The Lighthearted Quest (17 page)

“Tomorrow.”

“By car?”

“Oh heavens no—by train.”

“My dear, it is an
awful
journey! And do you realise that
there is
no
restaurant car? Be sure to take a good picnic-basket and a bottle of wine, so that you don't starve.”

Julia had not realised that the Moroccan State Railways seldom provide food for the traveller even on long journeys, and gratefully ordered herself an ample picnic meal on her return to the Espagnola. Señor Huerta had booked a room for her in a small hotel at Fez in the Medina, the old city, when she explained that she could not possibly afford the prices at the Palais Jamai, ravishing as she knew this to be; it was French-run, he said, and she would be all right there.

The storm which had so dramatically afforded proof of the authenticity of the wine-vat out at the site continued to blow and deluge Morocco, and when Julia went down to the station in good time for the three-thirty train to Fez it was only to learn that it had not even arrived—there were floods, the Espagnola porter told her; roads were washed away, and the train was delayed. Julia sat rather gloomily on her suitcases in that curious place, Tangier railway-station, watching the milling crowd of Moors, French
colons,
tourists, and hawkers of cigarettes and sweets who filled it, and used the time to inform herself about the journey from the hotel porter. What about customs, for instance? Oh, there were plenty of
them,
the man said grinning: customs out of the city of Tangier—the officers would come presently, to those benches where people were placing their baggage, as the Señorita saw for herself; customs again into the Spanish Zone; more customs on entering the French Protectorate of Morocco. It is a fact that the town of Tangier and its surroundings have a certain resemblance to one of those nests of wooden boxes beloved of the Chinese: the great French Protectorate, stretching from the Sahara on the East to the Atlantic on the West, and reaching southwards almost into Equatorial Africa, is the vast outer box; the much smaller Spanish Zone is the next; then the minute International Zone with the absurd little city at its heart. Absurd only because this tiny entity is politically unique, an
internationally-administered territory of a bare two hundred and twenty-five square miles, containing a population of only a hundred and seventy thousand souls; yet this doll's-house unit has its capital, its diplomatic corps, a judiciary of no less than eight judges, in fact most of the paraphernalia of statehood—it is really much as if Bournemouth had become a state, full as the place is of the delicate and the elderly.

About five the train from Fez came in; half an hour later it moved out again. The Espagnola porter was surprisingly efficient, and while most of the passengers were still screaming harassedly round the customs benches Julia found herself relaxing in a first-class carriage, her suitcases in the racks. Here she was presently joined by an exasperated and sweating individual who slung some rather military-looking baggage up onto the opposite rack, cursed his Arab porter in American French, over-tipped him, and sank back into his seat to light a Chesterfield—with typical courtesy he held out his pack to Julia before he did so.

“Oh, thank you, but I'm smoking,” said Julia. “May I later?”

Her travelling-companion, whose age she judged to be about thirty, next began to ask about customs; thanks to the Espagnola porter Julia was able to enlighten him. And was there a restaurant-car? No there wasn't, she told him.

“Gosh! This is a hell country! How will I eat? With this hold-up I won't get to Port Lyautey till around two a.m.,” said the American aghast.

Julia made no comment on this; instead she asked him what he was going to Port Lyautey for?

He was stationed there, it seemed, at the American Naval Air Base. Julia had not yet realised the highly important political fact of the huge American air bases in Morocco, but she pricked up her journalist's ears at once (with
The Onlooker
and
Ebb and Flow
well in mind) and set about cultivating the airman. Port Lyautey was sandy, she learned, and pretty upstate;
there really wasn't much to it beside the Base; nor was there all that much to the Base—it was dull, apart from the jets. They had a library, but he had read mostly all the books; he amused himself by writing letters. Julia drew him out on the jets, about which he was enthusiastic—wonderful machines! They had given a number to the French for their base at Meknes and sent instructors up to teach the Frogs how to fly them—he had been doing that before he went on leave to take a look at France; he hoped to get sent up again. Meknes was a hick town, though it had a pretty gate—“Kinda arch, y'know; funny, but really pretty”—but when he went there he often drove over to Fez. “Fez is a swell town, so unique. Know it?”

Julia said she was going to Fez.

The airman at once said that he'd try to fix it to get sent up to Meknes right away—anyway he had four or five days leave in hand; he'd gotten fed up with France and came back, so he might come up any time. Where was she staying?

Julia told him the name of her small hotel.

“That's in the old town, isn't it? A small French place? Oh, I'd not stay there if I was you. Little French hotels are awful. Ever stay in one? That's what drove me away, the French hotels. Their notions of
plumbing!”

Julia laughed and said that she had lived in France, and didn't mind any of it, not even the plumbing. She continued to cultivate her Yankee acquaintance, with her usual regrettable eye to the main chance: if he came up to Fez with his car it might solve the problem of getting out to Volubilis and checking on the Roman
huilerie
for Mme La Besse. He was quite nice really, she decided; rather lonely, rather bored—bored, living in Morocco! Julia constantly kept one eye out of the window, observing the country-side, the houses, the flocks of white tick-birds in the sodden fields, the storks wading majestically across the flooded land, a group of animals she couldn't identify scampering beside a reed-bordered stream—could
they be deer? Were there deer in Morocco? She asked her new acquaintance, who had already informed her that his name was Steve Keller, and that he had “done” two years there.

He didn't know—he knew strangely little about this place where he had lived so long. He had obviously never had any real curiosity whatever about the country or its inhabitants: the Moors were a crafty crowd, he said, but just the same what business had the god-damned French there, sitting on top of them and making money out of them? Julia, startled by this attitude, mentioned the hospitals in Casablanca as one instance of something the French had done
for
Morocco—it was, so far, the only thing she knew of that tremendous work. Oh, well, maybe, Mr. Keller replied; he hadn't seen the hospitals, he didn't know. But he was against imperialism and colonialism, any place.

“Why?” Julia asked. “The French have done at least one good thing, which you've never managed to learn about in all this time—don't tell me the Arabs would organise hospitals on their own; they never have anywhere. What harm have they done to the Moors?”

He couldn't answer her. It was just this vague emotional feeling, supported by incuriosity and ignorance, with no more solid basis than an inherited mass-memory of one instance of a Colonial dispensation gone wrong, gone sour; but issuing in a mass-attitude which presented a blank wall to facts. Julia was startled and rather horrified—she had met several Americans, but all of a much more sophisticated type than the airman: either too well-educated to be at the mercy of these primitive concepts, or too wise to give them expression. She relapsed into silence, a thing which always came easy to her.

Dusk began to fall, ending the resource of looking out of the window; the unheated train grew very cold—Julia was glad she had put on the fleecy zip boots admired by Mr. Reeder. She was hungry, and made up her mind to have
supper; clearly she must offer some to her companion and as she lifted down her basket and began to unpack it on the little table under the window she said—

“Won't you have something to eat? I have lots. That is, if you don't mind sharing it with an impenitent imperialist, who is a convinced believer in the colonial system for backward races.”

He laughed very nicely.

“You have me there! I am hungry.” He fairly beamed as he watched her spread out a long loaf, a packet of butter, slices of raw smoked ham, tomatoes, and a jar of black olives, with a bottle of Moroccan red wine standing up in the midst.

They supped in amity, now talking again; Julia had a little thick travelling glass, Steve Keller fished an aluminium cup out of his baggage, from which they drank. The raw ham troubled his timid ignorance about strange foods. “Nonsense, it's delicious; what absurd ideas you have,” said Julia firmly.

“It's
raw,”
objected the American.

“Yes, and so are oysters—it's raw and it's
good.
No, you'll get no more bread till you've eaten a slice,” the girl said, tucking the loaf back into her basket—and in fact when Mr. Keller had tried the raw ham he admitted that it
was
good.

Just as they were finishing supper the ticket collector came along—after snipping their tickets he informed them both that they must change at Petit-Jean. This was one thing on which the Espagnola porter had failed to enlighten Julia; she thought the train went through to Fez. They would reach Petit-Jean about 9.30 to change trains—oh, abundantly of time; yes, and plenty of porters. And when would they reach Fez? Julia asked. Ah, it was impossible to be precise—at one in the morning, or perhaps at two.

Julia groaned—this was going to be ghastly. Her little hotel was to have sent to meet her train at the normal time, but would they wait till one or even two a.m.? However, she put all that aside till the time came, with her usual calm.

When they reached Petit-Jean, they found that the collector was wrong both about the abundance of time for the change and the supply of porters. Of the latter there were none. Julia and Steve Keller tumbled out in the darkness on to a platform empty of everything but other distracted passengers tumbling out too, while a French voice screamed
“Depart pour Fez en deux minutes!”
The airman gathered up her suitcases, gallantly abandoning his own luggage, and led her, running and stumbling, round to another stationary train, which proved to be the one for Fez; hastening after him, cumbered with her typewriter and food basket, on the further platform she bumped into a small man who swore at her in some guttural language as he recoiled from the painful impact of the basket. “The same to you, with knobs on!” Julia muttered—in the light falling from the high train windows she saw that he had a cast in one eye, and thought she recognised the seedy little man from Purcell's Bar. But there was no time to make sure—Steve was already throwing her cases up the four feet which always separate the doors of French trains, Heaven knows why, from ground level, and hollering to her to hurry. Discomfited, furious, panting, Julia climbed in after them just as the train drew out.

“Oh, thank you
so
much!” she shouted at him through the window—and “See you in Fez, Thursday,” the American shouted back.

Fez is a strange city. Withdrawn, remote, secretive, it is so compressed, both within itself and by its gloomy encircling hills, that it is one of the most difficult towns in the world to
see
—its most famous monuments, like the Kairouine Mosque, can never be entered by Christians (or any other infidel), and there are no open spaces from which to gaze even on the exterior of these wonderful buildings. The most the visitor can do is to climb to the top of one or other of the Medersas, or sacred colleges, and thence look out over the roofs of the greater wonders, and perambulate the narrow steep streets, catching a glimpse, here of a fountain, there of the carved doorway of a shrine. It is very revealing of the character of the place that the only views it permits of itself as a whole should be of its walls, seen from the slopes of the hills outside—Fez allows no view within those walls.

And yet it is full of magic: the magic of things half-seen in a dream, the magic of the barely visible or the partly remembered, which are the very stuff of dreams. Fez is full of rivers—seven, I believe—but they all run underground; the narrow alleys are full of the mysterious sound of invisible rushing water, but even the rivers may not be looked upon. These subterranean streams serve the useful purpose of sewers and also of rubbish dumps; here and there, under dank and clammy vaulted archways, one comes upon a mortared chute where the sound of the hidden water is extra loud—two women with baskets, or a mule-drawn cart, are to be seen emptying part of what Fez has done with and wishes to be rid of down the chute into the roaring hurrying stream, below and out of sight. Earth has not anything to show, not more fair, but more peculiar.

And the people are as strange and as secretive as the place.
Hawk-like Arab types predominate, striding along in silence on slippered feet, their stern splendid faces closed, inward-looking; the women's great sombre eyes look out from above swathing white veils with none of the languor or gay curiosity of the eyes which look out above veils in Tangier or Marrakesh; even the Berber women, unveiled and with deep blue designs tattooed on brow and chin, seem, in Fez, to lack the bold chattering gaiety which they display elsewhere—sitting inviting the passer-by to inspect their wares in Tetuan, for example. And since the secretive, the mysterious, are apt to be also slightly sinister, or at least intimidating, Fez at first often creates a faintly alarming impression.

So at least it seemed to Julia Probyn—especially when the Oran express, into which she had to make another unexpected change at Meknes, decanted her at the station at half-past one in the morning. The railway of course has been kept well away from the mediaeval city, brooding within its walls; it only touches the new town. There were few passengers besides herself, and these got into cars and drove away; a solitary taxi was parked under the arc-lights on the space outside the station. This Julia hailed. It was free—it had not been sent by her hotel; an aged Arab with a beard, leaning in his djellaba by the station entrance, heard her question, and vouchsafed in curious French that the hotel had sent a car earlier, but that it had gone away. So Julia drove off in the taxi, cold, weary, and in spite of her usual calm a little nervous—what, for instance, would the taxi cost at this unearthly hour? It cost five hundred francs; but after driving along what seemed miles of wall, and through innumerable gateways and archways, looming high and shadowy above her, it did at last deposit her at her hotel, where a lot of hammering and bell-ringing at length produced a sleepy servant who led her to a small but decent room—fifteen minutes after she entered it Julia was in bed and asleep.