The Avignon Quintet (93 page)

“How beautiful the women are!” cried Sylvaine. “They don’t seem to fuss very much about the veil either.”

“It’s hard to work as they do and wear it.”

“I hope they abolish it one day. What eyes!”

“What eyes!” echoed Sam and added, in garbled quotation, “She walks in beauty like the Nile.” But it was an apt enough paraphrase for what one felt watching the women upon the banks, their tall frames moulded from the darkness of water and clay, brown as terracotta. In them you felt the great river with its sudden eddies and slow oozings, its lapses and languors. Yes, the river was her clock-time, she walked in time to river’s green blood, the Nile-pulse which throbbed in that velvet smooth element. The warmth of these villagers was inspiriting, smiles of charcoal, ivory or magenta, sudden flashes from the turret of a veil; and then the hoarse, bronze laughter of the man, brazen heads laughing, bronze arms raised. All suddenly cut off by a bend in the river, decapitated: their voices drowned by the shrieking of waterwheels whose wooden squeak is the most characteristic sound of the Egyptian night.

The pilot smiles as he answers the wave of a whole village – but the smile passes like a breath over embers and then is gone, lost in his dark abstraction, his nilotic amnesia. Slowly the villages pass out of sight; night is falling, soft as a great moth. These big lumbering men and women have all the humbling dignity of dispossessed monarchs. They are paupers, ravaged by want and illness. The old stand about in attitudes of deafness, like so many King Lears. And yet their land is a paradise – nature’s exuberance has gone wild. You see cork oaks ravaged by ants, honeysuckle climbing into palm trees, water-laved rock carved into the heads of elephants. But everything enjoying a seeming aloneness under that burning sky. Dusk to darkness to starlight. A fish jumps. Then another. Then a sudden shower of silver arrows. It is to be our last night aboard.

A faint river wind favours us, keeping the night insects at bay, so we are able to have our dinner by candleshine on deck – a smoky flapping light which we would soon extinguish in favour of a young rising moon. We grew sentimental and spoke of
après la guerre
. The French couple unhesitatingly expressed their intention of returning to Provence to spend the rest of their lives in the old tumbledown chateau of their ancestors. Bruno wanted to write a book about the Templars – apparently there was a mass of unpublished matter in the muniments room of the chateau.

“You will come too,” he cried warmly. “I feel you will. I know you will. We will be happy living there with just each other for company!” I hardly dared to extend my wishes so far, though Sam seemed ready enough to promise so far ahead. I could not envisage any end to this war, and a deep sadness took possession of me. I thought of Anne Farnol and wondered how many like her would be forced to abdicate in the face of fate. Then, with a jolt, I “recognised” the face of Sylvaine; it is strange how small things stick. I had seen her for a while in the lunatic asylum of Montfavet near Avignon. I had been taken there by Lord Galen to visit a friend of his and I had glimpsed a dark girl, a patient, walking in the rose garden. So very like Sylvaine, the dark, bird-headed girl – they could have been twins as well. I told her this and she smiled and shook her head. “Not me,” she said, “or me in another life – who can say?”

We had become such close friends now that it was quite a wrench to envisage this parting; just round the corner was the little town where tomorrow our car would wait to ferry us back to the capital where we were expected to dine with my Prince. Another small sadness too was that soon Sam would be going back to the front – and everyone knew that there was a big battle impending in the Western Desert. My heart turned over as I thought of Constance and watched her handsome, insouciant mate packing his kit bag.

On the morrow it was all goodbyes and regrets, unfeigned enough, for the whole voyage had been a miracle of comfort and delight. Yes, we would all meet again, we swore it. Then with a melancholy thoroughness we packed our affairs into the big camouflaged staff car which bore the Egyptian army crescent. The return journey was a whirlwind of dusk and clamour as we swept through the villages on the river bank, scattering livestock and villagers alike by the noise of our triple horns. There was some point in this speeding, for the capital was a good distance away – and indeed we only arrived at the palace with half an hour to spare before dinner. As my servant wound me into my cummerbund I heard Sam in the shower talking, half to himself and half to me: “So Constance doth make cowards of us all, eh? As a matter of fact I wrote her a long letter from Greece; but God knows if it will ever reach her through the army post office. Anyway, I feel the better for having talked to you. Will you write her about my visit? You have so many more nouns and verbs than I.” I agreed to do this.

The servant brought in a parcel of clothes and started laying out a desert uniform with Egyptian army tabs. Sam watched this curiously, wondering what it could mean. “I have been created an honorary lieutenant in the Egyptian army for tomorrow. Apparently the picnic place is technically out of bounds except to troops.” It was some time later over whiskies in the scarlet leather salon that the Prince himself added the details to this explanation, smoking a hashish-loaded cigarette in a long yellow holder.

“It has always been our favourite picnic place, an old Coptic monastery in ruins, Aby Fahym. Now since that corner of the desert has been cleared of the Italians I have asked H.Q. for permission to revisit it. You will see how pretty it is, though mostly knocked down. First the Italians took it, then the British kicked them out; then they came back, then were kicked out again. Each time they knocked a piece off it. There was one old monk who refused to move; he lived in the ruins, crawling about like a lizard. Both sides fed him, he became a sort of mascot. Finally he disappeared in the last British attack which took the place, and since then has never been seen. He will obviously become a legend in the Coptic Church; but meanwhile you will see how pretty it is.”

Next morning we set off by car and motored to the desert fringe where we were met by horses and a string of camels: slower moving traffic, so to speak, but more adept when it came to carrying heavy baggage, tents and suchlike. Everyone was in high good spirits. The party had been joined by two young staff officers from the Military Mission, an Egyptian liaison officer and an R.A.M.C. doctor who seemed to be on good terms with the Prince and Princess and answered to the name of Major Drexel. He professed himself to be “swanning”, very much as Sam himself was. The Princess with some hauteur refused the horses and camels which she described as “Bedouin folklore” and elected to lead us in her comfortable estate car with its special tyres. So we set off in a somewhat straggling party to complete the first part of the journey which was undertaken with circumspection, for the route led us first through a network of minefields until we hit the final wire with its command cars and straggling tanks on duty. Here we provided our permits and documents and were ushered into the desert as if into a drawing-room by a ceremonious staff officer who took the trouble, however, to compare map references with the liaison officer and insist that we went no further than the feature mentioned on our permit. “At least, we take no responsibility for you beyond that point.”

The Prince puffed out his cheeks with a proud and disdainful expression. “There is no danger at all now,” he said, “I have it on the best authority.”

“Very well, sir,” said the ruddy staff officer. “On you go, and a happy picnic to you.”

A light wind sprang up, not enough to create sand, yet enough to cool the middle hours of the day. The light with its dancing violet heart outlined this strange primeval world of dunes and
wadis
through which we wound our way; quite soon, like a ship which clears the horizon, we would be moving by the studied navigation of the compass, or the stars. It gave one a strange feeling of freedom. Once a small arrowhead of planes passed overhead – so high as to look like a formation of wild geese, and far too high to let us read their markings. Sam rode with the Princess, and I on another horse with the Prince. The whole journey only took about an hour and a half. We came at last to a small oasis and a series of grey escarpments, forms of striated rock, which shouldered up into the sky. “Look!” someone cried as we rounded a shoulder of dune. We saw a small oasis and within a few hundred yards the Coptic monastery came into view. Aby Fahym must once have been very beautiful, though now it was rather knocked about; one had to decipher its turrets and crocketed belfries anew to rediscover its original shape and style. But almost any building in that strange, romantic site would have seemed compelling to the imagination. The two main granaries were joined by a high ramp in the form of a bridge. The Prince was highly delighted and gazed at the old place through his glasses, exclaiming, “Well, it’s still there, the old Bridge of Sighs. They haven’t knocked it down after all.” He superintended the setting up of a shady marquee with childish pleasure, even going so far as to knock in a tent peg or two himself with a wooden mallet, until a shocked servant snatched it from his royal hand and reproached him in guttural Arabic.

Carpets were spread, divans appeared, as also the latest creation from Italy, a portable frigidaire which held countless bowls of sorbet and iced lemon tea. We were all thirsty and did justice to this initiative, seated in a wide semi-circle around the Prince. The conversation had turned to politics so that, excusing ourselves in a whisper, Sam and I set out to trudge up to the monastery. “We might put up the missing monk, eh?” said my friend with boyish elation. “There may be cisterns or cellars below ground – there’s little enough cover above,” I replied. We had both had a good look at the place with the Prince’s binoculars. On a ridge quite close to the monastery I had seen some red markers planted in the sand and wondered if somebody was surveying the place – I thought them to be for theodolites, perhaps. Somewhere to the right, upon a profile of sand dune and sky, moved a line of light tanks and command cars engaged on some obscure military manoeuvre. We turned back once or twice to wave to the colourful party in the oasis below. The camels were groaning and being bad-tempered. Then we addressed the last part of the slope and entered the baking gates of the little place. It had been built with a mixture of straw, brick and plaster which gave the walls, or what was left of them, a strange appearance of wattle-moulding in brown hide. But there was no sign of the monk, and no sign of any subterranean cellars where he might be hiding. Disappointed, we lingered a moment to smoke a cigarette, and then retraced our steps – or at least began to do so.

Then it happened – as suddenly and surprisingly as the capsizing of a canoe. The suddenness was quite numbing, as well as the immediate lack of sound which gave the illusion of a whole minefield going up silently around us. A series of giant sniffs and a crackle of splinters followed a good way after the first seismic manifestation – the desert blown up around us in picturesque billows and plumes – a whole running chain of puffs, followed after a long and thoughtful pause by the bark of the mortars, for that is what they turned out to be. “Christ,” shouted Sam, “they must be ranging.” Another series of dry crackles followed by puffs seemed almost deliberate, as if to illustrate his remark. We began to run awkwardly, stooped, hands spread out like startled chickens. The red poles I had seen must have been ranging markers. We tried to set a course away from them, running sideways downhill now in the thick sand. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the party in the oasis had also been alerted. There was a stir of alarmed recognition. They pointed at us as we ran stumbling downhill towards them, and the servants in a sudden access of solicitude started running towards us, as if to avert the danger from us. There was a tremendous burst now – it went off between my teeth, my whole skull echoed, my mind was blown inside out.

With scattered wits and panic fear we raced, Sam and I, along the side of the dune, in the hope of cover. But before we reached our objective we were overtaken by the whole solid weight of the desert. It was flung over us like a mattress. We collapsed like surfers overtaken by the rollers of the ocean, like ants overwhelmed by a landslide.

It seemed as if huge fragments of this shattered desert composure were blown about on all sides of me; my brain swelled and became full of darkness and sand. I felt my tongue swell up and turn black with heat, I felt it protrude. All this while falling sideways into space and vaguely hearing groans and whispers magnified on my right. Then thump – someone or something buried an axe in the middle of my back and the pain spread out from this centre of crisis until it reached the confines of my body, tingling in the fingertips like an electric current. I tried with all my might to rise to my feet but there was no traction to be had. My companion had fallen too, propelled skidding by the same sandspout as my own. And now in a lull came the crackle of shell splinters among the hot rocks, the sizzling spittle of the invisible guns.

From this point on everything becomes quite fragmentary, broken up descriptively like strips of cinema film, with just a frame here or there showing an image, indistinct and alarming. And even more alarming were the shattered fragments of conversation, or of voices calling. Guttural Arabic shouts and sobs – the servants in their devotion had shown great bravery. They reached us as we fell half rolling down the sandhills, in a welter of bloody smears which had begun to print themselves on the new khaki drill of our uniforms. I suppose we were picked up, joints all loose like rag dolls, and transferred bodily to the canvas tarpaulin which allowed Drexel to examine us, but only perfunctorily for the firing had become nearer at hand, and the whole party was retiring in the utmost confusion, leaving half their possessions behind in the oasis. In a moment of lucidity I heard the Princess say, “God! my veil is covered in blood.” Sad and reproachful she sounded. And then Drexel saying, “Give me a chance; I want to examine them.” And the Prince suddenly petulant says, “He is a doctor, after all.” I was moved about moaning and thumped down on canvas; I heard the clean clicking of scissors and felt air where my clothes were being cut away from me. Then in a lower register a voice I could not identify said, “I think the other one’s gone.” There were groans of vexation and the curious whimpering noise of the servants – to echo the anxiety of their employers was a formality of good manners. They did not fear death as much as blood, black blood which oozed like the Nile, or spouted darkly from a severed artery, or inundated a whole section of the skin with wine-red smears. “There’s a field dressing station by the wire,” said Drexel. “We can clean them up a bit there; but for the rest.… what can one do?”