The Avignon Quintet (17 page)

I was far away as yet from “seeing” in the gnostic sense that night – of acquiring that penetrating vision which could turn us all to masks and caricatures of reality with names, mere labels; each one of us nevertheless with an “eidolon” or signature, a disposition, a proclivity visible to the naked eye of the intuition only. Within each of us struggled man, woman and child. Our passions were packed in the cool clay of our silences, ready for the oven, ready for the mystical marriage feast. … In this sense, and in this sense only, did I find a perfectly satisfactory rationale which subsumed my double relationship with Piers and with his sister. It was through this experience with Akkad and his sect that I at last managed to gain a foothold in that part of reality which was probably my own inner self. It may sound strange, but I now understood the nature of my love – and also the nature of human love as a whole. I saw quite unmistakably that man had set astray the natural periodicity of sexuality and so forfeited his partnership with the animal kingdom. This was his central trauma, and it also signalled the final loss of his powers over the matter – that was coming …

Yet despite the apparent informality of the proceedings which amounted almost to laxness one could feel underneath the structure of a method. I had the impression that something was being conveyed to me as a sense impression, and not being made rationally explicit in order not to indulge my natural faculty of ratiocination. After all you cannot ask a perfume or a sound to explain itself. By the same token I simply inhaled all this lore without trying my mind on it, trying to reduce it to some sort of canonical formula.

All this and much more was borne in my consciousness on that strange night; despite my misgivings and my distrust of hocus pocus. … The incident of the snake and the mummia and the wine when it came seemed absolutely natural and not a mere seductive folklore to gain adherents or convince doubters. One of the dervishes brought a large flat wicker basket which he placed at the feet of Akkad, who lifted the lid from it and disclosed a very large snake – a species of cobra which I had not seen before. It was very much bigger than the ordinary Egyptian cobra and could have perhaps been Indian. But its colour was extraordinary – a kind of nacreous pink shading into violet underneath its body. It appeared as domesticated as a household pet. It looked about with its forked tongue flicking softly in and out of its cruel white mouth; its hood was not fully inflated. A saucer of milk was placed for it with some dead flies floating in it and it leaned forward delicately to lap like a pet; indeed to facilitate the meal it slipped out of its soft basket giving us a chance to marvel at its great length. Akkad stroked it in familiar fashion, and it accepted his caress as a cat might, flattening its head and extending it for the touch of his palm. After a pause the recitation went on, though all eyes were now on the snake. When the reptile had finished its meal Akkad took it up softly and came towards us holding it in his arms, draped around him, curled, oozing, swaying. We were each of us to stroke its head, so he told us; and in spite of our fear and revulsion we made an effort to do so.

Piers and his sister passed the test easily but in my case and Toby’s the snake appeared to hesitate and ruminate, and when we put out a hand it uttered a slight hiss. “Insist quietly,” said Akkad, “and don’t be afraid of it.” It was easy to say, and we did our best to comply with his instructions, but I did not feel that the perfunctory pat on the head I gave it amounted to very much. When it came to Sabine’s turn Akkad simply emptied it into her arms and snake and woman seemed to sink into a complete embrace. She murmured the sort of endearments one might reserve for a favourite kitten, stroking its head and winding it around her body. It took some time to complete this little ceremony for everyone had to touch it in turn; but when it was completed Akkad took it back to its basket and coaxed it to resume its position inside it – erect and ever-watchful however. Now some batons of incense had been lighted by the dervishes and clouds of aromatic perfume rolled about the dark corners of the mosque, obscuring outlines and transforming faces and forms. The recitation with its melodious but twanging Greek shifted key, moved in the direction of greater emphasis, as if kindled by the waves of perfume on the dark night.

Akkad sat listening, his head now bowed, like a man under a waterfall; but it seemed that he was waiting for a particular passage or a special break in the litany, for suddenly he raised his finger and the reciters paused. “Now let us partake of the holy mummia,” he said in commanding tones and the dervishes advanced towards us humbly bearing large silver trays on which were a number of small bowls with pieces of mummia – or at least I presumed it was mummia. Dried mummy-flesh had been a standby in medicine for centuries, and as a doctor in bud I was curious to taste it. But dark Sylvie shuddered. The little strips of flesh were quite dry, quite dehydrated. The consistency was that of the dried fish known as Bombay duck; but the colour was a dark red, almost crimson, and the taste was faint and tenuous. I tried to place it, and found myself thinking of a faint perfume of celery. It reminded me a little of French froglegs, or the dried locusts I had once eaten in the desert outside Cairo. I despatched a wafer or two of this magic comestible without undue anxiety and watched the quantity gradually diminish as each one of us in the circle took up his portion. Akkad watched it all solemnly; but there was no specially ritual aspect to this part of the ceremony. When everyone had partaken of the mummia the dishes were taken away and Akkad, once more interrupting the recitation said: “Now let us partake of the wine.”

Flagons were now brought made of some strange pottery, and in each flagon there was perhaps a teacupful of a wine mixture which tasted salt and tepid; we waited until the whole company was served and then, in response to the same gesture by Akkad, raised our receptacles in an attitude of toasting before draining them. This was the point at which I realised that some of my misgivings had been soundly based – for the wine was powerfully drugged, and one instantly felt one’s senses sag and falter. Everything now began to mix and flow – what with the clouds of incense and the staccato note of the chanting, you could quite clearly feel the sudden distortion set in as the vision changed focus; yet it was not at all alarming, we were all quite at ease. Perhaps we were reassured by Akkad who said: “It will not last long,” as he saw the obvious signs of our struggle against the drug.

He added, sweeping our faces with his glance: “Keep your gaze on Ophis the snake.” For my part I stared at the snake with all the wild intensity of a pilot seeking a passage across a fog-bound estuary; it was partly due to visibility and partly to the drug we had taken. Everything now rose and subsided, wobbled and merged and deliquesced. The ancient serpent itself appeared to rear up to twice its height in order to present itself more clearly to us, in order as it were to preside more fully over the ceremony. But anything I say about this part of the evening is subject to caution – for we were so obviously and woefully dazed by the potion. I recall the voice of Toby saying, with a kind of triumphant indignation: “Mumbo Jumbo by Jove.” But he said it unwillingly, almost sleepily, as though all but carried away by what he saw despite his native reservations. “The eyes,” cried Akkad sharply, “look at the eyes.”

I looked at the tiny glittering eyes of Ophis, and it gave back my glance with a queer malevolent glitter, an insinuating flicker of that forked tongue. So staring, I felt that I was rushing towards it, its head became enormous, its delicate hinged jaws open to expose long scimitar-like teeth, so white and clean. A wild revulsion rose in me, and I felt all of a sudden as if I were suffocating; I struggled to free my neck from the collar of the garment I wore, to breathe more freely. Then I shook the vision out of my eyes like someone shaking back clear-sightedness after a severe concussion brought about by a blow on the head.

It was something like a battle of will-powers. The serpent was trying to engulf me, like a python with a hare, and I was quite determined to keep myself free. All this rose to the boil, so to speak, and then burst like a bubble, and as it did so I saw what later I was to recognise as our mentor, the usurping Prince, seated in place of the serpent, staring at me with a kind of bloodthirsty jocularity. How difficult it is to describe this sort of vision; yes, we all have the capacity during a dream to fabricate this sort of thing. But this was somehow different, though I cannot for the life of me explain just how. I saw a snake no longer but a kind of huge dung-beetle with the head of a dog; its body was armour-plated like a saurian, with black polished scales, like the body-armour of a Japanese swordsman. A single goat’s hoof was visible outside the snake-basket, standing on the flags of the mosque. This whole vision kept dissolving and reappearing in the vast clouds of incense. Yet it was not quite a vision – it was certainly a Thing of particular consequence to me. I could not just dismiss it as a piece of reality distorted by a drug or a dose of alcohol. I was profoundly impressed and depressed by it, and I had a nagging feeling that nothing would ever be the same again for me. Absurd, of course, absurd.

Looking so fixedly at this strange machine-like animal-bird-insect I felt as if it were talking to me, felt it had the sort of significance which one cannot render clear by words, a deep symbolic significance of something which by-passed causality. The alchemists apparently have to deal with this sort of symbol in their work; but I was no alchemist, and I knew little enough about orders of knowledge which were not rudely scientific. I also shared a good deal of Toby’s dogged scepticism. But there was much of which I was then unaware – and for example, at this very moment I was unaware that I had let out something between a shout and a shriek and tried to leap to my feet and advance on the snake. Toby heard me faintly and told me later on. Yet all movement was impossible – I was paralysed. Moreover I was all of a sudden exhausted, racked with sobs; the current turned itself off with a magical suddenness, and just as if I had depended upon it to sit upright, I found myself falling forward upon my hands. I felt my cheek touching the cold flags of the room as I came to my senses, slowly, trembling all over. When at last I raised my eyes it was to see that almost everyone in the company was in the same case, lying utterly exhausted on their carpets, tremulously breathing and gasping. It had lasted a very short time, the visionary incident. It had drained us of our attention and then left us stranded like objects on a beach at low tide. I have seldom felt so physically exhausted.

But there was one exception to the general state of exhaustion – and that was constituted by the behaviour of poor Piers which differed completely from our own. He was plainly choking, with both hands trying to tear an invisible serpent from his throat; he rose to his knees, writhing, fighting, gasping with weakness. He rolled over on his side, still struggling – and his miming of the snake, something huge like a boa, was so lifelike that for a moment one almost saw the reptile sliding round him, squeezing the breath from his body. As I say, all this was so very lifelike, and his distress so great that I started feebly to try and rouse myself to go to his aid, but Akkad smilingly bade me desist; in fact he looked highly delighted by this mimic battle and by the deep anxiety of my friend. Later he was to tell me, for what it was worth, that it confirmed the initiation of Piers, and his inclusion without further probation into the sect. He had been granted the particular sign of the snake-covenant. Myself I was reminded when he said this of the Aesculapian snake and the
incubatio
in the white colonnades of Epidaurus where the doctors interpreted the first night’s sleep according to the snake-dreams of the patient. Yes, there were many connections which Akkad helped me to work out during the short time I was in Egypt with him, many resonances and affiliations.

Piers had gone so white and still that he seemed dead. But to tell the truth everyone showed the same signs of utter blank exhaustion in varying degrees, and presently at a sign from Akkad the servants appeared with soft wraps which they laid upon the recumbent forms. The great snake disappeared. Somewhere a door opened and a cold whiff of desert air entered to chase the columns of incense and bring a breathable atmosphere into the mosque. But we were all utterly dead with sleep, all of us; myself I lay in a state of dreamy half-convalescence like a child at breast. I felt the soft material draped over me and the cushion adjusted under my head by an invisible hand, and I allowed myself to founder softly into nothingness, worn out with all I had experienced. When I awoke with a jolt it was early dawn already, and all the other sleepers had vanished with the exception of Piers who had crawled to my side and now slept quietly with his head against my shoulder. Sylvie? Toby? Gone! Moreover everything was silent save for the hum of insects in the trees outside the mosque. The sun was just touching the rim of the horizon and the whole world was saffron and lion-gold. The cold cut to the very bone of thought. I took Piers’ pulse. He seemed perfectly normal now – and indeed I myself felt completely recovered from the mysterious fatigue of the night before. I was full, too, of a physical exuberance unusual for me, and also a tremendous mental euphoria – the kind of feeling one gets after having, without deserving it, passed a difficult exam unexpectedly. “Piers,” I whispered, “I’m going to have a swim.” He did not open his eyes or say anything, but a tiny pucker of a smile came to the corner of his lips so that I knew he had heard me.

I went down the stairs into the crisp dawn light; the whole village slept. It looked like an abandoned battlefield. Only an occasional horse was stirring. I walked towards the looking-glass of the lake, eager to see my own reflection in it as if in some curious way I expected to have changed, to have altered in my physical appearance. For what reason? I do not know – only this abstract sense of jubilation and relief dogged my steps, and I could offer myself no reason for it. I broke into a run along the margins of the lake, looking sideways to see my reflection racing through the massed spear-points of the reeds. The sun came up like a bronze medallion and its regal heat spilled over on to the damp sand, swiftly dispelling the heavy night dews. I looked carefully to see if there were any of the tell-tale black shells in the shallows which might portend water infected by the dread bilharzia but there were none and before I could think it I was up to my waist in the icy brilliance of the lake water, consumed again by this inexplicable joy. I swam out of my depth and turned over to let the sun fire a million silver drops of prismatic light on to my wet eyelashes. It was not too long either before a second figure joined me, and then the third – the dark girl whom I could never see like this without a contraction of the heart. I did not say “I love you” aloud, nor did she. Our wet fingers touched and we formed a circle like the corolla of a flower, floating into the silence of the desert dawn with the ancient sun on our bodies. It lasted a long time, this swim which seemed to have some of the qualities of an esoteric act of lustration. We were all somehow too excited to speak or exclaim; only our triumphant eyes met from time to time to exchange jubilant glances. It is true that once I asked Sylvie: “Did you see …?” But she drew her breath and, nodding, cut off my sentence, as if not only had we shared the same vision but also that it did not bear speaking about openly.