Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (9 page)

Ten miles short of Matruh I saw some painted oil barrels across the road, with a hurricane lamp burning on one of them. Light shone from the doorway of a little hut. I slowed down and a soldier approached me. He laid his left arm across his right wrist and opened his right hand, palm upwards, in the sign that meant: papers!'

I stopped, unlocked the box and brought out the passport. An older man in pyjamas and fez came out of the hut.

'Please wait,' he said. 'It will be ten minutes only.'

I heard a manual telephone cranking and lit a cigarette. After a while a third man came out and got into a black car parked beyond the barrier. As he started the engine and drove off the man in pyjamas hurried over to me.

'Follow that car, please,' he said urgently. 'They will clear you in Matruh if you hurry, but they are just going to close down.'

I was infected by the slight sense of panic and rushed off. The car was doing over seventy miles an hour and I had some difficulty catching it.

Then, for the second time that day, the bowels of the earth slid open beneath me. I reached back with my right hand. The lid of the box had been blown off. Expecting to put the passport back I had not locked it again. I stopped immediately. The wallet had gone. I looked at the mileage indicator. It could have happened anywhere in the last six miles.

The wallet contained driving licences, vaccination certificates, a credit card, photographs, currency and an address book. Losing it seemed like an overwhelming disaster. Two cholera shots, a yellow fever shot and a smallpox vaccination would have to be done again. There were addresses I might never recover. The cash, the credit card, were extra layers of defence stripped away. But how far could I get without a driving licence?

Slowly I drove back, on the wrong side of the road, searching but numbed by this sudden reverse in my fortunes. I had ridden nearly four hundred miles that day, and the weariness hit me then. I tried to think clearly. The gloves should have been the last objects to fall, and as they were quite bulky I hoped to see them where a black wallet might not show.

For a mile I saw nothing. Then I saw light ahead, and the murmur of engines running. I came across two taxis, one coming, one going, stopped alongside each other with their interior lights on. One driver was in the middle of the road, a tall bearded man in white robe and turban. He stood in the space carved out of the darkness by the car lights, and seemed very much in command of that space. I wanted to stop and ask whether he had seen anything, but he waved me on peremptorily. His hand was raised in a threatening way and he stared at me fiercely. I felt too weak to resist, and rode on.

I went on searching vainly until I got back to the police post. A truck was coming through, and the police commandeered it to help me search in the much brighter illumination of its headlights. After a while I found the lid of the box. Then the truck driver spotted the first glove, and soon after I saw the second one. The wallet should have been between the lid and the gloves. I went up and down several times but found nothing.

I was in a state of despair out of all proportion to the disaster. Weariness, the end of a long day, me alone with the bike at midnight in a strange country at war; that was part of it. From Mark Antony to Charlie Brown in one thoughtless moment. I snatched at the lesson. As always I felt I could endure my tribulations if there was something to be learned from them.
Euphoria leads to Thoughtlessness.
That's how fortunes are told. So okay. No more mindless chasing after cars. Is that all?

No, that was not all. I went over the incident again in my mind, saw the Arab standing in that pool of light in the darkness, with his arm raised. Yes, but I had seen something else, before I had even known what I was looking at. I had seen him straightening up, that was it, straightening his

legs. He had been rising from the road surface and I had seen him do it but I had not wanted to know because I was too tired. No! Not too tired, too
frightened.
I was too frightened of that imperious wave of the hand, of that fierce glance, to face up to the fact that he had just found my wallet on the road.

The discovery was devastating. I had thought I was a man. I had taken risks and come through them in the way a man was supposed to, and yet here I was after all just a boy quailing before the first figure of authority that came my way. It went very deep in me, this fear of authority, and it sickened me to find myself as vulnerable as ever. I knew the robed figure would haunt me for a long time. It was the beginning of a long struggle.

Hard as it was to bear this moment of self-realization, I found some kind of strength in it. I piled up some stones to mark the place where I had been searching and rode on to the checkpoint at Matruh where I was given back my passport. I explained what I was doing, and went back to go on with the search, but with no more success than before.

Then I started thinking. If the Arab had taken the wallet, he would probably not keep it. He would take what was valuable and throw away the rest. Where. Before the checkpoint. I road up to the first checkpoint again, and worked back. The driver of a car going to Libya would throw something from his window across the road to the other side. But no. In Libya traffic drives on the right, in Egypt on the left. So it would be a left-hand drive car, driving on the left of the road. I followed the right hand verge going towards Matruh. Fifty yards along I saw a small bundle of paper against the root of a bush. The wallet had been broken in half. No money. No address section. No photographs. No credit card. But the vaccination certificates were there, and one international driving licence. I could find nothing more in the area. Partly relieved, and a little better pleased with myself, I returned to Matruh.

It was two in the morning. The police corporal received me with genuine pleasure. He was short and unprepossessing, his uniform crumpled and short in the leg, with some kind of blue and white band round one arm. He was in charge of a small platoon of even more ragged soldiers, but they were all excited by the arrival of a man on a motorcycle, and determined to look after me. They produced tea. Then a handful of dates much bigger than any I had seen, and some corned beef and flat bread. The corporal's face was a landscape devastated by pock-marks. He spoke a little English and was fiercely patriotic. He wanted me to know about the crushing defeat Egypt had inflicted on Israel. As I munched my dates, sitting on a rough bench near a charcoal fire, he stood over me repeating, fanatically, the same words.

'Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel Aviv. Nekesta week, brekfast in Tel
Aviv. Israel finish. Is good?' And all of them stared at me looking for the truth in my eyes, but I wasn't going to let myself slip twice in a night, and I said there should be no war and that nobody wanted to fight on either side. By a charcoal fire in the Egyptian night the most banal remark can have the force of prophecy, and my words were received with wonder and agreement.

They built me a bedroom. Literally. While the corporal taught me Arabic, they made a soft-board roof over some heaps of brick, and a platform to lie on. At four o'clock I was allowed to sleep.

In the morning I went back for the third time to the police post on the Salloum road, and found pages of addresses and photographs spread over the desert. They were all there. Only cash and credit card were still gone. I thought I had been very lucky after all.

The road to Alexandria had military on it all the way. Immediately outside Matruh a very pukka officer with a dapper moustache sat behind a desk in an open tent. He asked for my permit to travel to Alex. I brought out all my papers. It was not among them, he said. I began to suspect that I might still not be in Egypt after all. Then, purely by chance I found the scrap of paper that had been filled in by the semi-illiterate police clerk, that my roly-poly guide had dismissed as unimportant. It was, in fact, the only piece of paper I really needed.

On the road, the new war and the old one blended together. War cemeteries, thirty-year-old tanks, routing instructions for Monty's armies still scrawled on semi-ruined walls, and El Alamein where I had a good lunch and a pint of beer for a dollar.

Matruh to Alex, one hundred and eighty-one miles, the hottest miles so far. An older, narrower, bumpier road than the Libyan highway. The coast was absurdly picturesque. On a postcard one would have said the printing was far too garish. Turquoise sea, radiant sand. Small homesteads by the roadside, donkeys and camels ploughing, turning over the top three inches of sandy soil with wooden ploughs. Graceful women in brilliantly coloured dress carrying water on their heads. Then, more and more houses, gardens, and just before the plunge into the city an extraordinary area of white stone, whipped and carved and flung into waves and troughs like a high sea suddenly turned to salt.

Then Alexandria, and in the twilight an endless scramble through miles of cobbled dockside streets, tram-lines, mad traffic and people in ever greater compression, nowhere to go, no friends of friends to telephone. The fate I escaped in Palermo caught up with me in Alexandria. I broke through the commercial areas at last into a garden square on the sea front, and parked opposite an expensive hotel called 'The Cecil'. As I nudged the front wheel against the kerb and looked behind me I saw black smoke round the exhaust pipes. I knew I was in trouble, but refused

to think about it. A thin man in a blue jellaba and
head cloth
appeared at my side.

'You want hottle' he said. I agreed, and followed him round behind the Cecil and into a high old Parisian-style building. He asked me for a coin and fed it into a slot in the lift. The lift digested it slowly and began to rumble upwards. The landings were open and Alexandrian life seemed to reveal itself by layers. On the top floor was the Pension Normandie.

I could not have asked for a better place. It was cheap, clean, authentic, owned by a cuddly French widow and run on her behalf with doting indulgence by an elderly employee called Georges. I noticed only two other guests and both were French. One was a bluff middle-aged man with a handsome, ruddy face and fair hair turning to white. He adored competitive conversation, in which the object is either to sap or cap the last speaker's story, a sort of verbal bridge. His anecdotes were planned and delivered more with the intention of frustrating the opposition and keeping the play than simply to amuse, but it amounted to much the same thing, for he was a skilful player and his stories about the Resistance were new to me. He taught French at a university in Cairo. The other guest, another French widow, had been married to a very wealthy Egyptian in King Farouk's time and was now retired on a small income. She also told languid tales of life in the days of sashes and cummerbunds and ten foot wedding cakes, all very reminiscent of St. Petersburg under the Czars, and could herself have been a Russian Duchess, angular, erect, always carefully groomed, and lightly varnished all over.

Madame Mellasse, the owner, would kick off her slippers and fold her plump stockinged legs on the sofa; the widow sat under a lamp stand examining her carmine nails and uttering her brittle remarks; the professor, in good voice, dominated the proceedings; and I, I suppose, brought news from the front rather like a young cavalry officer on leave. We made a quaintly period quartet.

I carried out my first ever major motorcycle overhaul in Alexandria. Both pistons, I found, were deformed by heat, and I had only one spare piston with me (a piece of nonsense which inspired more waves of telepathic profanity to burn the ears of Meriden). I found a cavernous garage near Ramillies Station and haggled bitterly over five piastres for the right to work there, and then received many times that amount back in tea, cigarettes, snacks and true friendship from the poor men who struggled to earn a livelihood in that place.

I took two days to do a job that might be done in two or three hours, but every move was fraught with danger. Already I knew that there would be no chance at all of getting spare parts into Egypt. I dared not make a mistake. The pistons had seized their rings, and I replaced the less distorted one after sculpting the slots with a razor blade. It seemed the
only thing to do. I prayed that I was right. I had no real idea about what had caused the overheating after only four thousand miles, and felt rather gloomy about it.

There were many British motorcycles pumping round the streets and some shops still had stocks of parts for them, but they were single cylinder BSAs, Enfields, AJSs of ancient vintage. It was warming to see all these old British bikes plodding on after twenty years or more and obviously held in high esteem, but it was rather pathetic also. I knew that it was only economic policy that prevented them importing new machines, and that small Japanese bikes would be much better suited to them. If the Japanese ever got a foothold, British bikes would quickly become only a nostalgic memory. There was so much good will towards us that it seemed criminal to fritter it away, yet we had nothing to offer now in competition.

When the Triumph was all buttoned up again I tested it rather nervously. The first clouds of smoke frightened the life out of me but when the excess oil was burned away, it ran clean and sounded fine. Only then did I allow myself the luxury of looking at the city.

It took me an hour to clear the grease out of my fingernails in the Normandie's bathroom. I admired the tiles, the old-fashioned fittings and, as I stood by the sink next to the lavatory, a bowl of Western design, I noticed for the first time a brass valve wheel sticking out of the wall. Its function was obscure so I gave it a turn to see what would happen, and a jet of water hit me in the chest. Instinctively I turned it off, and looked for the source of the mischief, feeling like the victim of a practical joke. It took me some while to notice the slender copper pipe pointing straight at me out of the bowl of the lavatory. Once I had seen it I couldn't quite believe it, and had to play with it a while, watching it, but even this latest sophistication in oriental toiletry did not convert me, and I went on leaving my paper trail across the face of Africa.