmed. And so, when T’hami and his people kneeled to pray, I joined them spontaneously, from that habit of absolute worship one acquires in the desert. I praised God and I thanked Him for all His creations and especially those which were a sign of His absolute benevolence. So overcome was I that I was forced to take an untypical risk and go to steady myself with the use of my cocaine, crouching on one side of my frisky mount as I tried to control the tube which would take the reviving powder to my nose.

A little later, as we walked back to his own beast, El Glaoui said, with a certain puzzlement, that he praised Allah for he had found a brother in an expected place. He did not speak with any particular warmth. Perhaps he suspected me of attempting to ingratiate myself with Moslems. Miss von Bek, riding by as I climbed into my own unyielding saddle, flicked at pretty hair and observed that there was surely no need for me to maintain my play-acting for their sake. Unless, she added, I intended to take up a collection later. In which case she would be delighted to reward me with a dirham or two for my undoubted talents. She rode on before I could give her my witty reply.

It was clear, however, that she was recovering from her embarrassment and seemed ready enough to continue our friendship. For my part, I bore her no ill-will.

Soon afterwards, El Glaoui retired into the wagon he used when the roads were good and I saw nothing of him or Rose von Bek until we stopped to make camp in a valley so saturated with perfume from the wild flowers that I feared I must faint into some exotic dream from which I would not awake for years. As the sun came down upon the crest of the western hills it spread light like an old glaze across the landscape. The flowers lost none of their glowing vitality. They seemed to have existed since the beginning of time.

We were eating the substantial remains of the previous night’s feast, the smell of couscous and fatty meat at vulgar odds with the surrounding paradise, when I remarked to Count Schmaltz that this scenery made a man understand how civilisation and aesthetics might take many forms. Who, after all, needed to create pictures here when such a magnificent picture appeared without fail every year? But Schmaltz amiably disagreed with me. ‘Only if you judge civilisation by its arts, my dear fellow. I do not. I agree that art can take many forms, some of them alien to our own ideal. But institutions are another matter. Our good old-fashioned Northern European institutions of justice and equality, they are a form of madness to our host. He pretends to understand them, but it is almost impossible for him to imagine a society in which the power is shared between a wide variety of interests and classes. He perceives civilised Europe as nothing more than a subtler, more successful and perhaps more devious example of his own world.’

‘Who is to say he is not right?’ I asked reasonably.

But this irritated Schmaltz. His face became melon-pink again. ‘Oh, do not mistake me.’ He glanced around him as he wiped his fingers on a napkin. We were eating according to local custom, with our right hands only. ‘I have considerable respect for El Glaoui’s Realpolitik as he applies it. But he grows ambitious. Soon he will try to dictate terms to us. It is like the Bolsheviks. Mark my words. Let them get on with their “social experiment” by all means, but they should not try to bully us.’

I agreed with him, though unsure of his point. I asked him what moral superiority the West could claim, when it singularly failed to come to the aid of fellow Christian nations. Were we superior to the Arab in this respect? Or the Bolshevik?

He became more impatient. ‘I see no reason, Herr Peters, why a nation which does not habitually torture and otherwise terrorise its citizens should accept the dictates of one which does. In common morality, my dear sir, we are demonstrably their superiors.’

‘But by how fine a degree?’ It was Mr Mix going by with his film camera. He had passed on before Otto could reply, so the German turned to me again. ‘I still do not take readily to being treated so casually by a nigger,’ he confided. ‘But these Americans are all the same, they say. Do you enjoy Hollywood, Herr Peters?’

It was my second home, I said. A golden dream of the future. He was taken aback by this. I did not know it was then fashionable in German military circles to denigrate everything American, especially if it came from Hollywood or New York, while in France the fascination with the United States was unabated. For them it was a place where all myth was made reality. I found both points of view rather conventional. Mr Weeks’s tolerant bemusement at the more extravagant aspects of American society was easier to share.

These were to be the first of several ongoing conversations, all of them refreshingly original, which the four of us (Mr Mix continuously aloof, the Pasha and Miss von Bek generally absent) came to enjoy almost greedily during our various necessary stops. After my first flush of zealotry, I now confined myself to lowering my head and murmuring the prayers where I stood, in the manner of Turkish aristocrats, explaining to my new comrades that I believed it important for diplomatic reasons to acknowledge the Muslim religion here. Though they were never easy with this aspect of my life it did not affect our hearty arguments over a pipe and a discreet glass of brandy at the end of the day (the Pasha also offered hashish) while we gathered around our camp fire, relishing the smell of the wild heather and the carpets of flowers, the wind still carrying the faintest sting of the desert back to us, the flickering light and the comradely warmth, the busy sounds of the camp slowly fading into silence as we sat close to the peaks of the mountains which the Greeks had named for the Titan who held the world upon his back. Perhaps this was also a symbolic union of Christian gentlemen sworn to uphold the name of their redeemer and take upon themselves the responsibilities of their civilisation, for the duties and sacrifices of Empire were frequent topics. Mr Weeks said there was nothing to beat a good chin-wag with a bunch of brainy chaps, each an expert in his own line. It was convenient that we all spoke French, but when the Sapper seemed to be flagging we would lapse into English.

No subject was disallowed and my only regret was that our host and Miss von Bek were not there to join in, since both were first-rate minds. However, this allowed the Pasha himself to become a frequent topic. It was Count Schmaltz’s opinion, for instance, that El Glaoui was consciously creating for himself a romantic legend, well aware of the additional power this gave him, especially in liberal European circles. ‘Those fellows allow you any infamy so long as you represent yourself as some sort of underdog.’ The Pasha received the support of the conservatives with his military actions and his absolute dedication to the French cause, but he welcomed those bohemians whom he knew to have influence in their own countries. It was second nature to a Moslem leader to play such complicated power games. ‘But the whole thing is a fantasy. It is founded upon the most appalling injustice and cruelty, which we are never allowed to witness. Did you find the dungeons in the castle the other night? I did. And saw - and smelled - something of their contents. The burning garbage hides much worse. These people still dismember their living enemies in public. There are slave markets in every village. The family - and consequently the blood feud - are their only law. Yet our great German playwrights and our composers come here to be charmed by a character from the Arabian Nights and return to Berlin to describe the civilised wonders of the Pasha’s court. There are too many people willing to believe in marvels and sentimental folly these days, my friends.’

Puffing upon his narghila, Lieutenant Fromental shook his head in amiable disagreement. ‘Why should we not believe in marvels and miracles and happy endings, m’sieu? It is the same with God. What on earth is the point of not believing?’

‘God is not an escape but a duty,’ said Schmaltz, a little upset. ‘I was not referring to the kinema, Herr Leutnant, but to current urgent social problems. To politics. I am sure we all find it very pleasant to enjoy Herr Peters’s displays. We all, I hope, require a little bit of fun sometimes. But to apply those values to reality - surely you would not argue that the morality of The Masked Buckaroo should be brought to bear on modern society?’

At this point I was forced to interrupt. ‘I would suggest that you view the picture-drama before you judge it, Herr Count. It was made in the same moral tradition as Birth of a Nation.’’

He was good enough to blush and offer me a gruff apology. He did not, he added, refer to present company in any of his pronouncements. He had every respect for the professions and the moral values of others. We lived, after all, in a modern world where certain realities had to be accepted. And thus, a model German, he returned to his original point. ‘The world’s predicament is too dangerous for any indulgence in fantasy, certainly not of this present glorious charade which, I admit, we all are enjoying. But we do not personally,’ he added, ‘very often have to overhear the screams from the dungeons.’

Mr Weeks murmured that he thought if there were any irregularities of that sort the French authorities would investigate them and, if necessary, correct them. There were, after all, certain bargains one had to strike with a powerful ally. The French could not - realistically - be seen to be supporting a tyrant.

‘So he makes the tyranny less visible. And we all accept his hospitality and act to help him hide his complex systems of torture, extortion and terror!’ Schmaltz would have none of it. He was of that class of over-sensitive German who made trouble for the Turks during the Armenian crisis. I could only admire him, without necessarily always agreeing with him, or even liking him.

‘What action would you suggest we take?’ enquired Fromental mildly. ‘We cannot employ an army of spies.’

‘It is not the barbarism abroad I speak of, Herr Leutnant, but the sleep-walking at home. That’s my main concern.’ The German was friendly. ‘We should all be looking to our domestic problems first, forgetting old differences and harnessing the positive energy which exists in every ordinary person.’

Fromental wanted to know if ordinary decency could be ‘harnessed’ and if so how.

‘Through community and idealism,’ replied the Count, busy with his meerschaum, ‘not through communism and rhetoric. We must all pull together for the common good.’

Lieutenant Fromental did not put his scepticism into words.

That evening the Pasha invited us to his tent. ‘This has become a rare privilege since he met your beautiful colleague.’ Mr Weeks winked at me. He had not detected, any more than the others, that my relationship with Miss von Bek had been other than professional. They had chosen to assume simply that we were engaged upon some joint mission of the Italian and British governments. I think it suited neither of us to make any more of our story than the Berbers would. Stories become very swiftly embroidered when translated, as it were, into literary Arabic. Fromental, my only confidant, agreed. “Those who live under tyranny, Mr Peters, make no progress. They learn only how to stay in one place. They learn a form of silence: the banal expressions of bureaucracies and armies, the conventions of the ruling élite, who fear a living, questioning, language. Thus the public language is allowed to say nothing new, though the people make new language every day. This was how Arab literature ceased to be the seminal literature of the mediaeval world, supplying the West with almost all its present story-forms and narrative devices. New Arabic is nothing more than a way of retelling the same myths in different guises. One perceives this effect in the Turkish Empire and everywhere the hammer and sickle crush and cut. There are no advantages to tyranny, save for the tyrant.’

‘And his,’ I counterpointed, ‘is an inefficient method of keeping power, as the financiers of New York will verify!’

El Glaoui was, I must admit, the very model of a modern benevolent tyrant; urbane, expansive, generous and humorous, anxious to understand other points of view than his own, eager to embrace the twentieth century while supremely certain of the superiority of his own way of life. As we seated ourselves on the cushions of his great tent while our hands and faces were washed by his handsome negro slaves (he was rumoured to hide his Caucasians for fear of giving Europeans offence) I was immediately seduced by his hospitality and his charm. Each guest was welcomed and questioned as to his needs. His individual tastes were courteously recollected by the Pasha. Mr Weeks, beside me, murmured that he wouldn’t be surprised if the old boy hadn’t been educated at Eton. Lieutenant Fromental was listening carefully to Count Schmaltz addressing his host on the matter of the recent Riffian wars.

‘But you flew, did you not, Lieutenant Fromental, with the French air force?’ The Pasha signed to include the young man and allow him to speak for his own people.

‘For a few days, Your Highness, yes. As an observer, of course. I’ve never felt any wish to control one of those things!’

Rose von Bek spoke up. ‘I envy you, Lieutenant.’ I had hardly noticed her in the shadows. She wore a long becoming gown, heavily embroidered in the Berber style, and her head was covered by a kind of turban. Berber women frequently went unveiled and frequently only covered their faces in imitation of more sophisticated Arab customs. In the villages, I had been told, it was considered uncouth rather than irreligious to go uncovered. (The cinema, says Mrs Fezi, changed all that. Again, she blames the Egyptians. ‘Now they are all film stars in the country towns,’ she says. ‘But we didn’t wear veils, any of my family. And that was in Meknes.’)

‘Envy me, mademoiselle?’ said my young friend in surprise.

‘You flew at will over this wonderful country. We, on the other hand, scarcely glimpsed its beauty before we crashed.’ (She did not see fit to explain why we had observed so little of the passing landscape!) ‘I wish I could have been your pilot! What an awfully thrilling sight. The Riff massing in all their glory!’

‘Actually, mademoiselle,’ said Lieutenant Fromental in some embarrassment, ‘we were bombing villages. With the Goliaths, you know. They are the very latest heavy bombers. The smoke and the fires tended to obscure our view of the Riff.’

‘Six thousand hours of flight and three thousand missions. What was it, forty bombing flights a day!’ The Pasha exclaimed all this in terms of the warmest admiration. ‘I read it in Le Temps. Forty bombing flights a day!’

‘And still Abd el-Krim and his Riffians were able to bring those planes down. Sharp-shooters lying on their backs in rows and firing in concert! Aeroplanes make no real difference to warfare, in my opinion. Only to civilians.’ Mr Weeks was a confessed admirer of the rebel chief. ‘How many squadrons did you have out there? Fourteen? It was folly. The British had equally disastrous experience bombing the Kurdish villages in Iraq. The aeroplane can never be an independent agent of warfare. It should no more operate on its own than should artillery. In the end it’s always up to the infantry. Or,’ he admitted, after due consideration, ‘sometimes the cavalry. I doubt if the French would have had a war in Syria at all if it hadn’t been for their indiscriminate bombing in the first place. The Times said so quite clearly. Destroying villages, of course, gives the enemy scores of homeless recruits.’

I began to laugh at this. ‘Come now, Mr Weeks. You’ll be telling us next that the airship is an invention of the Devil!’

He shrugged and held up his hands, trying to smile as he dropped the subject. His hatred of every kind of flying machine was well known.

‘However, the aeroblane is effective,’ pronounced the Pasha suddenly, silencing us. He paused to take some stuffed sweetmeat from the tray his slave offered him, ‘as Mr Weeks says. As artillery is effective. Did you know, Mr Weeks, that much of our family’s bower was founded on the ownershib of one Krubb cannon?’

Mr Weeks had told me as much, but he feigned ignorance.

‘A gift from God,’ said the Pasha. ‘With that one excellent German gun - ‘ a further acknowledgement of Schmaltz’s somewhat tender feelings ‘ - we were able to bacify rebellious tribesmen, unite the whole region as one beoble and imbrove our friendshib with the French.’ He smacked his lips. He dipped his fingers to be washed and dried. ‘But there are certain barts of the South which even a Krubb cannon cannot reach, where we are still irritated by unregenerate outlaws and rebels who make cowardly raids into our lands and then skulk away again. We discussed this frequently with General Lyautey, that great man. In Tangier and in Baris.’ El Glaoui nodded in deep self-approval. ‘He told me that if I wanted an air force I should not ask the French for one. It would be imbolitic. But if I were to build my own small fleet, merely a squadron or two, no one would steb in my way.’ He looked into the middle distance as if his eyes already rested on his gleaming battle-birds, ready to carry the flame of a great new Moorish civilisation, an empire which, arm-in-arm with the French Empire, would civilise the whole of Oriental Africa. I recognised a man of vision as thoroughly as he recognised me. I felt like leaping to my feet and swearing that, in a year or two, I would give him the air power that he craved. I would give him more than that. I would give him nomad cities, moving slowly across the dunes on their mighty tracks. I would give him roads burned into existence by fusing the sand with heat-beams, just as my Violet Ray had fused the stones of Kiev. At that moment, our eyes met. He smiled, a little dazed. I would give him Utopia.

I became immediately loyal to this shared vision. I was in no doubt that it would soon begin to materialise and, once my ideas were in full realisation, I would be invited to Rome.

The conversation turned to other matters and I was left with my own optimistic thoughts. Only once did I become aware of anyone’s attention on me. I looked through the lumping shadows of the firelight, through the smoke and the little wisps of mist which came up from the valley. Rose von Bek was observing me from under her long lashes even as she pretended to listen to her new lover. It was as if I had whetted her curiosity for a second time. I think she was beginning to see me for the man I was, rather than the fantasy she had created. I half-closed my own eyes before I returned, steadily, her stare. The Pasha, absorbed in some weighty philosophical discussion with Count Schmaltz and Mr Weeks, paid us no attention. Only Francois Fromental threw me an amused glance as he settled himself deep into his cushions and drew luxuriously upon a good Havana.

Ma sha’ allah! Ma teru khush ma’er-ragil da! A ‘ud bi-rabb el-fulag! A ‘ud billah min esh-shaitan ev-ragim!

A little later I heard my name called. ‘Mr Peters! Ace!’ The young Frenchman was reaching across and shaking my arm. I opened my eyes.

I realised with a shock that I had, for an instant, been travelling again in the Land of Dreams.

It was not until the next day that I had my third vision of paradise - the great palmeries of Marrakech, filling the verdant mesa surrounded by the Atlas’s noble crags and, at their centre beneath the pure blue sky, the Red City, the city which only Timbuktu rivalled as a mysterious legend, crenellated walls rising above the surrounding palms and poplars; the city who had given a whole nation her name and given the word Moor to the world. Dreaming Marrakech, as old as romance, as sweet as forbidden wine, says Wheldrake.

I stood in awe, that evening, and wondered how any Moor could ever turn his back on such unique beauty.

El Glaoui joined me, reaching almost delicately to touch my shoulder. ‘Mr Beters, I want you to helb me build the future - here in Marrakech.’ It was impossible to refuse him. At that moment I forgot my dreams of Hollywood and returned, with rising spirits, to my true vocation.

My cities will be filled with gardens. Surrounded by a halo of golden light they will rise above the earth and settle upon the mountains like proud hawks. And the first of these shall be Marrakech.

I must admit I had expected nothing like the reception I received as we rode into Marrakech. Bit by bit a crowd formed, chattering and pointing at me, and when I cheerfully waved back a great gasp went up, then an ululation of sheer joy.

Glad to ride beside me at that moment, El Glaoui grinned. ‘You must be used to this, Mr Beters, wherever you go. I feel very small fish beside you.’

I do not think he was entirely pleased as the cheering increased and I heard the name ‘Bookh’aroo!’ on all their lips. By some peculiar fluke I was adored in Marrakech as Valentino was adored in Minneapolis. Lieutenant Fromental was almost drunk with reflected glory. ‘One day,’ he proclaimed excitedly, ‘they will know about you in France. You will be as famous, my dear friend, in Paris and Marseilles as you are now in Meknes and Fez!’ I had no other option but to wave and salaam as, with horribly aching muscles, I tried to control my lively horse. And so we passed through the walls of Marrakech and only Rose von Bek took no notice of my fame.