Moon Tiger (13 page)

I cannot write chronologically of Egypt. Ancient Egypt. So-called ancient Egypt. In my history of the world – this realistic kaleidoscopic history – Egypt will have its proper place as the complacent indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazuli, bits of pot and fragments of wood to fill the museums of the world. Egypt is not then but now, conditioning the way we look at things. The image of the Sphinx is familiar to those who have never heard of pharaohs or dynasties; the new brutalism of Karnak is homely to anyone who grew up with ’thirties architecture.

Like anyone else, I knew Egypt before ever I went there. And when I think of it now – when I think of how I am going to invoke Egypt within the story of the world – I have to think of it as a continuous phenomenon, the kilted pharaonic population spilling out into the Nile valley of the twentieth century, the chariots and lotuses, Horus and Ra and Isis alongside the Mameluke mosques, the babbling streets of Cairo, Nasser’s High Dam, the khaki convoys of 1942, the Edwardian opulence of Turkish mansions. Past and present do not so much co-exist in the Nile valley as cease to have any meaning. What is buried under the sand is reflected above, not just in the souvenirs hawked by the descendants of the tomb robbers but in the eternal, deliberate cycle of the landscape – the sun rising
from the desert of the east to sink into the desert of the west, the spring surge of the river, the regeneration of creatures – the egrets and herons and wildfowl, the beasts of burden, the enduring peasantry.

In the Rameses Hilton a few years ago I met a man who was the biggest world-wide distributor of lavatory cisterns. Or so he claimed. A mid-westerner on the brink of retirement and a member of one of those groups of footloose geriatric Americans who stream through hotels from Dublin to Singapore. This man, unattached, picked me up in the bar, taking me for a bird of the same feather. ‘What I don’t get about these guys,’ he said, easing his polyester-clad bum on to the stool next to mine, ‘is the motivation. Lemme buy you a drink. Never mind the engineering, and believe me that’s quite sumpin’, it’s the motivation gets me. All that, to get yourself buried.’ I let him buy me a whisky and asked him if he was afraid of death. ‘Sure I’ m afraid of death. Everyone’s afraid of death, aren’t they?’ ‘The Egyptians weren’t. They were concerned with the survival of the spirit. Or the soul – call it what you like. Not that that makes them unique, but it’s a thing we’ve rather lost interest in nowadays.’ He gave me a suspicious look – regretting the whisky; no doubt wondering what he’d landed himself with. ‘You some kind of professor?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m a tourist, like you. What do you do?’ And so he told me about the lavatory cisterns and we struck up something that while it could not be called a friendship was a sort of eery alliance because he was a robust, honest, not incurious man who liked someone to talk to and I was – not lonely, I have never been lonely – but alone. And thus it was in his incongruous company that I went for the second time and forty years later to Luxor, to the Valley of the Kings, to Esna and Edfu. And to the Pyramids and to the Citadel and to the bank of the Nile beside Kasr el Nil bridge where St George’s Pro-Cathedral in which I once prayed no longer exists, replaced by a roaring flyover system for Cairo’s unquenchable traffic. He is neither here nor there now, the American – I don’t even remember his name – like that Ordnance officer on the terrace of Shepheard’s, but like him he
is forever tethered to a certain place, a certain time. His story – whatever his story is – was twined briefly with mine. In both our stories there is a temple wall before which we stand, screwing up our eyes against the hard brilliance of the sky above as the complex scenes carved in relief upon the stone resolve themselves into what they are – a chronicle of bloodshed. Half-naked soldiers are being decapitated, run through with spears, flattened by chariots. These scenes are repeated on the other three walls, to a height of twenty or thirty feet. The guide explains that this is both a record and a celebration of the pharaoh’s various triumphs over his enemies. And there indeed is the pharaoh, several times over, bigger than everyone else, driving his chariot with casual ease, reins in one hand, weapon in the other. Bodies lie around. ‘Tough guy,’ comments my companion. ‘I thought he was supposed to be the god as well as the king? So how come it’s all right for him to go around wiping people out?’ ‘Would it be incompatible?’ I ask. The guide explains that the decapitated figures we see probably represent units – thousands or tens of thousands – it’s a system of recording the slaughtered enemies. ‘Jesus,’ says the American. ‘That’s one hell of a massacre. You’d think things would have been rough enough on them back then anyway without carving each other up on top of it.’ We stand there in contemplation of this silent carnage. ‘I was in France in ’forty-four,’ says the American. ‘I never saw combat, but I saw what it leaves behind. It’s not pretty, let me tell you.’ I do not bother to say that he has no need to.

It is an infinite sandy rubbish-tip, as though some careless giant hand has showered down on to it the debris of a thousand junk yards – the burned-out carcasses of vehicles, heaps of old tyres, empty petrol cans, rusted tins, sheets of corrugated iron, tangles of barbed wire, used shell-cases. All this litter lies amid the desert’s natural untidiness, the endless scatter of bony apparently lifeless scrub that speckles it from horizon to horizon. The only clear spaces are the tracks along which wind the occasional line of trucks or
armoured cars, the ‘Tin-Pan Alleys’ defined by petrol cans.

They have been following just such a road for two hours now. It is easy, though, to lose the track in the confusion of tyre-marks and rough sign-posts, and when this happens the driver, a small wiry Londoner baked to the colour of burned custard, navigates by a combination of map-reading and guesswork. He drove a taxi before the war, it emerges, and treats the desert with contemptuous familiarity, as though it were some Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of London topography. When they meet up with other vehicles he bawls queries and information into the wind. Everyone is looking for someone else or somewhere else. This area was at the centre of the last action, during which units were scattered; the landscape is full of thousands of men trying to sort themselves back into some kind of order.

Claudia sits beside the driver. Jim Chambers of Associated News is in the back with a New Zealand correspondent. Conversation has to be shouted above the din of the truck’s engine. Claudia feels as though all the bones in her body have been rattled loose and her eyes are red-rimmed and smarting from the dust. The driver, who is protective and amused about this exceptional passenger, warns her to tuck a scarf between her neck and shirt or she will have desert sores like everyone else.

They are heading for Seventh Armoured Division HQ, and the driver is worried about getting there before sunset. They have already taken the wrong track once and got stuck in soft sand three times through leaving the track altogether. When that happens the driver swears, jumps down, hauls out the sacks and they all set about the gruelling sweating process of digging out.

He points out a tank. ‘One of Jerry’s. Brewed up in the first push. Want to take a look, miss?’

They climb out of the truck and walk across to the tank. It is a blackened hulk and it stinks. It lies lurching on one side, beached in a sand-dune, and around it is strewn more debris, small-scale intimate debris – a mess tin, a tattered airletter that
flutters in the wind, a packet of biscuits from which a neat black stream of ants pours away towards a rock. Jim Chambers takes some photographs.

There is continuous noise. When planes pass overhead – transport planes, fighters – the whole sky roars. From beyond the horizon come dull thumps and every now and then a silver glitter of tracer fire rises from its rim, or a jewelled explosion of Very lights. And the entire landscape smokes. Burned-out vehicles stream grey in the wind, the sky-line erupts with white puffs, a black column towers away to their right where captured enemy ammunition has been blown up. Smoke and dust fume upwards together, each truck, car or motor-cycle trailing its own buff-coloured wake. In the distance, there is a column of lorries, so blotted out by dust that only their shapes can be seen creeping across the waste and evoking another wilderness and another time – covered waggons on the prairie. And when another cloud of dust comes near enough to disgorge the outlines of tanks they too seem to be something quite else – the high complex turrets of ships riding an ocean, complete with bright pennants.

‘We’ll stop for a brew,’ shouts the driver. ‘I want to take a shufti at the map.’ They are climbing a slight ridge at the top of which is the hollow of a gun-emplacement with camouflage net and scattered leaking sand-bags. This makes a useful shelter from the wind which is getting up. A fire is made in a can of petrol-soaked sand and tea is brewed in a mess tin. ‘Cuppa, miss?’ Claudia sits drinking the tea and staring over the top of the sand-bags down into the shallow valley from which they have come; she wonders who lay here a few days before, trying to kill someone else. A little earlier they passed three crosses erected in a line near the burned shell of a truck. One of them had a tin helmet beside it and an inscription pencilled on the rough plank of wood: ‘Corporal John Wilson, killed in action.’

The driver thinks they are in for a fucking sandstorm – ‘Pardon my French, miss.’ They climb back into the lorry and rattle down the other side of the ridge where the landscape of the last hour, and the one before, repeats itself. The track is
badly marked but the driver heads for the distant black smudges of other vehicles which resolve themselves, as they get closer, into a couple of Red Cross trucks, stationary near the carcass of a tank. A bundle lies nearby on a stretcher. Men are clambering on the tank. The driver stops and jumps out, as do Jim Chambers and the New Zealander. ‘I’d stay put, old girl, if I were you,’ says Jim Chambers to Claudia, who disregards him. They walk towards the tank and she sees now that the figures on the tank are dragging from it what has been a man, a reddened, blackened thing with smashed head and a shining splintered white bone for an arm. There is a reek of burning and decay. Two more bundles on stretchers lie in the back of the ambulance truck, whose driver is giving directions to their driver. They are all, it seems, off the track. This is the scene of one of last week’s tank battles and yes, the ground is crisscrossed all over with the crenellated plough-marks of their tracks, reaching away on all sides, a silent mayhem in testimony of what has happened here.

They get once more into the truck. The sand is blowing hard now; the sharp clarity of vision has gone, the horizon can no longer be seen. The driver puts on goggles and finds a pair for Claudia. They crash on into the murk, the driver stopping every now and then to jump down and examine a marker, but presently the petrol cans and posts give out altogether and they are forging into emptiness with occasional tyre-marks roving off in all directions. The sand rises in clouds. The whole world turns a lurid pinkish orange; it is impossible to see more than ten or fifteen yards ahead.

They creep on through the sandstorm. The firm going gives way to softer sand from which jut treacherous boulders that grate against the underneath of the truck. Twice they flounder to a halt and have to dig out. And the second time no sooner are they going once more than there is a grinding smash from somewhere beneath and the truck judders to a stop. The driver jumps down and vanishes beneath. He comes up to announce that the fucking back axle is done for.

Everyone, now, is cursing. The New Zealander has an
interview lined up that he sees evaporating if they do not reach HQ by nightfall. The driver, who clearly regards Claudia as his special responsibility, says, ‘Don’t worry, miss, we’ll get you there.’ ‘I’m not worried,’ says Claudia, who is not. She takes the cover off her typewriter and sits in the cab of the truck, typing, while the desert roars around, now white, now sulphur, now rose-coloured. Jim Chambers produces a flask of whisky. The driver says this may not be blinking Piccadilly but there’ll be someone by sooner or later, they can’t be far from the fucking track and once the sandstorm dies down they can get their bearings again. ‘How do you spell “incandescent”?’ enquires Claudia. ‘Don’t show off, Claudia,’ says Jim. The driver, now besotted with her, offers yet another cigarette.

Claudia types. She has to pause from time to time to shake sand from the typewriter. She types partly from expediency and partly to exorcise what is now printed on her eyeballs. She tries to reduce to words what she has seen and thought. She types also because she is dog-tired, thirsty, aching and bad-tempered and if she does not occupy herself she might give away some of this, and be ashamed.

And now out in the howling sand there is another sound, and something solid moving in the murk that presently forms itself into the outline of a jeep in which are two figures. Shouts are exchanged. The jeep approaches. The figures jump out. They are a tank officer called Tom Southern and another officer. Their reaction to Claudia’s presence is one of amused concern. They are making for HQ and can give a lift to two. The driver will stop with the truck until the breakdown blokes can be reached. Jim Chambers volunteers to stay also. So, grimly, does the New Zealander. So, naturally, does Claudia. In the end it is decided that Jim will stay and the rest continue.

Claudia climbs into the passenger seat of the jeep. Tom Southern drives. The sandstorm is dying down and it is again possible to see the contours of the desert and to pick up the track. She is so tired that she is unable to respond to anything said by the others and at one point she dozes off, slides against Southern’s arm and feels him gently but firmly prop her
upright again. She sits there half-asleep, seeing little, just his hand on the driving-wheel, a brown hand with a scatter of black hairs between wrist and knuckles; forty years on, she will still see that hand.

My cushioned and carpeted return to Egypt, courtesy of Pharaohtours and the Hilton, included a brief trip into the desert, seen this time through tinted windows from within an air-conditioned coach. The driver stopped so that his passengers might descend and taste for themselves the authentic desert air; there was also a fine view of the Pyramids of Dashur. ‘Don’t you want to get out?’ said my American friend. I shook my head. ‘You sure you’re OK?’ he enquired solicitously. ‘You’ve not spoken a word this trip’ ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I was thinking, that’s all. And I’ve already seen the desert. You get out and have a look around. I’ll stay here.’ He heaved himself up. ‘OK then. How come you’ve seen the desert, though – you been here before or something?’ ‘Not here exactly,’ I said, evasively. He did not pursue the matter; his attention span was short and camel touts had appeared from nowhere, camera fodder not to be missed. He got out and I was left alone with the tinted glass through which I saw my own images, the distant but vivid shapes and colours of another time, the tanks hunched into the sand, the surrealist sepia swirls and blots of camouflage.