At last we were ready to take the road to al-Khufra, leaving the mountains behind and crossing a plain which glittered with cornelian, flint, mica, agate and obsidian worn by the hooves and sandals of all the animals and men who had passed this way for three thousand years or more. The splintered peaks were below the horizon and the desert widening under the evening sky before Kolya grew at once more light-hearted and more cautious. ‘Soon, Dimka, you will understand the real temptations of the desert.’ But he refused to expand on this.
Each caravan has its own rhythm, pace and character. Our party now consisted of a miscellaneous collection of Bedouin merchants, Tebu camel-breeders, Sudanese slavers, pilgrims returning from the Haj, and the camp-followers who served us in various ways. Kolya assured me it was nothing compared to the great oasis at Khufra.
In those days, before the half-track conquered all, a caravan was exactly like a train, with connections at various oases for other caravans following a variety of fixed routes. You waited for the next party going in the direction you desired. It was Stavisky’s people, he eventually admitted, who were supposed to meet Kolya at al-Khufra, near the Toom road. He would turn over our pack camels to them in exchange for cash. Then, he hoped, we could head for Tripoli. I remarked gloomily that the camels couldn’t be worth very much but this only amused him. ‘Enough to get us a room and breakfast at Bagnold’s, never fear!’
At night our trail across the golden dunes turned to gleaming silver and remained easy to follow. We were rarely far from water. With a good caravan it was a route as uneventful to travel as the railway from Delhi to Bombay. Gradually the desert became what the Bedouin called sarira, hard sand, flat, all but featureless and spread with a thin layer of gravel. Later I would come to know the gruelling boredom of caravan life which would teach me the habit of patience. But then my head was filled with an understanding my body still refused to accept. I was free! I had escaped God’s punishment. God, Kolya assured me, was slain. It was as if I had passed every test I had tried to learn from my book. I had answered all the questions, made the proper statements of repentance, all the time believing I would still at any moment be struck down, further humiliated and weakened. But I had gone safely through the First Gate and Anubis was my friend. Why should I still be afraid? No rationality would release me from the fear that at any moment God might stand again before me, telling me that I had merely drifted for a short while into a dream. Yet if I dreamed, then I experienced a nightmare within the dream. I was yet to be blinded. I remained terrified of a future which could only be horrific, grotesque and disgusting. I had seen the boy turning in circles with his own living eyes clutched in his bloody fists while al-Habashiya had chuckled softly. I had seen the mutilated girls. So still I capered and giggled, the compliant object of all their foul-mouthed speculation. I even suffered their gross sexual advances. (I have often thought that the reason the British and the Arabs have such a love affair is because each race is as sexually repressed as the other.) Sex, my enemy, continued her tyranny.
I was conditioned to please them. I had earned my life through pleasing them. I had very little capacity for logic at that time. I was at any fellaheen’s mercy whenever I was caught alone relieving myself behind a rock or running to fetch a wandering goat on the far side of a dune. But then some of them took to calling me casually, for their own perverse amusement, al Yehudi, and I began intellectually, as well as instinctively, to fear for my life again. Then Kolya issued some subtle decree to my tormentors (which I do not think was an appeal to their better natures, but a suggestion they discontinue handling his property). I was grateful for Kolya’s intercession, but might have hoped for a more dignified appeal. He did his best, he said. He had, after all, to behave thoroughly like a desert Arab. Anything else would arouse suspicion. I assured myself that I need have no more rational fear of them. Anubis was my friend. If, by God’s command, I was already dead, I had nothing at all to lose. Any sensation of life would be a gain. There remained, however, the knowledge that anyone whom the Arab intended to murder was always first cursed with the name of ‘Jew’ and so the crime became legitimate. It was the same, of course, in parts of Germany, as I discovered to my cost.
God continued to haunt me; her smothering flesh, her organs still threatened my soul. My bowels would knot in agony for the loss of Esmé, my muse; the little goddess who had betrayed me so badly. I had not wanted any of this. I had done everything I could for her.
Within caravans, disputes and quarrels are rarely allowed to blossom into full-blown affairs. A people whose law is the blood feud and who are in constant conflict with the elements cannot afford extra antagonisms. Kolya’s words were heeded. My days became happier. What if I had gone from being a Cossack’s pet Jew to an Arab’s pet Nazrini? I now stood every chance of reclaiming all I had lost. I still had a small fortune in my California bank. In the fullness of time, Kolya would get us to a town with civilised conveniences and I would wire Goldfish with a brief account of the truth. Calling upon our funds, I could return to Los Angeles before the year’s end and start my career again without encumbrances. I would look back on these months of inhaling sand and living off brackish water and miscellaneous beans and, no doubt, even I would romanticise it, softening the details, embroidering certain facts until it was suitably similar to The Desert Song for the civilised world’s demanding sensibilities.
Even the most persistent of my persecutors lost interest in me as we neared al-Khufra which, we were warned, now had a large Italian garrison on the look-out for slavers and gun-runners. The Wormeater’s incapacity to distinguish a gunrunner from a blind mule was a source of wild amusement amongst those Arabs who had already experienced Italian occupation. They of course were equally unable to tell an Italian musketeer from a Norwegian matron. One fierce rumour had it that the soldiers had been ordered to erect a Christian church on the site of the oasis’s chief mosque. In the mythology of these people Christians were forever hatching complicated (usually extremely petty) plots and spending considerable resources merely to bring insult to the Moslems. It had reminded me of Kentucky, whose people credited the Pope with similar ambitions against their dissenting congregations. As I said to Kolya: Considering the army of crazed zealots which between them the Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Bishop of Constantinople can rally, it’s surprising they have not thought of combining resources before now!
Such racialist paranoia is disgusting. It only clouds the issues and makes us lose sight of the real enemy. ‘These Moslems are bound to be touchy,’ said Kolya, lapsing into Russian as the bulk of the caravan fell away to our left. ‘What would you think if you suddenly realised, in your heart of hearts, that you and your ancestors had backed the wrong religious horse - and were still insisting the useless nag could win the Petersburg Straight? Yet when you listen, in Cairo for instance, to their political ideas, you wonder which came first, the self-destructive religion or the average Arab, who would always rather shoot himself in the foot than not shoot at all!’