These people are tender and kind-hearted. They care for one another. Finally, however, the desert allows room for too much abstract thought, especially when it concerns the outside world. Inevitably the desert gives you the mentality of a hermit, a great tendency to think in terms of broad and simple issues. The hermit comes in from the desert after ten years and he goes to the city’s central square. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘a message.’ The people gather around him. They send their friends to fetch other friends. They wait, patiently, but with mounting eagerness. And when they are all congregated there, in silent respect, he looks upon them and smiles. ‘Love one another,’ he says.
It could be that the city complicates issues. The city is a complicated organism after all, the finest creation of mankind. What human mathematics can describe a city? The city’s complexities mirror the complexities of God’s universe. Yet the nomad has a clarity of vision the city-dweller will never know. That is why our cities must fly; the best of both worlds.
‘It makes yer git everyfink art o’ proportion, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Like orl big spaces. It wos ther same when we went ter Dartmoor. Or up in Yorkshire. Ya git a littel bit o’ news an’ yer blow it up too much.’ It made me think again of the attitude towards Christians which, say, the Wahabi Arabs have, or indeed, how the Cossack perceives the Jew. Perhaps that was why I sensed such a feeling of belonging in the desert. Stippi or baria’d, the invariable view has much the same effect on the mind. As I discovered from the Bedouin, the less one sees of a supposed enemy, the more sinister he becomes. Then, of course, one’s imagination has done its work. You do not recognise your enemy when you see him. Not all Jews, for instance, are Communist Fifth-Columnists; not all Christians are hypocrites.
I told Kolya I thought the Sudanese had made sense. We should employ a guide. If not a Bisharin some kinsman of the Tuareg, perhaps? But he was adamant. ‘The trail is not known. The trail that leads to the trail has been lost. That is why Europeans have failed to locate it. When we find it we shall be establishing our own route. A secret which will give us a permanent advantage if we wish to do further business in this area.’ Then he showed me the map the Senussi had helped him draw. It could have been of anything. But he had longitudes and latitudes. ‘Once we reach Zazara, there is a well-defined trail again. More than one. Most of the rest, of course, lead to the interior. The slave roads come out of Africa, here and there, out of French West and Rio d’Oro, out of Abyssinia. Almost all black slaves go through Zazara now. From there they can go east to Cairo and the Hadjiz, to Iraq or Syria; west to Tripoli, Algeria and Morocco. The Romans no more invented the road network than they gave us mathematics. We owe both to the Arabs.’
It is true that the Arabs invented algebra. It is also true that Einstein used algebra to invent the nuclear bomb. A fine example of Arab and Jew working together. Nicht wahr?
And who was responsible for the triumph of the primitive decimal system over the subtle duodecimal? The Sumerians, first to celebrate the discovery of their own mental treasure-trove, gave us the flexible mathematics of the dozen, infinitely more manipulable and therefore infinitely better able to represent and examine the world. But it was the rationalising Jews with their tens of this and their tens of that, the Arab’s undivided finger, who found a way of narrowing and simplifying our achievements. This numerological imperialism earned its final great victory when Britain fell to that mathematical dullard, Monsieur Dix. Twelve groats to the penny, twelve pennies to the shilling and twelve shillings to the pound would have been ‘rationalisation’ enough! Without her ‘illogical’ currency, England was nothing. Use of such currency cultivates a subtlety of mind. The history of this century will record with cruel irony that our worship of Lord Rationality was our most ludicrous folly.
One must, I suppose, blame the French for this. In the hospital it was the same. That psychiatrist told me he was experimenting with cats. The human brain, he said, is like a computer. Oh, certainly! What he meant was he had found a model he could understand. So he promptly called the model Reality. I pointed out to him a simple truth, that the computer is the invention of Man. Man’s mind, however, is the invention of God; the former comfortably finite, the latter unfathomable in its infinite variety. And for that the double-six is a better representative than the half-score. We are spurning the heritage of our first great city-builders. God gave them twelve. We have since converted His gift to ten. With our present education standards we shall soon be asking for ‘one and one and one’ because we no longer know how to count to three. By means of these economies do we slip steadily away from Eden. Shall we ever begin the journey home?
We left our caravan at night, before the morning call to prayer. We were out of sight beyond the rocks as the dawn rose to reveal the flat daffa. This waterless and barren plain of unbroken brown monotony eventually gave way to dunes which stood like rollers frozen in time, a memory of when huge rivers had boiled down the shallow dales and everywhere had been green and rich and in these lush lands rose the cities of the people who came before Atlantis, who made laws and developed great arts and sciences and knew peace. Now, with all this unearned wealth, the Arab could easily make his homeland blossom again, see it grow rich with trees and grass, but of course he has made a virtue of his desert necessities. Now his ambition is to create further wastelands wherever he has the opportunity. I do not blame this on the Moslem religion. Persia does not waste her wealth on weapons. ‘But an Arab,’ as Captain Quelch would say, ‘genuinely loves a gun.’
That was why, I think, Kolya had hidden our Lee-Enfields within heavy bales of cloth. Under our robes and general Bedouin impedimenta we carried Webley’s revolvers with a dagger or two for outer decoration to show, as the Mozabites say, we had not taken the Woman’s Way. A man without weapons was looked upon with considerable suspicion by the Bedouin who, like the American cowboy, tends to wear a gun as a form of sexual identification. Some of the cowboy guns were so old, and in such bad condition, that they lived in terror of ever having to fire one. This was also true, I was told by Buffalo Bill’s nephew, himself a famous Circus Master, of the Old Frontier, where a knife, an axe and a bow remained, for many years, the only reliable weapons. Only the rarest of buckaroos sported a good Colts’ or a Henry’s and was usually loth to employ it in any action which might mark it. Young Cody asked me to imagine how difficult it was for the Chief of Scouts to keep his buckskins, especially the white ones, so clean and bright on the buffalo trail. Constant changes were needed to ensure that the Dandy of the Plains was never dusty. And Custer took a valet with him, said Cody, to the Little Big Horn. Indeed, one legend spoke of the same valet surviving the massacre and attending his new master, Sitting Bull, on his famous Grand Tour of Europe. Wherever he went Texas Jack, for instance, would always take three wagonloads of outfits and a fourth wagon full of weaponry. Kit Carson, called Pe-he-haska (Golden Curls) by the Sioux, was known to have escaped at least twice from certain death with the aid of nothing but his manicure set. And, Cody had added, Jim Bridger’s Palomino was the best-groomed and sweetest-smelling pony in the whole Arizona territory. He had showed me pictures of all these people. It was true. I had never realised before what emphasis America’s great frontiersmen placed upon personal hygiene and smart appearance. Their spacemen are the natural successors to the plainsmen of yore. There is a lesson in this for those boys of today who come into my shop and complain because I have had an overcoat cleaned before I feel I can offer it for sale!