Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY-FIVE

NARCOTICS POSSESS none of the curative properties of the white psychedelics. By these I refer not to hippy pleasure trips on LSD but to the mind-expanding and mind-focusing properties of pure cocaine. These boys and girls today know nothing of cocaine. They have never sniffed it. They have had the illusion of pleasure on lavatory cleaner and baby laxative and they presume to condescend to the man who has imbibed ‘the woman-drug’ with the great and famous of the twentieth century - and by this I mean no innuendo to our present rulers and their families. I speak my mind when I have to, but otherwise am well known for my discretion. I learned the virtues of silence in Egypt and Morocco. To these people ‘free speech’ is synonymous with ‘blasphemy’.

At a Moorish court self-discipline becomes a question of survival. I learned the old, mediaeval virtues, and began to understand the meaning of Chivalry. I had travelled in Time. On such ancient understandings were the codes of the Black Hand founded, as I have reason to know. The so-called mafia were in their own world the old forms of Law pitted against the new, just as today the Arab is pitted against the institutions of democracy.

At Talouet, the seat of his family’s original power, El Hadj T’hami Ben Mohammed Mezouari el Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, had already proposed his plan to me, even before we reached the capital. The great mediaeval pile had been filled, almost like Hearst’s strange fantasy, with a mixture of Moorish treasure and expensive European furniture, with unselected objets d’art. The castle housed much of the Pasha’s great collection of concubines, at least half of whom, it was said, were French. Staffed by his huge Nubians, the palace was never completely silent.

He had been irritated, he said, by an unpleasant little Frenchman of the worst class, a man called Lapin - a Communist journalist with some profession to the Law. He was in league with an old enemy of the Glaoui, a certain discredited kai’d called El Hakim, who had enlisted this turncoat to bring suit against the Pasha. El Hakim’s supporters had even brought Lapin a newspaper in which he uttered every kind of calumny against the Pasha and his family. One of the accusations which El Glaoui found especially rankling was that none of his wealth was put back into the region. Nothing was spent on cultural projects or scientific schemes. If the Glaoui was truly enlightened, Lapin had argued, why did he not encourage scientific and social progress in his realm? In response to this the Pasha pointed to Mr Mix, employed to record the cultural and varied rule of the great Pasha and his world ‘for bosterity’. He had founded a film industry in Marrakech which would ultimately be the rival of Hollywood. And now an aeronautics industry. Nothing could be more modern. Every day his city became a second Los Angeles. Suddenly, from advising on defences, Mr Mix was commissioned to draw up plans for a series of solid English public works, ‘Like the lavatories,’ commanded the Pasha, ‘in Leicester Square.’ Other guests were recruited. Count Schmaltz’s advice, concerning discipline and the chains of command appropriate to a modern standing army, was also sought, though the German, like Miss von Bek, was only the Pasha’s guest.

All this he had elaborated as we stood together on the roof of his kasbah’s tallest tower, looking across the ragged peaks of the High Atlas, listening to the rushing of the Oued Mellah, and staring out across the surrounding semi-desert towards the true Sahara we had so recently left behind. I had never seen such vividly coloured mountains as these. The rock itself was radiant with dark greens and yellows, with luminous cerise and mauve, with deep reds and blues, slabs of stone sometimes merging with the undulating meadows of wild flowers all pulsing beneath the heat of a royal-blue sky. I remember thinking how different this landscape was from everything I had yet seen, how the desert contained a world of contrasts and variation as distinct as anything in Europe. As the sun dropped down over the crags and their shadows lengthened until it seemed they must engulf the castle itself, El Glaoui had spoken of his love of this land. This, he said, not Marrakech, was his true capital; he thought of the place as home, for which he experienced the deepest sentiment. If he had his way, he told me, he would spend far more time here. I had been introduced to half-a-dozen cousins and brothers-in-law (though not the resident Vulture himself, who was tactfully absent) and could remember none of them. They were not an especially remarkable family save for the direct branch. It was then he had asked me to work for him, to build him an air fleet. I told him I would give the matter great consideration. That night two Circassian houris of the most subtle and astonishing skills were sent to me. My lusts remained unavailable to me, but I appreciated my host’s thoughtfulness. At the time I believed this was something of a guilty gesture on his part, given his interest in Miss von Bek, but I would later learn that ‘guilt’ was not a word in any of the Pasha’s vocabularies.

He had asked me my opinion of Lieutenant Fromental: I said diplomatically that he seemed a pleasant enough young man.

‘He is here to spy on me,’ El Glaoui had murmured with a small smile. ‘He is a secret communist, I think.’

Privately I felt this an overly strong response to Fromental’s Christian humanism, but I held my tongue. I had no will to self-destruction. I am, I have often said, no martyr.

Perhaps it is a little late, even for a new messiah? Sometimes I say to Barnum the Jew, you people might have the right idea. Can things get any worse? Where is this messiah you tell us hasn’t arrived yet? He cannot answer. He will be waiting for his messiah when the rest of us are two feet under, but no doubt he will be standing on my shoulders.

‘I blame the whole thing on the death of the family,’ says Barnum. He is particularly upset because of his girl, who Mrs Cornelius warned him about when she was six.

‘The death of the family,’ I said, ‘is probably our only hope.’ But then I think I knew something about what ‘family first’ means. For my own part I continued to put my faith in the great political ideals we developed throughout the 19th century. Nietzsche is not entirely to be trusted on this. It is to those 19th-century values we should return, not seek some ideal anarchy. ‘Who would wish to live in your Utopia?’ I asked him. Your mother! Anyone else? Some families should be dispersed at birth! I met H. G. Wells in Marrakech. He still had some notion of gigantic crèches as the answer but I suggested it would be simpler to remove, as it were, the father factor. Let the father always be anonymous. This amused him. ‘There are a lot of chaps I know, including me, who’d drink to that,’ he said. ‘Now I know what we have in common!’ Illustre Abraham; procriateur fanatique du Mythe sacrificateur. Herbert Wells had no time any longer for practical science and his social notions were often unsound, but as an inspiration to my generation he had enormous influence. Stalin counted him a close personal friend. Only Mr Mix, I recall, never took to him. But I had grown used to the man’s odd changes of mood. He had developed a chip on his shoulder, I think. Generally he refused to exchange more than a few sentences with me but occasionally would be as amiable, as solicitous, as in old times. I began to suspect he was the slave of some wretched drug.

He would frequently disappear with his camera and his ill-matched crew of Berber donkey-boys and Jewish street-arabs up into the mountains, or would go back to Talouet. In that brooding family fortress of the Clan Glaoua high above the Salt River, the chiefs still gathered in times of crisis to decide the fortunes of the tribes who remained in the Atlas and gave the Glaoua fealty, who had not, in the Berber’s droll saying, exchanged their rifle for a mule.

The Berbers referred to themselves by their clans much as the Scots did and, from my own reading of Rob Roy, their social system and leisure pursuits were almost identical, save that the Moroccans did not at that time have an implacable industrialising ruling power bent on driving them forever into submission, to make them bend before the firm yet not unkind hand of progress. Mr Mix had become something of an enthusiast of these clansmen (‘Berber’ being simply a corruption of the Greek ‘barbarian’) and spent an inordinate amount of time with notebooks recording their dialects and folk practices. I wondered if he did not have some misguided notion that this mysterious people were his ancestors. I suggested it: he denied it. Employed as El Hadji T’hami’s personal film-maker, he said, it was his business to record the glory and variety of the Pasha’s realm. Having no interest in the fine distinctions of one tribe’s scarifications compared to another’s, I realised how these customs must give him a better sense of his own past.

I had also begun to understand that Mr Mix’s discretion came chiefly from his not wishing to embarrass me in front of the other white men. This was typical of my friend’s sensitivity and I let him know that I thoroughly appreciated what he was doing. When we were alone, he resumed the old, easier manner of our comradeship. Yet even here he seemed to nurse some sort of resentment. More than once he suggested that I get on the first train to Casablanca and go from there to Italy where, he said, I really belonged. They needed me there, he said. At first I took this for a warming concern for my well-being. But then I began to realise that in certain respects he was trying to get me away from Marrakech. No doubt he feared that my authority as a spokesman for Hollywood was rather greater than his own. Yet he continued about his film-making unhindered by me, while the Pasha seemed perfectly content to use him for recording special occasions and for help with the foreign press when they required interviews or newsreel footage. Effectively, Mr Mix had been elevated to the position of press attaché to the Pasha, as well as Court Recorder. I was still unsure, in those early days at Court, exactly how Mr Mix had come by his appointments while now yearning for the railroads of home. As to my own fortunes, I joked to Lieutenant Fromental, I was now both Court Engineer, Jester and Royal Plane-maker.

Marrakech is the most exquisite of all Moorish settlements. She is a timeless city, the colour of her red marigolds and green palmeries, of bloody milk and a sky as flat, as tranquil and as blue as any perfectly painted Hollywood firmament. Her days are full of the smells of beasts, mint, saffron and musk, of henna and fresh-picked oranges, of mounded carrots and leeks and a dozen different mysteriously gnarled husks, of tea and sweet sherbet and boiling couscous, of roasting sheep and goat-stew, of honey and coffee and the dyer’s wells, of heavy tobacco smoke and the thick, tempting whiffs of kif, of sour milk and sweet flesh, of heated mud in the summer and sour dampness in the winter, when the clogging open drains are flushed away and even the Frenchman’s sewers cannot take the sudden flood. Marrakech is one of the magic cities of the Earth, a busy, modern Maghribi metropolis, where automobiles and camels argue on equal terms for right of way through her narrow lanes. Marrakech, at any season, is superbly beautiful. In the spring she is at her finest, with great snow-capped mountains visible on every side, and her mile upon mile of palm groves making a lush deep emerald setting for a city nestling like a glowing ruby at the heart.

She is beautiful in the rain, when her trees and shrubs are dark with the weight of water and her walls begin to glisten; she is beautiful in the summer when her rich, raw colours bring a hint of the desert. She was founded in the year William the Conqueror made London his capital. Even when the harsh sandstorms rush into her streets like some relentless harka, and for weeks at a time it is almost impossible to move without feeling blinded and gagged by that steady tide of red dust, even then there is a wildness to her scenery, a certain nobility in the way in which her stately palms and sturdy people take their battering. Unless your imagination has died it is impossible not to love her. More than Paris, she has the ability to seduce and hold the traveller within the comfort of her massive battlements. For Marrakech is, of necessity, a walled city. It is a few years, not decades, since her ramparts stood between her people and relentless savagery. Perhaps it is true that here, not out in the desert, I found Temptation and succumbed. El Glaoui’s charm and Marrakech’s magic combined to divert me. Both provided the illusion of scientific progress. El Glaoui was a generous employer. I was introduced to levels of luxury I had never dreamed of. I had the honour, the position, the goodwill - everything the Pasha’s power could put at my disposal. Everything I had ever desired.

‘I am not myself,’ he told me, ‘of an ascetic disbosition. There is more than one way of fulfilling God’s will. God has given me the means to exblore the nature of bleasure. And sometimes,’ he offered me a man-to-man smile, ‘a little bain.’

Miss von Bek expressed the intention of remaining in Marrakech indefinitely. She was my best introduction to Il Duce. I had no choice. I accepted the Pasha’s offer. I decided to give up six to nine months to start the Pasha’s aeronautics industry and fulfil our mutual dream. I began to dress in combinations of tropical European clothing and local splendour - a silk shirt and trousers and silk khufta with pointed babouches on my feet. This was a comfortable style which suited me very well and made a gentle irony of my more Western official titles: Aeronautics Adviser, Chairman and Chief Engineer to La Compagnie de l’Aviation du Monde Nouvelle à Maroc, my task being nothing less than the setting up of a native Moroccan aviation industry that would not merely supply its own forces but would sell its machines abroad.

‘Here we have ideal conditions for flying and landing aeroblanes. That is the reason why Marrakech should naturally be the aviation manufacturing cabital of the Mediterranean,’ El Glaoui told me with infectious confidence on the first day he welcomed me to my up-to-date offices, which might have graced any major Parisian establishment. I make little effort here to reproduce the elaborate circumlocutions and euphemisms of his French. It was, if anything, more full of embellishments and flatteries, innuendo, subtle threats and veiled boasting than his Arabic; yet this quality also added to his enchanter’s power.

Often he pretended to listen but never heard. His own interests were always paramount. Yet his casual generosity and natural intelligence charmed everyone, especially when he returned to the subjects he understood best - war and religion. Even by Moorish standards he had some of the air of the legendary past, an intellectual man of action, and perhaps he deliberately cultivated his personality in the way he built his famous library, but I do not think so. Given a civilised education and less self-destructive beliefs he would be among us to this day. He was not the only friend of the French to be ruthlessly betrayed. He was even snubbed by Princess Elizabeth when he arrived at her wedding with a small pie. In some ways he was a man of extraordinary simplicity as well as grandeur. The knife with which to cut the pie was sheathed in a scabbard of jewel-encrusted gold. But no. Coconuts from Tonga she would take, buckets of bongu beans she would take. But a priceless - and witty - offering from the great Pasha of Marrakech was spurned. By this time, of course, the pro-Zionist stranglehold on Europe and America was unbreakable. El Glaoui knew the Jews had shamed him. He had trusted them too long with his affairs. But already he was exhausted. He died without friends, humiliated and shunned by his inferiors, while the streets of his noble city rang once more to the clash of tribal arms. But that was in 1956, a year which can only be compared to 1453 in significance to Christendom. It was also, as El Glaoui knew, the Death of Arab Chivalry. 1956 was the year in which Christendom tested her strength and was found wanting; in which Bolshevism tested her strength and conquered; when godless Arabs set up a secular state and the Jews bought Tunisia from the French; when the British abolished third-class accommodation in trains by calling it second-class and let New York command her to give up the sacred trust of Suez. Britain is America’s puppy-dog now. She never knows who her real friends are. She had her visionaries. They foresaw a great independent Arabia; an Arabia ruled by dignified caliphs with firm but unflinching justice. They saw an Arabia where the Knights of the Round Table might form again, to demonstrate their religious ideals through deed and word. The greatest of Arabia’s lords have always taken comfort in the words of Jesus, whom they recognise as a significant prophet. Their quarrel with Christians is that they refuse to see that Mahommed was the most recent and most important of God’s prophets and submit themselves to His will as their souls must surely be calling out to do. What evil, what terrible secret dishonour, can be the Christian’s if he cannot accept the truth of Islam? Yet we could have respected one another. We have, after all, more than one common enemy. Which is not to say I have ever advocated intercourse between the two persuasions on anything but the most superficial level. They should be allowed to remain in their enclave, their Zone of Peace, on condition they no longer shop at Harrods and British Home Stores. Let us all live and let live, I have always said. But they were not the old, gentlemanly type of Muslim, like El Glaoui or those whom Lawrence recruited; they are a coarser breed altogether, made not in the desert’s tempering heat, but in the air-conditioned halls of some artificial Florida. These oil people are not trained to power’s responsibilities. Wagner knew this. One of my conversations with Graf Otto and Lieutenant Fromental concerned the composer’s profound Christianity and his respect for Buddhism and Islam, both of which at their best preached the ideals of Chivalry he so thoroughly celebrated in his last mighty work, Parsifal, with its exhortation to us all to come together in common brotherhood, to make of ourselves the very best we can. This was the old Code of Islam, too. And the old Platonic ideal. Schmaltz was a critic of French North African policy. In destroying the Islamic codes and replacing them with French, the Quai d’Orsay was actually encouraging anarchy.

‘You are contemptuous of these barbaric laws and traditions. But imagine coming to 13th-century France and deciding that chivalry, old-fashioned and primitive, should be done away with. Like it or not you have destroyed their only ethic, since the one you offer in exchange is to them no more than an aspect of an alien rule they already resent.’

Lieutenant Fromental protested at this: ‘El Glaoui is a true friend of the French.’

‘Because friendship with the French is all that sustains his rule. He has made his decisions and knows he must follow them through. I am not accusing our host of lack of courage, sir! But Moorish chivalry is dying, too, believe me. Were the French to go tomorrow they would leave behind a ruined myth - a bewildered monster. They do not ask for theories of democracy. They should be offered what those theories are based on. And that, I believe, is the Christian religion or something very much like it. In exchange for their freedom you are offering these people a modern philosophy that is at least three hundred years ahead of their needs.’ I think Graf Otto was expressing some of that fashionable paganism which brought Weimar to its knees, but he was of a fine old tolerant South German stock and I later found it very difficult to believe he was guilty of those crimes. He was interested in Kolya’s theories about Wagner, whom he called ‘the great modern genius’. ‘I should like to talk to your Russian prince,’ he said. I told him that it was quite likely he would. Kolya could even now be on his way to Morocco, although Fate might also have taken him into some more remote region of the Muslim world.

‘Wagner is the future,’ declared Count Schmaltz. ‘These gleamingly finished innovations! They turn with such novel precision, like highly-finished movements in some massively complex machine. It is the sublime music for the twentieth century. Strauss and Mahler are mere flounderers, desperately presenting us with novelties and cacophony rather than substance and sublime melody.’

‘The light so bright and the shade so black!’ exclaimed Fromental. ‘Oh, those inspired vulgarities!’ And he laughed admiringly. He had a Frenchman’s traditional suspicion of German seriousness.

‘You are an opponent of imperialism, I take it.’ His attitude towards Count Schmaltz was rather challenging. We all knew that Schmaltz had an East African family whom he planned to visit after he left Marrakech. ‘Would you rather have French influence here, my dear Count, or the kind of barbarism which existed throughout this century before we arrived?’

‘We were not comparing benign foreign imperialism to savage tribalism,’ declared the German. ‘I would agree, the first permits at least a modicum of opposition while feudalism permits none. But those are not the only choices. That is my point.’

‘You think, do you old boy, the weaker Power should be permitted to determine with which strong Power it links its destiny?’ Mr Weeks’s favourite argument held that, given the choice, most countries outside Europe, including America, would prefer to live under the amiable protection of the Union flag. Indeed he had some notion of a Pax Britannica which would dominate the globe by means of gigantic airships, expanding trade, increasing the wealth of all who elected to join his great Commonwealth of Nations. He saw his country’s Empire as the core of a new World Order, making justice and peace available to all. While I had every affection for his optimistic dream I could not see it becoming a reality without invoking the power of Christ, and Mr Weeks, among many other quirks of character, attested to a firm and old-fashioned atheism. Frequently other guests (who visited for a week or two and were often clearly no more than anecdote-hunters who would use their exotic experience as after-dinner topics for the next ten or twenty years) would grow vehement with what they considered Mr Weeks’s socialism, but in fact he called himself a syndicalist and based his particular creed on the work of that droning naturist William Morris, who insisted on working naked in his Oxford carpentry shop in imitation of his hero Blake. Both thought they could build the New Jerusalem upon interminable verse with an artist’s palette and a couple of dovetail joints. Mr Weeks quarrelled only with the PreRaphaelite’s muscular Protestantism, but excused him for it on the grounds of being born too early. I can see the madman now, with his great bottom shining over the limewashed table, those mighty genitals, which made him they said such a Tarzan to his Jane, swinging with manly insouciance above the falling shavings as he tackles another sideboard with his ever-accurate awl! I am no denigrator of Morris as a furniture-maker, nor as a decorator. More than once Mrs Cornelius had said how much she fancied his wallpaper, but it is too expensive, even from Sanderson’s. G. K. Chesterton was another disciple of that hearty Victorian visionary and came to promote his views through a newspaper he founded. I saw nothing wrong with his ideas, any more than with Mr Weeks’s, but they were as flawed by Catholicism as Weeks’s were flawed by apostasy. These days such large men become transvestites. They are never content.

There is a considerable similarity between working for a Moroccan Pasha and a Hollywood Mogul. Both have a tendency to keep you waiting for hours, sometimes months. Both are inclined to change their minds rather more often than they change their undershirts and always find it surprising that you should fail to anticipate their every momentary whim (which usually involved dismantling anything which has already been created). Your master also provides a rich but erratic flow of money, which makes it impossible for you to make long-term plans and puts you permanently at his disposal. He wishes you to socialise with him, to become his confidant when, at three in the morning, he has become bored with his latest sexual conquest. On other occasions you can expect him to pass you by without even recognising you. You are no more than a shadow-player in his complicated vanities. Like one of his women or boys, you are merely something to pass the time with. And yet, while you remain in his favour, you are invested by him with considerable power of your own. Much of his authority becomes yours even though to him you are no more nor less useful and worthy of affection than a good gun-dog. My latest patron was, I had to admit, somewhat more tolerant than most tyrants of human weakness, and so weary was I of my ordeal I grew very swiftly to welcome the opulence, to rest at last under the patronage of the Pasha. I came to take as natural the power and the immediate security of my position at the Pasha’s court, just as I had come to take Hollywood for granted. Indeed I might have been in Hollywood when I awoke in the morning to stand on my balcony and look through tall palms, across Moorish roofs and battlements, past the towers of the muezzin to the mountains. Why should I not give up a few months of my life to this wonderful venture? I had no great reason to rush back to America. I drank sherbet. I read books. What else could I do?

A few days after I had arrived I again buttonholed Mr Mix. This time I put my hand over his lens and humorously warned him that I should do this every time I saw him unless he came to my room at Le Transatlantique that evening. He agreed with the quick, unthinking air of a boy not used to following his own desires. ‘I’ll be there. Now let me go, Max.’ But he was reluctant, disturbed. He seemed fatigued, almost maniacally distracted. For the first day or two I had been given quarters in the Pasha’s palace, one of several small buildings adjacent to the courtyard housing honoured guests or high-ranking officials. All were built of the same salmon-coloured piste, with green tiled roofs, and their windows looking only inward, like every traditionally built house in the part of Marrakech they were beginning to call ‘the Medina’, meaning ‘Old City’. The new French administrators and merchants raised themselves fine mansions beyond the walls. Some of these, save for their distinctive colours, could have graced any provincial street from Brussels to Barcelona. Whatever its benefits, imperialism also has a knack for banality.

I was now staying as the Pasha’s guest at the only reasonable hotel in Marrakech, Le Transatlantique, in honour, I think, of the Americans who had begun to find the new colony safe at last for a daring fling at the mysterious East. Americans will go anywhere so long as it has familiar toilet facilities. The first action of any nation wishing to attract US dollars is to order its porcelain from Thomas Crapper and Sons, the great originals. Thus Britain, too, benefits from her new master’s psychology. ‘Without the Americans,’ says the plumber in the pub (they call him ‘Flash’ Gordon), ‘the British toilet industry would be down the drain.’ He has no other range of metaphor. ‘Once the Japanese dribble in, it’ll pull the plug on Staffordshire,’ he predicts. His politics are crass. He once said that people like me were blocking the sewer of history. If so, it’s because history can’t afford to call you out, I told him. These plumbers are all the same. They are famous throughout the world. Mention frustration to a Berliner and he will speak of plumbers, mention extortionate bills and the Bombay brahmin will cry ‘plumber’. In Cairo the plumber is a term applied to any bloodsucker or blackmailer while in Sydney to ‘sink a plumber’ means to get your own back. Muscovites, even today, cite the plumber as the example of the vulgar nouveaux riches now rubbing shoulders in the same apartment blocks with academics and engineers! ‘And you have the nerve,’ I cry to Gordon, ‘to accuse me of exploitation!’ The plumbing at Le Transatlantique near the Mammounia Gardens left something to be desired (although it was of the European rather than the Turkish type) since the water frequently had to be turned off for mysterious reasons. However, I was able to take regular showers and use Western soap and this, just then, was luxury enough. Even the most thoroughly hospitable desert peoples tend to be parsimonious around water - unless they are of that type which delights in spectacular waste. Mrs Cornelius had a cleaning job with an Arab once. Everywhere in the house there was a tap, she said, it was running full-blast. He loved the sound of it above all other music, he said, and it was costing him nothing!

Mr Mix came to see me at my suite on the top floor of Le Transatlantique. From my balcony it was possible to look out into the warmth of the summer night, at the natural geometry of palmeries and distant mountains beneath the diamond stars and the golden moon. My valet having gone to bed, I opened the door for Mix myself. My whole suite was furnished in that opulent Moorish style found elsewhere only in restaurants, with a profusion of slippery leather and wood saddles no self-respecting camel would allow on her back and upon which no rider could keep a seat. Mr Mix stepped in and closed the mirrored door behind him. He was wearing his big bush hat and khaki tropical kit. He removed his hat and accepted the sherbet I offered him (I had yet to redevelop my taste for alcohol and only drank it for social reasons). He asked immediately if I had any ‘snow’ and I said I had a little. I could spare him a sniff or two. He was grateful and became immediately human. He apologised. ‘I’ve had to give you the ice, Max. The Pasha doesn’t like his boys having conflicting loyalties. But now you’re on the team I guess it’s okay. I’ll tell you this fast, Max, I’m in a jam and I want to get out of here. I’m in hock to the Pasha and I’m working off my debt to him.’

Now I understood immediately and was overcome with sympathy. ‘Mr Mix! You are buying yourself back! So you were, after all, captured by slavers!’

He seemed embarrassed. ‘Not exactly, Max.’ He leaned forward in his leather settee, found purchase and steadied himself as he lowered his nose to the straw and the straw to the little ribbon of cocaine I had laid out for him.

‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘But after I jumped ship at Casablanca I had this idea of riding the train up as far as here and then seeing what happened.’

‘You were not captured by gypsies?’

‘Those guys. They’re bums. They tried to rob me. No, I bought a ticket and boarded a train, first class, all my stuff in the luggage wagon. A compartment to myself once I got the idea I had to slip the right number of francs to the right people. Only it went to Rabat. I awoke still looking out at the Atlantic Ocean! Then, before I could get off, it went to Fez. Well, on the train to Fez I met an Algerian entertainment promoter. He fixed it for local acts to entertain the tourists, that kind of thing, but he also ran a couple of burlesque theatres in Tangier. He was planning to open two more in Casablanca and another one in Marrakech.’

‘He offered you the chance you’d always wanted to act,’ I said. ‘How could you refuse? What was it - some sort of coon number? Your dancing skills alone - ‘

He lifted a tired hand which begged me not to interrupt. ‘We came to a deal. It seemed good to me since it would give me control of the Marrakech theatre. I’d begun to figure out that Africa wasn’t going to be a whole lot different to America. Nobody welcomed me as a long-lost brother. They just wanted to know why I’d been fool enough to leave and how much dough I’d brought with me. Mainly it was like Valentino said when he got back to the States - “In the world, I was a hero, in Italy, I was just another wop.” Here, I’m just another nigger - and in Tangier that means about what it means in Tennessee. So I’m cheated blind by my business partner who is about to get hold of my stock in the company and I decide to get the hell out of there and come to Marrakech myself where I’d heard the boss was almost a nigger and it was possible for a gentleman of colour to get along better than in the North. So I finally got there, overland, making a little money as I went. By the time I arrived three months ago I had enough to open The Ciné Palace in what used to be an old slaughterhouse off Djema al Fna’a near the Katoubia Mosque. It was all remodelled. Believe me, Max, it’s the ritziest little theatre outside Casablanca. We opened in June and business boomed. I’m not kidding you, Max, we had to have big buck Berber hillmen to keep those boys out. I’ve seen the alternatives. Believe me, Ace Among Aces beats snake-charmers and the two-thousandth re-telling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These boys’ll pay good money to see a movie. Any movie! It doesn’t matter a damn what the moulas say, they go anyway. All I had to do was square a couple of the big religious guys and make sure we scheduled the programmes between prayers. That’s five shows a day, morning till night, seven days a week, and every one packed. The same guys came back show after show. These people don’t believe they’ve got the best out of a story unless they’ve heard it told a hundred times. They never got tired of the programmes!’

It had begun to dawn on me that the reason for my reception as we entered the city, indeed the alacrity with which the Pasha put his aeroplane scheme to me, all had something to do with Mr Mix’s business venture. But why was my old compañero now forced to work off a debt to the Pasha?

‘What I didn’t know is that T’hami has a financial finger in almost every pie in the city. He’s the managing director of the mining companies, the import and export companies, banks, newspapers, whatever’s lucrative. The smaller businesses he lets his big boys squeeze, while the little ones only have to pay a rake-off to a local official. Me, I wasn’t paying anyone except the guys from the mosque. I guess nobody ever thought the Palace’d catch on. Well, it didn’t take T’hami long - he’s quicker than Al Capone to pick up on a new angle - and one day I get an offer. He’s going to buy me out, he says, and make me manager. Or, he says, he can throw me in jail as an illegal immigrant, or he can send me back to the US, or he can fine me. That’s when I found out he’s not just the Mayor of Marrakech but the whole damn’ Justice Department, judge and jury rolled into one. My case is already tried. I owe him a hundred thousand dirham in fines for my illegal business and The Ciné Palace is confiscated with all its stock. Well, Max, I had fifty thousand francs in my hotel room which his gorillas found and “taxed” and I was flat broke again!’

‘You did not seek the aid of the American Consul?’

‘They couldn’t help me,’ was all he would say to that.

‘And The Ciné Palace?’

‘I took some screws out of the projectors and they broke down in a couple of days. I thought I was being clever. I told El Glaoui I could get it running again but I had to take it to Tangier for repair. He said he would send for a new one. It still hasn’t arrived and meanwhile two local engineers had a look at the projectors which now work pretty good except that most of their lenses are missing. I can’t even get to the stock. T’hami’s hidden it somewhere. So here I am. I’d even sent to Casa for some English and Egyptian movies. It would have made a change from White Aces with the middle reels missing and The Lost Buckaroo with a scratch down the middle of the final chapter.’

‘They seem to have a preference for Max Peters movie plays,’ I said with some satisfaction. Realisation had dawned! I saw from Mr Mix’s expression that it had been he who had taken the missing films when he absconded. It was my films, shown over and over again, the length and breadth of Morocco, their titles changed to dramatic Arabic, that had been the basis of the darkie’s lucrative business! I experienced a peculiar stirring in my stomach - the strangest mixture of betrayal and gratitude. This was why we had not been captured as Italian spies. This was why El Glaoui remained so firmly under the impression that we were American moviemakers, why he so solicitously courted me and cunningly trapped the black man.

I remained silent for several moments as Max shrugged his apologies. ‘It was the only way out I had, Max. I knew there were other prints. I guess I was only stealing a little of your vanity while to me it was a way of keeping alive.’

‘Easier to have remained aboard,’ I said at last.

‘I couldn’t, Max. I’d tried to wise you up. My feet was itching. I was bound to go.’

I understood this impulse, though I could hardly sympathise with it.

‘And my films are now the personal property of the Pasha?’

‘I guess so. Maybe we could buy them back.’

I sighed, hardly able to blame the black man for what he had done. One must not judge other races by one’s own high standards. I told him I was glad the mystery was cleared up. I was, I said sadly, still pleased we had been reunited.

‘Believe me, Max,’ he said. ‘I was glad to see you. You don’t know the half of it. My luck’s been worse than a bull’s in a bullock truck. I need to get to Tangier!’

‘But I’m not going to Tangier.’ I hardly knew how to respond.

‘You will, Max,’ he said. ‘And when you do, I’ll be right there with you.’

He thanked me for the cocaine. It would help him, he said, with his official duties. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘I got to fly. Don’t think too badly of me, Max. We’ll get your movies back.’

When he had gone I became, for some reason, increasingly cheerful. Now I knew the cause of my current success and was relieved. What was more, the record of my Hollywood career, if not complete, was at least safe. I decided that part of my price for my services would be the films he held as security against Mr Mix’s absconding. Doubtless it would not be easy to get him to agree and I must bide my time, choose my moment. With this decision firmly made I gave my whole attention to the job before me. I had made all my initial plans and projections, estimates and costings (in dollars and francs) long before the Pasha sent for me. There was trouble, apparently, with the succession, and he had been involved in the enthronement of the new Sultan. I made the most of my time. My normal lusts at last fully restored, and Marrakech famous for her beautiful whores who came to stand at night around the perimeters of the Djema al Fna’a, a short stroll from my hotel, I lost myself in possessing several partners every night.

Save that Marrakech had no coast, the city somehow seemed to be an uncanny echo of Hollywood. She set up astonishing resonances in me. Just as I had felt in Hollywood, I felt now in Marrakech as if I had come home. And still I could not readily identify any real points of similarity between those two very like cities and the very unlike city of Kiev where I spent most of my childhood.

Marrakech might eventually become Carthage’s film-making capital, and spread the ethic of Islam across the Earth, as we tried to distribute the ethic of Christianity. But one ethic is Death and the other is Life. Today Life falls back before Death’s steady gallop. It is time, I said to Mrs Cornelius, we had a miracle. She replied cryptically that she thought I’d had enough of miracles. And she laughed so heartily she began to experience one of her coughing fits, so I never could get her to explain. ‘Your lungs will get you in the hospital,’ I said. ‘You should smoke filters.’ But she is careless of such things. And anyway I think she is sometimes as happy now as she has ever been, sitting in her old armchair in her damp basement full of mildewing magazines, sipping from her gin glass and talking to that little black-and-white cat her son dotes on. It is unfortunate she does not notice the smell. But she insists on doing her own housework. ‘I’ve orlways bin neat but not fussy,’ she says. ‘There’s no point gettin’ upset over a bit o’ catshit on the carpet, is there?’ She laughs and her fat moves like the ruffles on a seaside pierrot, reminding me of her brief return to the stage in the forties, when she entertained the troops and did six straight weeks at the Kilburn Empire with the Miller Brothers - Karl, Jonny and Max - when they were still all comedians.

I think I was happiest with her during our Hollywood days and later in the 50s when she began to seek my company more frequently. I had moved to Notting Hill because it was where she lived. I was still very active and hopeful in those days, although she complained I looked too readily on the gloomy side. Then we began to go on holiday together. At first it was just the occasional trip to Brighton or Margate or Hampton Court, but as time went on she discovered she enjoyed my company and found it amusing to book a boarding-house for a week just to talk, in the evening, about our adventurous past, before the War. ‘Ther Wor sorta sobered us up,’ she thought. ‘But ter tell yer the troof, Ivan, I get as much fun art o’ a charabang to Butlins as I do art o’ swiggin’ champers at Biarritz.’ I must admit I have not been able to share her enthusiasm, though I always did my best to get into the spirit of her fun. We went to Minehead in Somerset two years running in 1949 and 1950 and had very good weather. We went to St Ives in Cornwall in 1952 and spent a miserable day on a boat to the Scilly Isles while she regurgitated (mostly over the side) the accumulated dainties and savouries of the previous twenty-four hours. A veritable cornucopia of half-digested tarts and pies. Arriving at the Scillies we found nothing but sand-dunes and a few unremarkable houses and I had been led to believe these were the remains of the Isle d’Avilion where Arthur came to die. ‘No question abart that bit, Ivan,’ she assured me between gulps of ozone and dramatic bodily eruptions as she plodded helplessly back towards the boat. The Sea of Scilly might have been the Styx.

T’hami el Glaoui, respected chief of his clan and undisputed ruler of half Morocco, power-broker to the other half, sent for me after I had been his idle employee in Marrakech for almost a month. He was in his study overlooking the palace’s great courtyard in which shady shrubs surrounded a splashing fountain of the most splendid mosaic. On mornings like this I could imagine myself in Byzantium, paying a call upon some Greek dignitary. Unfortunately T’hami, for all his virtues, continued to have the reality of a suburban usurer and, until he spoke at least, was inclined to disappoint expectations. Moreover, he was dwarfed by the heavy Spanish antique furniture which gave the room the appearance of a crowded museum. Part of his great library was here. He was rumoured to read only with difficulty and to have stolen most of the books.

He wished people to think him wise, true, but T’hami had actually read much of his library and understood some of it far better than I. Like a real bookman he took pleasure in the feel and smell of his volumes. Today we stood by the window looking down at a print table on which he had spread my designs. Behind us were the lovely arches, domes and tiles of the best Moorish architecture, which again reminded me of a Hollywood tycoon’s offices. It is, sadly, an architecture which has been readily vulgarised by every modernist who ever designed a suburban picture-palace or a picnic park. ‘I have been looking through these just now,’ said El Glaoui, smiling up at me. ‘They are very good, I think. I have had one or two exberts give them a glance. I hobe you don’t mind.’

I murmured something about the patents being already registered.

‘Well,’ he said, adjusting his little silk collar, ‘in sbite of young Lieutenant Fromental’s view of the matter, I think we can begin building some aeroblanes, Mr Beters.’ He was delighted by my response and laughed aloud.

‘You are a man who loves these things!’

‘More than my own life, I sometimes think.’

He enjoyed this. Like most tyrants, wherever they occur, he approved of strong expressions and opinions as long as they did not conflict with his own. He became by turns avuncular, brotherly, respectful, intimate, yet always the confident authority. As I knew from Mr Mix, he had, though it would be impolitic to employ it, the power of life and death over everyone in Marrakech and her surrounds; more power than the nominal ruler in Rabat; enough power (and he desired no more, for he was by nature a cautious man) to hold the balance between the French, the rebels and the Sultan. Even while I marvelled at the Glaoui’s sudden decision, he made a further suggestion. ‘I think we should have one of each tybe at first. Meanwhile brint a catalogue which will describe the virtues of our machines. Use as many colours and photos as you like. As the orders arrive, we shall make the aeroblanes. That way the cabital investment comes from the customer. What do you think?’

I was merely glad that I was again going to be busy doing the thing I loved best. I would bide my time before I raised the question of the confiscated Buckaroos. There was no point in arguing with the Pasha, who would jovially have promised anything and then declared that it was a police matter and out of his hands. So has the East learned to use the language and cherished institutions of the West to its sublime advantage.

‘We will number them, I suggest,’ he continued, ‘and berhabs give them names. As I see you have done in your sketches. The Desert Wind is one I had in mind. Or is that a little too brovincial, do you think?’

‘We should select a theme,’ I suggested, ‘as you see I have done over here. These are the names of animals - you will recall Sopwith’s famous Camel - and these are of oceans - The Pacific, The Atlantic, The Indian - or weather conditions - Typhoon, Hurricane, Maelstrom, Sandstorm.’ I admitted my own preference was for birds - The Hawk, The Swallow, The Owl and The Snowgoose. My ship is called The Silver Cloud. She is crewed entirely by bright-eyed Slavs. He settled for the birds. He said he had heard that I, in fact, was nicknamed ‘The Hawk’ in certain quarters. I admitted I had been honoured thus by the Bedouin of the Eastern Sahara.

‘I, too, have been likened to a bird of brey.’ He turned to the window and the music of his fountains. ‘I am sometimes named “The Eagle of the Atlas” while my boor nephew Hamoun, alas, you know, is “The Vulture”. So we are “of the same feather”, I think?’ I have made no effort to reproduce his peculiar mixture of elaborate Arabic, rather simple French and broken English. I know women found this especially charming. ‘What do you say, Brofessor Beters?’

His manly clap on the back filled me with an odd sense of pride. I had no doubt that I had discovered a fellow-genius. It was always of deep regret to me that he used it in such shortsighted and unChristian ways. I was never a hypocrite. While I came to attend the mosque at least once a week and to be as dutiful in my daily worship as El Hadji T’hami himself, frequently to be found reading from the Holy Q’ran, my deepest prayers were addressed to a somewhat more progressive God. I did not, however, live a lie. My faith matured during my time in Marrakech and I had many debates with myself concerning the nature of God and His role for me. I learned to accept the responsibilities of my position. I was after all a great international celebrity according to the Pasha’s extraordinary court. I was as often at his palace as I was at my desk. Almost every day brought a new visitor from Europe. Our work proceeded with the leisurely pace which at first frustrates the European until, one day, he discovers he has learned to prefer it and regard it as the only civilised way. I was, I now see, lured by something very like the luxuries and the flatteries of Satan.

The Pasha’s advisers were all Jews. One of the youngest was a great enthusiast of my Masked Buckaroo films and saw me as something of a hero. He insisted, to the amusement of his fellows, on quizzing me on every detail, every mystery of young Tex Riordan’s career. I did my best to answer him and was a little flattered by his attention. He was a Europeanised Jew of the more intelligent sort. He had been educated at a French school. I knew him as Monsieur Josef. These Jews were frequently seated beside me during meals and were friendly enough to me. Some understood Yiddish. They were clever, quick-talking men, who made the Pasha laugh. To these alone he would give his full attention, for they advised him on all his many interests throughout the country, whether they were agricultural, mining or manufacturing. It was through listening to his Jews that I began to understand something of his master-plan. He was not interested in challenging the Sultan by force of arms. He was instead building himself a modern commercial empire as vast and as varied as Hearst’s or Hughes’s. Like them, like Rothschild or Zaharoff, he had discovered the crucial importance of modern engineering to the improvement of his fortunes and would in time come to own the Moroccan press. He would develop power and influence in the democratic style. Increasingly the echoes between my masters in Hollywood and my master in Marrakech became louder and better defined, and at first I found this amusing. Thinking it might solve our mutual problems, I suggested to Mr Mix that we make some good old-fashioned picture-plays while awaiting the Pasha’s pleasure, but he threw cold water on the idea. ‘Already,’ he said, ‘I’m running out of film stock. Some was ordered from Pathé in Casa, but it’s still not here. Soon I’m going to have to start faking it. Or try for some interesting double-exposures!’

So I devoted myself to my aeroplanes. I moved into a marvellous house on several levels in the new French Quarter being built on the far side of the walls, beyond the Bab Djedid, the gateway through which the Avenue Katoubia ran. The house was fully staffed with slaves from the Pasha’s own palace, including several young creatures who were provided purely for my pleasure. I had my own carriage at my permanent disposal, bearing the Pasha’s arms to show that in every case I had right of way. Through the healing routines of the leisurely Moorish court I began to forget my ordeal in Egypt. I thought sometimes of Kolya, that wonderful friend, and his noble stubbornness which had left him in such a difficult position. But I had faith in Kolya! Slave or free man, he would survive somewhere and I knew in my bones we would one day meet again and share a joke about our hallucinatory desert escapade. Although continuing to avoid any public closeness to me, Miss von Bek remained the Pasha’s mistress for longer than anyone could remember. His negro vizier, Hadj Idder, who was El Glaoui’s closest confidant and a freed slave, was delighted. He said that his master had found a playmate. It was true, it seemed to us, that the Glaoui had, according to his habit, selected fresh sport for his evenings, but Miss von Bek always occupied a good deal of his daily life. His horses, his golf course, his cars were at her disposal. Again, typically, he remained jealous of their friendship and more than once had turned a severe eye upon a man he suspected of admiring her. She and I had become adept at disguising our brief communications, with the result that a new intensity of feeling existed between us. Only Hadj Idder suspected us. Like so many Marrakchis, he was himself a devotee of The Masked Buckaroo and had complimented me several times on my acting but this enthusiasm did nothing to shake his loyalty to the Pasha to whom he was as devoted as Mr Mix was to me. Hadj Idder had the manner of a Christian nun, except that he delighted not in God’s work but the Pasha’s. It was rumoured that they were half-brothers and lovers, and we could believe almost anything of a relationship by far the closest El Glaoui had with any creature. Hadj Idder’s great African head would grin with delight at each new pleasure his master took. At these times he and Mr Mix would look very much alike. He would chuckle and yell or grow sad in appreciation of every passing humour. And yet when acting on the Pasha’s part he became as dignified as any butler of a great Southern mansion in the years of Dixie’s tranquillity. At these times he was a diplomat, discreet and incorruptible - perhaps the only living human being aside from myself at that court who could not somehow be bought. He was trusted for the same good reasons the World Service of the BBC is still trusted in many quarters.

I had suggested we use the crippled cinema for a factory, hoping my reels were still there, but I was presented instead with a great shed on the city’s outskirts. It had been originally an experimental palmery but was abandoned due to some dispute between El Hadj T’hami’s cousin, who was the managing director, and the French interest, who made some complaint about the lack of trained staff. The staff, naturally, were all relatives or clients of the ruler. I had as yet no materials with which to begin my work and spent a good deal of my day at my drawing-board, producing the very latest in catalogues. This, eventually, was sent to a printer in Tangier, whereupon there came a further long delay, during which time I was, of course, supported in luxury but received no salary. The similarities with Hollywood became clearer by the day. My hours passed in clouds of kif and cocaine smoke. I learned to leave my ‘plane factory’ in charge of a servant and repair, after a long siesta, to the Djema al Fna’a. The great public square of Marrakech is surrounded by shops and cafes and little streets leading into a maze of souks where everything, including arak, is readily for sale. The square is called The Congress of the Dead and there are several legends to explain its name, the most likely being that here the rotting bodies of rebels were habitually displayed. Here, preserved by Jews whose ghetto in the Maghrib was always called mellah (salt), the heads of the Pasha’s enemies would, before French protection, stare across the square to where the leisured classes, the great merchants and worthies of Marrakech, sipped their mint tea and discussed the price of pomegranates, gravely clear about the price of dissent. Here, towards sunset, everyone would gather to gossip, to trade and to be entertained. The leaping snake-charmers and squatting story-tellers, the gypsy fortune-tellers and Berber drummers, the sword-swallowers and sinuous fire-eaters, the tumblers and grotesques would come pouring into the Square of the Dead with their yells and whoops and wild ululations, their strutting and their boasting, their capering, their tall tales, their display of skills, of lazily curling snakes and monkeys and exotic birds, of lizards on strings and locust lanterns. In the orange warmth of the dying sun, in and out of the long shadows, the braziers sent up the smell of roasting nuts and skewers of lamb, of cooking fruit and couscous, of those delicious little sausages and breads for which there are a thousand names, of saffron rice and thick vegetable stews, the tajins and the pastillas of pigeon and almonds which all Southerners love to eat, for Marrakech is the Paris of the Maghrib, with the finest food cooked before your eyes on the little kerosene stoves and charcoal fires of the street-traders, gathering around the edges of the Djema al Fna’a, their lamps beginning to glow warmly in the gathering dusk. Meanwhile the huge crimson orb shudders as she falls deeper and deeper through a sky turning the colour of coral and cooling steel behind the sharp teeth of the Atlas; smells of jasmine and lavender waft by as the veiled women go about their mysterious tasks, buying the food for their husband’s evening meal, visiting relatives or the mosque. The tasselled carriages, pulled by brightly harnessed horses so much healthier than those of Egyptian cities, trot slowly in and out of the square between entertainers, singers, zealots and fakirs. Every Berber and Arab in the region seems to arrive at once in the square. Nobody hurries. They swarm about the vast arena while from the balconies, and from beneath the awnings of the cafes, yelling men and women communicate to each other the latest news of relatives and friends or read important pieces from the newspapers to those who cannot read anything but Classical Arabic or the few who cannot read at all. Here men trust only the Holy Q’ran and the spoken word.

I would make my way through the wailing beggars and yelling street sellers to my favourite table outside the Hotel Atlas and join my cronies, several of whom were colleagues and friends of the Pasha, employees like Mr Weeks, or miscellaneous European visitors who arrived almost daily at the invitation of the Glaoui. Some were commercial people come to see what business could be done with the potentate. This meant, of course, that few of us were ever required to pay for our own pleasure and we were often in amused receipt of envelopes containing banknotes which we pocketed, though we had no special influence. As a result however I was soon able to open an account with the Société Marseillaise de Crédit under the name of Peters; while a more discreet account was opened in the name of Miguel Juan Gallibasta (the name on the passport I still owned) upon the Bank of British West Africa, for, though I received a little direct salary from El Glaoui, I came to understand that in common with his other officials I must make personal arrangements for myself where day-to-day cash was concerned. Mr Weeks assured me that it was quite in order. ‘One must adapt, Mr Peters. When in Rome, you know.’ He had a marvellous manner when some Yankee sewing-machine broker, for instance, who was attempting to sell a hundred machines to the harem at special rates, wanted to know if he could help. He would invariably tell the man that he was prepared to bribe the appropriate people and would, of course, simply pocket the money. When challenged, he would make a significant gesture and would explain the lack of action away as a perfect example of Arab perfidy, for which his victim was of course fully prepared, and accepted fatalistically. The ritual might even begin again.

Slowly but surely, and often by my own efforts, I began to put together a team of boat-builders from Agadir and Mogador, local carpenters and metal-workers who had the skills and intelligence required to turn them into aeroplane-makers. They were all masters of improvisation and set to with a will creating the beautiful shapes I had visualised. My lovely designs - art nouveau in practical machinery - were formed with bent woods and heavy silk, coaxed into reality by loving Moorish craftsmen until the great shed came alive with a dozen gigantic, brilliant dragonflies. All this of course quickened my blood, yet to my growing frustration we had not yet received instructions for engines. I explained to the Pasha that if we were to make our own engines we would need a number of subsidiary factories. He said he did not want more factories so had decided, after much thought, to purchase complete Portuguese engines through a firm in Casablanca. However the Casablanca people soon proved to be having ‘problems with customs’ (obstruction from the Sultan) and so further delays resulted until, from sheer impatience, I took matters into my own hands. I had heard of a machine found by Tuareg herders out on the jol towards Taroudant. Clearly it had landed safely enough, for its undercarriage was only slightly damaged, but the pilot was never found. The machine was an old French Bleriot monoplane and could well have been sitting in the desert since before the War. Lieutenant Fromental failed to trace it from any reports and concluded that the plane had probably belonged to a gentleman flyer who merely abandoned it when its engine, which was even then no doubt clogged, jammed up. The flyer might well have joined a camel-train to Marrakech and from there returned to his own country. Or, even more likely, some Tuaregs caught him and sold him in-country. I never discovered the truth of it, but at least I now possessed one good, if antique, engine. Once I had worked on it for a few days, glad to get back to the practical business of spanners and plugs and cylinders, it functioned perfectly. It was a heavy old Martinez Blanco, of a type which had not been thought particularly suitable even in 1912, but it was all I had, and very soon I was able to instruct my people how carefully to fit it into my own favourite machine, the slender Sakhr el-Drugh, my Hawk of the Peak. And now I had a working aeroplane! Within a week or two I would be airborne again. I could then (I secretly thought) please myself as to whether I remained with the Pasha or went on my way to Rome with Rosie von Bek. I did not intend to betray my employer, but I felt considerably happier that I now had a working machine, a means of escape. I looked forward to testing her. She had an unusually long wing-span of some fifty feet and a slender body covered in scintillating multi-coloured silk. She resembled a magnificent insect. Her body rose on thin hydraulic rods which supported an axle for her wheels. The heavy dark engine looked a little out of place, but I improved the plane’s performance by adding a longer than usual propeller which it was possible to fit thanks to the taller undercarriage, but this increased the insect-like appearance. Sent by El Glaoui to film this fantastic nativity, the production of our new Moroccan air-works, Mr Mix was the first to see her. He said she looked marvellous, like something Douglas Fairbanks might have thought up. I was flattered. Fairbanks remained my film hero for many years, even after it was revealed that the perfect marriage between himself and Mary was a sham and that he was a Hälbjuden. I can’t say I was greatly surprised. She was never suited to adult roles. I had taken the liberty of painting the slogan ‘Ace of Aces’ on both sides of the plane, behind the wings, since I thought this would appeal to possible American buyers while our Arabic recognition symbols exhorted the glory of God and the Glaoui. My workers were forever amazed by every tiny development, by every fresh marvel I had them create. I think they were as proud of our first bird as I. They could foresee a time when, perhaps led by Ace Peters himself, their veiled cavalry would take to the air, to fight with the same valiant cunning they had displayed for centuries on horseback. For my part I saw, somewhat selfishly, and more prosaically, an advertisement for my own genius which was bound to be noted in Italy. I now had, through my patron’s intervention, a fresh passport in my American name as well as my Spanish passport and Moroccan papers. I could travel without fear anywhere in the world. I remembered how I laughed at Shura’s ‘two names are better than one, Dimka, and three are better than two’. Now I realised the wisdom of the maxim! - not for reasons of criminal expansion, but for ordinary insurance in uncertain times. Perek Rachman was a friend of mine. He was much maligned. He said most people were like cattle, neither good nor evil. But they had no imagination. They are shocked by a boy who pays a penny too little for his tram ticket. To them, one’s ordinary precautions for survival are absolute proof of evil. To those of us who have been forced, stateless, from a nation upon which Satan Himself squats - feeding off human blood and souls, His mad red eyes rolling back in His bestial head, His claws reaching for fresh bodies to devour - it merely displays a prudent nature. It is the same with people who claim they have never known a whore, but they talk to one at the bus-stop and think what decent, right-thinking human beings they are, as Mrs Cornelius says, ‘an’ never fuckin’ guessin’ they’re suckin’ cocks fer a livin’.’ Judge not lest ye be judged is something we should all remember.

I began to feel secure for the first time since we had ridden out of Egypt. I felt that the true God was once again my guide.

I go every Easter to Ennismore Gardens, to the Cathedral, for the Vigil. It is the most beautiful service, the Service of the Resurrection sung in Church Slavonic, and there is no more intimate contact with God while it is taking place. I used to watch those little girls singing the Kyrie eleison. Such an optimistic experience. And yet they make some story up in the newspapers and suddenly I am a dirty old man. No one could feel more sentimental than I - who have been brought low by a love of children, after all, and yet still feel no bitterness towards them, they sing so sweetly. I shall magnify Thee with everlasting love. Such spiritual beauty! What harm could I ever bring myself to perform against that beauty, that innocence? But they say I am guilty and bind me over. It was in The Evening Star and nobody locally blamed me. They all said she was a little trollop. Mis Cornelius said her mother had been on the game in Talbot Road since 1958. But nobody cares how they damage the honour of an ‘old Pole’. I tell them I am Ukrainian. They think it is still a province of Poland. Anyway, they call everything over there ‘Russia’. I despair of the ignorance of youth.

I stopped Mr Mix one evening as he came towards me across the guest courtyard. He seemed embarrassed for a moment, as if I had caught him in some private act, such as picking his nose. He offered me the largest smile I had seen for some time and said he heard I was going to test The Hawk of the Peak next week. I asked if he would like to come up with me and he surprised me by saying that he might. ‘I wouldn’t have to fear a plane crash if you were with me, Max.’ But he said he thought his first duty was to keep his feet on the ground and film the event. ‘I am the Lord High Grand Recorder, you know. What?’ Whenever he talked of his duties or his titles he adopted a chortling English stage accent which I never found becoming or dignified.

He assured me he would join me in my second flight, to film the city from the air. He had found a new cache of stock, abandoned two or three years ago by a French film company which had gone bust shooting Salammbô. Some of it might still be good. It was a matter of luck that the sprockets almost matched, he said. I applauded his work. He was creating an archive, I said, which posterity would treasure. He was filming, I thought, a vanishing world. When I discovered that this world was not vanishing at all but was in fact growing and expanding, I did not feel quite the same elegiac sweetness, the same nostalgia for a lost age. Now my nostalgia has found more immediate subjects and I live in fear that my own way of life, not theirs, will suddenly be stolen from me. Big business in its kasbahs, the rest of us in souks and slums. It is not much to ask, to live out one’s days with a little comfort, cultivating a little garden, making enough to live on, talking to neighbours, perhaps occasionally giving someone a helping hand, but no, you are not allowed even that when these people get into power. They take everything. They eat everything up. Their God is a God of Locusts. Their God is a God of Deserts. I know this. I prayed with them but I refused to become one of them. It was impossible. Unlike Christ, says Mrs Cornelius, I was never a joiner. I did not become a Musselman but by then I had learned the Oriental trick of instant submission, for by this means you may survive for the time it takes to escape. Ikh hob nicht moyre! Der flits htot vets kumen. Wie lang wird es dauern? Biddema natla’ila barra! Kef biddi a’mal?

Mr Mix left me, saying he might join me later at the Atlas. I again reflected what pleasure I took in our camaraderie, a pleasure difficult to explain, since we were so different in temperament and intellect, yet his company gave me a sense of secure warmth and I experienced a pang of loss whenever he seemed cool towards me.

Rounding the corner of the guest-wing I next came upon Miss von Bek, who darted me a curious searching look. She seemed dishevelled and yet not in any particular hurry. She stood beside a palm drawing in deep breaths beside a blue pool crossed by an ornamental gilded bridge. She asked how my aeroplane works was progressing and I told her we had our first model ready to fly. I asked her if she would come to see it. The polite question emerged quite innocently from my mouth and yet she responded with alacrity. ‘Down there?’ she said. ‘At the sheds? Good thinking.’ And she blew me a kiss as she disappeared, a sylph in dark green and gold.

My stunned shock gave way to a thrilling sense of foreboding! I realised that inadvertently I had embarked upon a liaison which, if discovered, could very well end in dreadful consequences for us both. Ikh veys nit. . .

I had written to my Californian bank asking them to send me a chequebook and to let me know how they could make my funds available to me. But mail between those two notoriously tardy postal departments would take months. Even Fromental’s exchange of wires (using, against specific military orders, the official telegraph) met with nothing but a vague insistence upon ‘hand-written applications’. Meanwhile, I was dependent upon my local credit (which for the famous Max Peters was considerable) and the Pasha’s good graces (notoriously whimsical). I did not realise then how, in those languorous months, I had become a slave to Oriental self-indulgence, capable of giving myself up to passing temptation like any schoolboy and moved not by lust but by pride, a kind of arrogant sloth, a profound boredom. How is it possible to be taught such unmistakable lessons as Griffith taught us in masterpieces like Intolerance and Birth of a Nation and still not learn to live by them? I, who had worshipped the work and the man, who had based much of my life and philosophy on his, had begun to act like some Victorian prodigal. Yet I could not bear to leave without my confiscated movies. El Glaoui had forgotten them. The projector from Casablanca had still not arrived. I was as they say ‘double bound’. But I have made mistakes in my life and been betrayed. I am the first to admit there is no deceit worse than self-deceit.

That is what the jackal tells us. Anubis, mein Freund.