The Avignon Quintet (21 page)

These cabins were to prove a godsend, for we were able at times to work over our books, maps and papers, and barricade ourselves against the talkative importunities of the Arab crew who seemed to be dying of boredom. So it was that on a late afternoon we said goodbye to Bulaq, the port of Cairo. There was not a breath of wind stirring so that the Arabs were compelled to resort to their oars at once to fetch us into mid channel and to clear all other shipping. This they did with great cheerfulness (it is always thus at the beginning of a voyage) accompanying their energies with loud songs. We skimmed along the surface of the river, elegant as a flying fish, the spray flying under the oars. Our course lay through the narrow channel between the island of Rhoda and the mainland. On both sides of us the banks were covered in the most luxurious vegetation; while here and there as we passed we glimpsed, through narrow openings, vistas of magnificent gardens and palaces whose grounds ran down to the water. From one such palace came the strains of music and song, obviously from the harem, and our boatmen were silenced. They listened with rapture. It was, they said, the palace of the great pasha called Halim Bey, and they were most impressed when Piers said that he knew the great man, and had actually dined at his table – a statement which was not strictly accurate, though useful.

It was not long before we had passed the points of the Nilometer – and then the broad hauntingly beautiful river opened its reaches to us like arms and we found ourselves gliding across a floor of dark glass which the evening light was turning to gold. Clouds floated in this mirror with their customary languor. Our crew resumed their singing as we sped on into the darkling horizon, while we sat on the forward hatch and gazed at the intoxicating play of light and darkness over the cool bosom of the ancient river. There was no doubt that this was to be another memorable journey which would bring to an end the first year of our stay in this beautiful land. No one responsive to colour and landscape could remain the same – and when this was combined with the companionship of Akkad, and all the exciting intellectual enigmas of the place … Egypt as an experience had separated the old life as we were used to living it from the new which was as yet unborn, undefined, as yet only a whispering gallery of premonitions. Piers cleaned his gun thoughtfully that evening, tilting the barrels to the light and polishing them until they glittered. “How will we ever get away from this country?” he asked in despair, almost as if he had followed the direction of my own thoughts. “We’ll have to I suppose, one day.” But what he meant, I knew, was that we would never be able to go “back” to the old life – something new would have to be offered us in its place. After Macabru the old life in Provence seemed somehow so moribund and finished. We ached for the infant new to be born.

We drove on thus at breakneck speed towards the sunset after-glow, trying to clear the nearest waters of the river before we anchored for the first night to take stock of ourselves and the dispositions of our kit. Things looked fair enough for a light breeze on the morrow so that we might use our blunt lateen-sail as a jib. It was powerful enough both to steady us and make a little way in the veritable lakes which the Nile had carved out of the river banks in the course of its descent; for the rest we would depend on the tow-rope – from time immemorial ships on the Nile, as on the Rhône, have been man-hauled when heading upstream. But we were lucky in an unusual disposition of winds and counter currents to be able to make quite a distance upriver before the darkness threatened to close in and our crew found it necessary to seek a landfall, which they did at last after a number of violent disagreements about the choice of the place. The two one-eyed men yelled and gesticulated, and exchanged fuliginous stares. But at last they found a place to moor on the western bank.

As soon as the boat was made fast to the land by a short pole driven into the soft earth, the boats crew kindled their dinner fire in little portable ovens on deck and began their cooking operations; as did also our body servant under the directions of Piers who spoke by far the best Arabic. We noticed that the standard fare of the Arab crew was lentil soup and bread, with perhaps a few onions – meat was a luxury undreamt-of because of its price. Their usual drink was usually Nile water. Yet constitutionally they seemed pretty robust. On this first evening, however, as if to prepare themselves for the journey, they turned in early with none of the usual evening songs or dances to which we later became accustomed. A heavy damp came off the river, and a dense ground-mist blurred all clear outlines. We ourselves ate soberly enough in the cabin, and were glad of a small charcoal brazier over which to warm our fingers. It was the first breath of autumn cold, and the days were to be continually deceptive at this season – as if they kept forgetting and reverting back to the summer we had left behind. Some nights for example were damp and cold, and some warm and fruity and humming with mosquitoes. No two were quite alike.

But on this first evening we tasted for the first time the feeling of spaciousness that the Nile always conveys, for its levels are never stable, they are always falling and rising; and its banks and boundaries shift and alter, appear and disappear under one’s very eyes. Islands emerge and fade, swallowed by the rising tide, or else sprout up again with fully grown trees on them by some freak of level – as if fresh from the potter’s wheel. All this was to come; but for this first evening we ate soberly, drank a brandy with our coffee and then set our books and maps to rights. Finally I turned in, and so did Sylvie, leaving Piers with his diary which he was determined to fill with news of our doings. I took one brief walk on deck before turning in. The Arabs lay everywhere like fallen skittles, muffled into bundles against the damp; some of them had clenched themselves up in their rags until they looked more like hedgehogs than anything else. A lone river wind sighed in the cordage of the ship. Then, after a long hesitation, a harvest moon came bobbing up, turning from bronze to white as it rose. It was of such a startling brightness, and penetrating all the chinks in our cabin with such a piercing glare, that Piers was roused from his book to find that the yellow oil-lamp could hardly hold its own with this moon which gave such a wild and strange colouring to the place – the books and maps, the pots and pans. Somewhere a jackal sounded, its doleful howling mingling with the distant barking of dogs. Nearer at hand on the brilliant river came the croak of some night-bird stirring. I fixed my bunk to my liking and said: “Piers don’t stay up too late; tomorrow will be a heavy day.” He shook his head. “I won’t,” he said. Later as I drowsed off I heard him close his diary, blow out the lamp, and then make his way to his own bunk. He set a pistol by his bed with a small torch, while under his pillow he placed the precious wallet which held all our passports and money and papers. I lay for a long while suspended between waking and the sweet unreason of dreams; I heard a boatman talking in his sleep, and the scatter of drops along our prow as a freshet of wind struck us. Then oblivion came and I felt my mind stretching out towards the frontiers of love and childhood, so that when I turned, and when a hand came out of the darkness to rest its fingers on my wrist I did not know whose it was.

From that point forward day merged with day and night with night to such an extent that time became fluid, distances illusory; we were moving from one dream to another, merging from one truth into another in a way that gave the lie to the banal chronology of Piers’ diary which tried to segment our lives in so untruthful a fashion. When one is fully extended by day and exhausted every evening one lives differently, without the weight of yesterday or tomorrow on one’s shoulders. I stored up simply a constellation of moments, a firework display of small but brilliant incidents which were like a set of coloured engravings of this great river with its moods and silences, its strange caprices and impulses. It was never still, and it compelled the imagination to follow its flight across the ancient land, as if it had been some marvellous steed running wild in the exuberance of youthful beauty. But it was sinister, too, and ruthless. Ask the huge crocodiles in the upper reaches! Here and there the hurrying water had carved up the soft banks, intruding on a nest of cobras and carrying them off, or else had invaded the shallow grave of a boatman buried, as they always were, on the tow-path they had so often trodden. A corpse whirling down the river, trailing its wrappings, as ancient as any mummy of the Pharaoh’s. Or else walking in the calm evening through a forest of tall supple date palms to a village where a quaint old lady sold us milk by the tin cup and where we took the early evening flights of turtle-dove which tried desperately to rise steeply enough to avoid our guns, but were pressed down low by a river wind. These little birds would be feathered in the evening by the Arabs and then cooked by Piers. I can recall so much, but cannot give the memories order and shape, so completely had the days fused together. It did not take us long to feel the imprint of this wild life without cares and preoccupations.

We let our beards grow. We did not change our clothes despite the well-meant offers to wash them on the part of our servants who were somewhat shocked at our unkemptness. Nothing mattered but this succession of marvellous days that flew by, bearing us on their backs, as the river water bore the
Nasr
. One day in the upper reaches we came upon immense flights of pelicans which lay in – droves, shoals, what shall I say? – upon the surface of the water and showed no alarm; only when we approached quite close they did get up, or half get up, screaming harshly and beating the water with their vast wings. To Piers’ utter fury and humiliation the Arab captain, without asking his permission, took up his charged gun which was lying, broken but loaded, on the hatch, and discharged it into the mass of birds, killing one outright. It upset us terribly – as if it had been an albatross; but the crew could not understand our shame and fury, and cheerfully tumbled overboard to retrieve it, the water being shallow and the day windless. It was quite an effort to get it aboard, and now the deed had been done I swallowed my anger and allowed my curiosity to get the better of me. It must have weighed about forty pounds, this opulent bird. The thick soft delicate plumage of the breast was milk white at the roots, but if you blew on it you found the top part tinged with a tinge of pink or rose colour. This shows up most beautifully when the bird rises on the wind and turns its breast slowly into the sun. It had a touching, ungainly beauty which made us regret even more the shot which had cost its life.

Before the Arabs should feather it – for they showed every sign of being prepared to eat it for dinner – Sylvie had it laid upon the hatch in the evening sunshine while she sketched it. But when dusk came it was surrendered to the cooks, and here Piers was sufficiently French to take an interest in their manner of dressing it. The meat was distressingly coarse and fibrous like old beef; but worst of all, it had an oily fishy flavour which made it most unpalatable, so we abandoned all hope of sharing in the repast. It must be said that the crew themselves showed every sign of enjoying it, greasy and fishy as the taste was. They made some attempt to burn out the fish smell by filling its stomach with live coals, but as far as I could see, without achieving anything very remarkable. But eat it they did, unto the last morsel. The Arabs, according to Piers, called this bird Gamal El Bahr which means River Camel – perhaps some vague association stirring between the hump of the camel as a place where water is stored and the pelican’s enormous shutter of a beak? Who can say?

Daily the Nile seemed to increase in grandeur and magnitude, and for a whole series of days we found our path running across something like an inland sea or delta, full of lovely tufted islands, some sinking and some emerging under the vibration of the waters. They had the lonely fragility of dreams in which one could only half believe. I could see now how it must be on the other great rivers of the world, the Yangtse or the Ganges or old Amazon. A whole world passing by in a kaleidoscope of colour, yet always changing, always impermanent. All day long this feast of colour, and then at night the heavens thick with brilliant stars like the loaded boughs of an almond in blossom. Standing on deck at night, listening to far-off hyenas barking and following some spot of light from a village, one drank in an immense peace and calm, feeling the old river stealing by beneath one, licking the prow of the ship, sliding beneath the dreams of the humble Arabs like a floor of glass.

So we came to the region which throws up a few riverside mountains, so pitted and hollowed by wind and sand that they have become the home of millions of birds. Here the number of cormorants and black Damietta duck was prodigious and beggared all description; every morning at dawn, with a tremendous hurrying of wings, they arrived in huge flights from the direction of the desert. They sounded like an approaching storm; then they settled with a thunderous clamour upon the mountain scalps from which they came down from time to time to dive for fish. Pigeons, hawks and swallows also abounded here. And here too we struck relatively low flying geese with hides so thick that it seemed quite impossible to hole them or bring them down. You could hear the smack of the shot like a drum on their feathers, but they did not even deign to break formation. I tried some ball on them, but always missed owing to the height and the lack of a choked duck-gun.

And then at night, anchored under these unusual cliffs with their sleeping bird populations, to see the white moonlight falling upon a wilderness of jewelled crags, touched in with ink-dark shadows of grottoes, chasms, caves. How small and frail was our light on the sleeping ship.

I must leave to Piers the detailed account of the journey in all its details; for somewhere among his affairs the old diary must still be knocking about with its long list of temples and towns, monuments and tombs. For my part I simply engulfed everything wolfishly, never even pausing to ask the name or the history of a site. I knew that we could look it all up later on if necessary. For me the raw experience was enough. Later of course I rather regretted my lack of documentation, for my memory was far from infallible and I tended to mix up places and times without discrimination. But Piers was indefatigable and spent a fair while every evening bringing his little book up to date while Sylvie slept with her arm thrown over her face to ward off the moonlight and I cleaned the guns or did our accounts.