The Avignon Quintet (92 page)

Indeed, the banker Affad was the most charming, diffident and resourceful of the Prince’s associates, presenting himself as an eager host, and his invitation was made the more tempting by the fact that he was about to set off on a journey by water – a Nile journey: moreover, in a well-appointed little ship belonging to the French Embassy. We hardly realised the magnitude of our luck until we had been two whole days aboard this pretty pirogue travelling up-Nile, a water world which is like no other. It was all too brief, for halfway up to the nearest big town we were to be dropped in order to return to Cairo by car, since my friend must not overstay his leave, or even risk such an eventuality, while this return would enable him to enjoy a little of the company of the Prince and Princess to whom he had taken a great fancy. But this little journey proved delightful as a sort of extension of our untroubled Provençal summer – the links formed there still held. Indeed they seemed almost forged anew, so ever-present seemed Constance and Hilary her brother, seemed Felix Chatto the consul … seemed even in ghostly form the dark shade of Livia. Where would she be, I wondered? And Avignon with its looming skyline against the blue sky – the cathedrals which Hilary had always referred to as “disused prayer factories, with no noise of bumble like turbines coming from them”. The thrilling swish of mistral in the pines. It was all these, it was all here.

More piquant still was the fact that Affad’s other two guests proved to be a French couple, of meridional persuasion;
“les ogres”
they were christened, for their family name was LeNogre. They were brother and sister, twins to the hour, inseparable – Bruno and Sylvaine by name. The boy was a young attache in the Free French Embassy; his sister kept house and entertained for him. They owned, or so he said in his calm, studied English, an old derelict chateau in the village of Villefoin, not very far from Tubain where “our” chateau, the house of Constance, was situated. Why, they had been there that summer – we could all have met! There was a gleam of sorrow in the dark eye of Sylvaine as she stated the fact. The expression on her face, the shape of her features, her way of holding her head, reminded me most acutely of someone, though I could not for the life of me think whom. The thought was troubling, like the attentions of a fly one could not brush away; but my obstinate memory refused to yield up the key to those dark features. Her brother was deeply preoccupied and ashamed of the way France had fallen, and of these base chicaneries of the French Mediterranean fleet which refused to join the Allies. However, the Free French movement was now a fact, and within the year De Gaulle would have twenty thousand Frenchmen in the field under his leadership … so that all was not lost. Yet it was touching to see so young a man wounded in his national honour by the collapse of his country and its wholehearted espousal of a Nazi peace. But, he added ruefully, “I am surprised at the strength of my own feelings – I did not know I had any. I am just the average French intellectual, and you know how cynical they are!” Sam reassured him in his tactful way by saying that something very similar had come about in England. “I was very much criticised for joining up,” he added, with a side-glance at me, “as Aubrey will tell you.” All of this was true; we had all been living in a fool’s paradise. It has taken Hitler to blow off the tent top and show us what a circus the political world really was.

These young people were hospitality itself, and soon the large centre cabin with its enormous table and hanging petrol lantern was well and truly taken over – our belongings were disposed upon and around the bunks which lined the walls. The big central table with its sanded benches was where we sat and ate or played cards, or spread out our maps and writing materials. We were staying with them too briefly to have accumulated much luggage, for they were planning a trip of some two weeks and were very well equipped with everything in the way of tinned food and ammunition for their sporting guns. But the mood was so tranquil, the coilings of the great river so suave and dense with beautiful islands and groves, that we quite forgot that the pastures which bordered it were thick with quail and turtle-dove. While we were with them there was no shooting by common consent. That would begin, said Affad, when they arrived in the true north, the crocodile reaches. One ached to be going with them. Not the less because their visit to upper Egypt was to end with a ride out to a distant oasis where a famous country fair was to be held, and where a clairvoyant of renown was to be encountered who would tell their fortunes. “I don’t mind about the fortune-teller,” said Sam, “but the oasis sounds everything one has read about. What a damned shame.” But the two
“ogres”
professed not to be unduly superstitious and would, they said, be delighted to offer themselves to the fortune-teller as subjects.

We dined that night by lantern light, while high overhead the night sky spread its carpet of brilliant stars and a frail new moon shone. It was quite chilly on the water and the freshets of evening wind rapped upon our prow as we drew into shore to anchor for the evening meal. Our consciousness had already been lulled and subdued by the thump of bare feet upon the wooden deck and the quavering, trailing songs of the watermen as they guided us southwards. The river opened and closed like a fan – suddenly enlarging its confines into whole estuaries or small lakes, only to fold back into its own narrow bed for a space. Kites hung in the higher airs, keeping up their steady relentless patrol, but all along the banks we met brilliant rollers and kingfishers, and the little rock-doves of the desert fringe with their plaintive small cry: “Too few,” they seemed to say, “too few.”

The ever-changing light all round expanded and contracted solid outlines and distances so that the eyes, travelling in pursuit, were mesmerised by the apparent make-believe. “Lord bless you,” exclaimed Sam, inappropriately crossing himself and repeating the Latin grace in use at his Oxford college. “You couldn’t describe it to anyone because you can hardly believe it yourself.”

Palms and tombs, tombs and waterwheels and palms. Islands rising and subsiding in the mist. A river which flowed like smoke between the two deserts in a luxuriant green bed full of paradisiacal plants and trees. “No wonder dervishes dance,” Sam went on, and Affad smiled his approval. “Who wouldn’t?” But with the rising light came also the glare and the parching heat, so that at midday the sky weighed a ton. “Tell me what surprised you most about Egypt,” said Affad curiously; he was genuinely curious and not merely in search of compliments. To have replied, “O everything” would have been at once too easy and not sufficiently exact; for my part what had assailed me was an extraordinary sense of familiarity. To throw open one’s shutters at Mena House and find oneself with, so to speak, a personal Sphinx squatting outside one’s window, patient as a camel … They seemed great playful toys, the Sphinxes, and despite the complete mystery which surrounded their history and meaning, curiously warm and familiar – domesticated animals, like the water-buffalo or the camel. And then of course the desert itself had been a complete surprise. One came upon it, came to the edge of the carpet of human plantation and there it was like a great theatrical personage, waiting serenely. It was at once a solitude and also homely as a back-garden. But as much an entity as the Atlantic; one could not just walk into it for a stroll, for its shapes were always changing; at the least wind all contours changed, and one’s tracks were expunged at a breath. No more could one decide to go for a row in the Atlantic without misgivings. The desert was a metaphor for everything huge and dangerous, yet without so seeming. Parts were slick as a powdered wig, parts shallow with pretty coloured rocks and clays, striated with the marks of vanished caravans; parts were like a burnt-out old colander full of dead cinders. Rosy winds sighed about it at dawn, or when the desert wind called
khamseen
set upon it, pillars of rusty blood-coloured wind raced as spume races ahead of the waves in an Atlantic storm. But riding across it one found certain animals quite at home, oriented and self-possessed; the rat, the
jerboa
, a kind of jack rabbit – how did they manage it when there was no cover at all save scrub? Packs of wild dogs wandered about with the air of living off the land – but what could they find to eat? Heavy dews at dawn and at midnight provided moisture of a kind for insects like mantises and locusts. But dogs? The desert offered a different sort of providence; its terrible frugality engendered introspection and compassion. God!

Some of this I managed to say and Affad listened keenly, with interest. The desert fringed our present skyline, but here we were gliding upon the glazed reaches of the Nile which offered the contrasts of cool surface wind and sparkling water, not to mention the gorgeous panorama of river-craft with its thousand eye-coaxing sails of different hues. Here the felucca came into her own, dominating, like some great queen of antiquity, the river upon which she had been built to travel. The beauty of function, the elegance of purity and stress. No one could see a felucca and not feel it to be a symbol expressing the unconscious essence of womanhood. But feluccas have no need to be fashion-conscious. The way they press their cheeks to the river wind is as invariable as the wind itself, which imposes on them a formal geometrical precision of trajectory. They run down river upon a few sweet angles of inclination – and they surprise one with the feeling that they are among man’s choicest and rarest creations, which indeed they are. Their field of action is limited and more exacting than ocean navigation. The Nile flows directly down out of the heart of Africa into ancient Greek history – like the spine of a cobra. Its feluccas are controlled by the river winds which arrive and depart like soft-footed servants whose work is dedicated to these swallow-cut, pouting lateen rigs. A shivering goes through them like an electric current all day long, and they slide down river as if on a cord, then abruptly come to a halt and everything is becalmed, frozen in the middle of a tactic; the feluccas bow their heads as if the wind when it comes will behead them. Instead the glass floor starts rolling again, and quietly they turn to left or right to resume their journey. Here and there you might encounter one ferrying sugar-cane and wearing an eye like some apt Aegean echo; but the eye will be an Egyptian eye – the eye of the camel, in fact, with its double set of eyelashes. One will recognise the ship as a Greek vessel manned from the Greek colony at Edfu. The whole of Herodotus gazes out of that kohl-traced eye!

The people of the river too are special and apart, different from the mundane and banausic town Egyptians. On the banks they superintend the criss-crossing water-channels and tend their dates and their vegetables, but always with time for a salute and a hoarse cry of welcome which invites the wayfarer to sit and sup with them. The women strike one more than the men – their magnificent carriage upon the treacherous river banks. They are black-avised as warlocks and wear their black cowls with formality and disdain. But their smile, fuller of ivory than a male elephant in rut, flashes out of toil-worn faces packed with all the majesty of hunger. They glide along like the unconscious patricians which they are, and their bear-like, gloating walk seems to draw its rhythm from the pace of the Nile’s green blood, flowing steadily from some distant wound in the heart of Africa.

“For me,” said Bruno, “it was chiefly the tombs, dug so deep into the ground, and yet so snug. I have never seen anything comparable to the tiny kings lying there in their painted cocoons surrounded by their toys, as if the world of childhood also passed with them through the barrier of death. But what am I saying – ‘barrier’? I was struck by the facts of that marvellous workmanship, all those frescoes so brilliant in their colouring, were to lie there unobserved by human eyes through the centuries. The little kings and queens with their toys, slowly drying out in their awkward sarcophagoi (the word means flesh-devourer in Greek, no?); their attitude to death was quite different from ours, or indeed from their contemporaries the Greeks’ with their asphodel-splashed underworld expressing all the sincere and open regret which the thought of death brought. They had no impassivity about death – it was terrible and sad and uprooting, and the end of every happiness. They refused to allow themselves any factitious consolation. And yet they were also naive, they felt if they wailed enough, made enough noise they might make death relent. But the Egyptian? This massive, slumbering, vegetal life of silence and vacancy, strapped into one’s swaddling clothes, the mummy wrappings … Then I realised that the word eternity really meant something to them – an eternal waiting – but for what they did not know. Time existed forever in massive extension – to the very confines of the human consciousness. It was frozen, their thoughts as well as their tears were frozen by the sepulchre, but there was no repining for death was real, and it existed like the next room exists while we are talking in this one. I got a shock off these strange little mummies, planted like vegetables in the shaly valleys. Even to sit beside them in the tombs and hear one’s own heart beating was a strange experience. And the toys? Reaching out one could actually touch their touch upon them, the touch of children’s fingers! But the quality of immobility, of waiting without thought, without hope, without desire, is something you can see in the peasants today as they wait for the sun to rise or set, or for the station to open, for the first train to come. They wait like inanimate objects, like sacks of grain, like chunks of marble. There is no buoyancy in them – just the enormous load of their waiting. One can read into their posture some of the immobility of the little kings in their brightly painted tombs. The word ‘eternity’ comes into the mind, the whole field of consciousness becomes one eternal waiting-room. Even the dust does not gain upon one in these bright tombs, for they are sealed and the little kings exist now in a tepid vacuum of eternity. They can get no older now, nor will they ever get any younger; but at least they have achieved a perpetual immobility, a perfection of non-being beyond moon or sun.”