Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (10 page)

The obvious place to walk to from the Normandie was the sea front, only a hundred yards away. In my linen jacket and white trousers I strolled along the promenade, cameras slung ostentatiously round my neck, and raised the telephoto lens experimentally to look at the lighthouse. One moment I had been looking for someone to photograph, next moment I was surrounded. A hand seized my shoulder, a voice shouted hysterically close to my ear. People came rushing towards me. It seemed to me that they appeared from nowhere, out of the cracks in the pavement. The man who had me in his grip was much smaller than me. He wore a dirty brown fez and a jumper over a T-shirt, something I have always considered a sure sign of bad taste. His face was distorted by hate, his veins and tendons stood out throbbing.

'From where you come?' he screamed, again and again, and when

I said England he went on screaming. 'No. No. From where you come?'

The truth is I had completely forgotten about the war.

Fortunately there was a naval barracks just along the road, and some naval police arrived before the mob grew big enough to lynch me. The sailors were all for treating me in a civilized way, but my captor insisted that they pin my arms behind my back and frog-march me off. He would have liked to see me blindfolded and led before a firing squad there and then.

As soon as we got into the navy yard, they let go of me and apologized profusely. The apologies were taken up more elaborately by captains, majors and finally a colonel who asked me to please not let this unfortunate incident colour my good opinion of Egypt. Eventually a blue jeep was arranged to take me to the General-in-Command of the defence of Alexandria.

The general, like all the other officers, had a bed made up in his office. His desk was burdened with a great quantity of patent medicines and tonics as well as paperwork, and he looked dyspeptic, myopic and tired, but he received me with much grace, devoted ten minutes to discussing my journey, the merits of Pentax cameras and the publicity that Triumph would undoubtedly get. By now I had learned always to produce the
Sunday Times
cutting with my picture. It opened more doors than my passport did.

The general took the film from the camera, a new roll with nothing on it, wished me luck and returned reluctantly to his war. A brigadier next door gave me tea and talked fondly of the years he had spent living in London next to Harrods. I was returned to the promenade and turned loose.

I went back to the Normandie, dumped the cameras, changed my swank jacket for a disreputable sweater, and went out again determined to see something of Alexandria. Not far away, I found the sort of area I had been looking for, a poor working neighbourhood crammed with tiny lock-up shops, people caning chairs, plucking chickens, bundling firewood, counting empty bottles, scooping grain out of sacks into small cones of thick grey paper, beating donkeys, dragging trolleys, recuperating scraps of everything under the sun. A small boy in rags, no, in one rag, had his capital spread on the kerbstone in aluminium coins and was counting it solemnly as though about to make an important investment. A number of delicate gilt chairs stood tip toe on the pavement, like refugees from a revolution, having their seats stuffed.

I was standing fascinated in front of a display of dried beans swarming with weevil, when a hand fell on my shoulder. I turned to face a man in a grubby blue suit with a mourning band on his arm. He made the sign for papers' and I had to swallow my irritation, because I had left my papers in my jacket. He handed me to another man, similarly dressed but less shaven and more villainous. They had the same hard edge to their expressions that I had seen on the police in Tunis. They sat me on a chair outside a cafe. A crowd of people began to gather, murmuring 'Yehudi'. The proprietor came out with a bucket of water and threw it over them. They scattered and reformed, pressing closer. The 'chief decided to take me to his headquarters, a hutch buried under the staircase of a building across the road, eight foot square, windowless, and lined with 'wanted' pictures. It was the sort of place where 'B' movie heroes are usually beaten up, and for the first time I began to squirm a little. During both arrests, I had surprised myself by remaining very cool and detached, and I was interested to see how disarming my behaviour had been in the face of possible violence. Now, as I sat against a wall, facing the door, where privileged onlookers were allowed to peer in at a genuine Israeli spy, I began to reconsider my tactics. I watched a
fire hose
being dragged along the corridor to the street, where the crowd had evidently become a mob, and thought how helpless I was and how much I preferred being with the navy. Then the chief brought a cup of coffee, and the time for a beating had evidently passed.

The episode dragged on, however, for the rest of the afternoon. I was driven to police headquarters, then to the Normandie for my papers, then back to the police, and at last let go. There was a lot of waiting, but no attempt at ugliness. I got to know a number of police and their relations, but to be arrested twice in one hour was enough to convince me that my third attempt might be unlucky. I got my bike out and rode to King Farouk's old summer palace, the Montasah, to sneer at the vulgarity of it, to admire the cool light inside, and to be won over, finally, by the bathroom showers which operated somewhat like a modern dishwashing machine, and were no doubt supplied by Harrods.

The war news was not good. Tension was rising at Kilometre 101 where the opposing sides were discussing an armistice. I decided to hurry on to Cairo and the Sudan. Already I guessed that I would be refused permission to ride the road to Aswan. Big troop concentrations, radar installations and airfields were said to lie along the road. If the train was my only way south, then the sooner I got on it the better.

I had a last lunch at the Normandie, stranded on the shores of time with my three exiles from better days. Speaking French, which was the hotel language, the professor entertained the ladies with an account of my escapades.

'It would be apparent to a babe-in-arms that our friend set out yesterday morning determined to provoke an incident. When his cameras and his obviously sinister wardrobe failed to do the trick, he climbed on a

pedestal and pointed his telephoto lens at a Russian submarine in the harbour. However, his "arrest" by the Navy was disappointingly civilized and apologetic. He therefore exchanged his jacket for an Israeli sweater, deliberately abandoned his papers, and sauntered off to the roughest neighbourhood available to behave as much like a spy as possible. And in case that was insufficient, he made sure of popular hostility by drawing attention to a merchant's infested beans, saying "In Tel Aviv, we have laws against this kind of thing." '

There was much laughter, and perhaps a grain of truth.

At the end of the lunch, just as I was about to leave, a telegram arrived for the Frenchman. He opened it, drew a sharp breath, and stared at it.

'My son is dead,' he said. T knew it.'

He was petrified by grief. He was inconsolable, and immovable. None of us could find anything to say. I murmured goodbye, and left. On my way to Cairo I reflected, uneasily, that a lot of things were happening to me and around me. Every day, it seemed, added its quota of significant encounters, events and revelations. Were they already there, waiting to happen, or did I bring them with me? Could turbulence and change be 'carried' and transmitted like a disease? I knew I had brought excitement into those three lives, but the news from the front was not always good. I wondered, unhappily, whether I was destined to leave a trail of grief and misery behind me too. 'What colossal arrogance,' I thought, but could not quite brush the idea aside.

From Cairo to Aswan the train ran for a night and a day. I boarded at the blacked-out station in a tumultuous rush of bodies to share a two-berth sleeper with a fat middle-class Egyptian in robes and turban. I also shared the sumptuous chicken feast he had brought bundled in a large white napkin, and he politely accepted a bit of my fruit. We munched together contentedly until it was time to sleep, undistracted by efforts at conversation because he spoke only Arabic.

Most of the following day I watched Egypt and the Nile pass by from the dining car window. I saw no missile pads or airfields, though a company of newly drafted soldiers came on board for a short distance. There was a bruised astonishment in their eyes that brought back sharp memories of my first weeks as a conscript.

I enjoyed the train, but resented the onward rush of it, that rationed me to such fleeting glimpses of life outside. It was a quite different world, I realized, viewed through this thick screen of plate glass.

At one of the inexplicable stops trains make between stations I found myself looking down directly on to a rice field beside the track where a
grizzled old man and a boy were turning the soil with hoes. The man wore only a tattered galabeia. As he leaned forward to chop at the mud it revealed the whole of his stringy body tightening with effort and his genitals swinging back and forth. Beside him stood a woman in a black robe and shawl, also old but slim and perfectly erect. In contrast to the old man's coarse, dull face, her features were exquisitely drawn. Her eyebrows, nostrils and mouth were arched like spring steel under tension, expressing complete authority and contempt for her circumstances. She held a long and slender cane, like a wizard's wand, and supervised the work with smouldering eyes.

Pharaoh's daughter could not have looked more handsome or commanding than this woman standing bare-footed in a rice paddy. The group was quite oblivious of the train or of my stares. I saw that there was nothing they wore or used that they might not have had thousands of years ago. If I could discover, I thought, the secret of this woman's presence and the old man's submission I might have the story of Egypt, but before I could melt the glass with my eyes the train took me away.

The ferry is tied up at a wooden wharf above the Aswan Dam. It is not one boat but two; two small paddle steamers lashed together and run on a single paddle. The nearest one is First Class. I and the bike have to cross to the Second Class boat. While this is no problem for me, I can see immediately that it will be impossible to manhandle the bike there. I can see that, but the porters can see only a glorious opportunity to earn a fortune in baksheesh by achieving the impossible.

'Yes, yes, yes,' they scream and, in a flurry of brown limbs, they fight with the Triumph up a gangplank, over a rail into a narrow gangway, through hatches, over sills and bollards, four hundred pounds of metal dragging, sliding, flying and dropping among roars and curses and pleas for divine aid, while I follow helpless and resigned. Finally the bike is poised over the water between the two boats. The outstretched arms can only hold it, they cannot move it, and it is supported, incredibly, by the foot brake pedal which is caught on the ship's rail. Muscles are weakening. The pedal is bending and will soon slip, and my journey will end in the fathomless silt of Mother Nile. At this last moment, a rope descends miraculously from the sky dangling a hook, and the day is saved.

For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.

I sleep illegally on the roof of the First Class boat, because the Second Class deck is indescribable. I would rather swim than sleep there. Hundreds of Nubian camel drivers are returning to the Sudan, with their huge hide bags and whips, to pick up another consignment of camels and drive them remorselessly up into Egypt. They are all dressed in grubby white, and lie side by side among their bundles across the deck. The crevices between them are caulked with a mixture of orange peel, cigarette ends and spit. The hawking and spitting, which is a constant background murmur to Arab life, here rises to become the dominant sound, louder than speech, louder than the ferry's engine, drowned out only, and rarely, by the ship's hooter. Lungs rasp and rip, you can hear the tissues tear into shreds, and the glutinous product flies in all directions. I am not ready for that yet.

During the first night we cross the Tropic of Cancer. During the second day a Turkish passenger goes mad. He has been looking more pale and drawn by the hour. Now, with his black eyes buttoned to the back of his brain he begins to twirl in the saloon, stopping suddenly to point his finger and cast some fatal spell. He collapses, then rises to twirl again. His eyes have seen something too terrible to be borne.

The ferry ties up in the night somewhere south of Abu Simbel, and the Turk is taken ashore, but after much discussion he is brought aboard again and we continue. When we land at Wadi Haifa at midday he is quiet.

I meant to ride from Wadi Haifa, but the police say I must take the train at least as far as Abu Hamed, and I cannot get petrol without the help of the police. I have made friends with a Dutch couple, and once on the train I might as well go with them as far as Atbara. What's a few more miles in the whole of Africa?

The train rattles on through beer, supper, songs, sleep, tea and English breakfast. In the oval, engraved mirror of a colonial dining car I actually take notice of my face for the first time in a long while. Action has freed me from self-consciousness, and I am becoming a stranger to my own appearance. It is a very satisfying feeling. I no longer think of people seeing me as I see myself in a mirror. Instead I imagine that people can see directly into my soul. It is as though a screen between me and the world has dropped away.