Everything I said amused my friend. Eventually his laughter became so frequent and so loud I suspected he had been too long exposed to the sun and the monotony. Soon I realised that my poor friend had lost his grasp on his reason, that he had probably been insane for some while. Ironically I had linked my fate with that of an obsessed lunatic!
By the fifth day even the few distant bluffs had either disappeared or proved themselves far from unique. We roamed a trackless wilderness and all we knew for certain was the position of the sun and our relation to it. With Kolya cackling and roaring from his uneasy seat on his camel, breaking off occasionally to whistle a few bars from Lohengrin or Tannhäuser while my own sweet Uncle Tom growled and snapped with re-invigorated foul temper, as if she sensed we should never see water again, I once more reconciled myself to death.
The dust became grit, blowing steadily onto our lacerated faces. Every time I ventured to voice some trepidation Kolya would bark with laughter, informing me we were still in Senussi territory; the Tuareg would not dare attack us here. I would have welcomed a Tuareg, or anyone able to lead us back to a familiar track. Kolya said we were Bedouin now and must think like Bedouin, putting our souls into the hands of Allah. He reminded me that this was what Wagner had done and roared out some chorus from The Ring. Allah, I declared under my breath, I would trust rather more readily than my poor, singing fool. I should have stayed in Khufra and waited until I found a caravan heading towards Ghat, I thought, but I knew in my bones the best I could hope for without Kolya’s protection would be to become a Senussi slave. (The Senussi were known to be fair, though strict, and tended to adhere to the Koranic system of punishments. Their slaves were known, therefore, for their honesty as well as their plumpness.) I remained grateful to Kolya for his rescue of me from Bi’r Tefawi, but his characteristic over-confidence, a result no doubt of his aristocratic upbringing, was an increasing source of dismay. I gave up attempting to debate these matters with him. He bellowed some phrase from The Flying Dutchman. Since he automatically kept goading his mount forward, I let my camel follow him, though I began to regret this when he later took to composing long alliterative verses in Old Slavonic and sang snatches of folksong, or Greek liturgy, availing himself freely of a sudden supply of drugs which he had not previously revealed to me. No doubt he planned to sell these at Zazara or some other mythical oasis. On the first night we lost a sheepskin of water as two of our pack camels crushed against one another. We still had several more skins and a couple of tin fantasses slung over our camels’ humps, hidden under our equipment and trading goods. We could survive for at least a week. But the event depressed me. No man on earth can go without water for more than four days whereas a camel, far from plodding into infinity, can never be trusted to survive! Some will trudge for weeks, even years, seemingly the sickliest of animals, giving no hint of weariness; others, young, healthy and pretty, might decide to fall down and die for no apparent reason, their hearts suddenly stopped. My own belief is that the camel, a noble and independent beast by nature, has always been resentful of his role as carrier of Man and his goods. One of the few important choices he can still make for himself is his time of death.
Through days of relentless blue, under a sun which increasingly demanded obeisance, under a night of extraordinary, comforting darkness, in which the stars became identified, each an individual, whose intensity changed with the hours, over dune upon dune and rocky pavement or parched wadi, we trudged due west into the widest and least-travelled stretches of the Sahara, moving steadily away from any charted or inhabited region, so that we might indeed have accidentally crossed to some incompatible planet!
Ironically, I had ceased at last to be afraid. The desert, our animals, the sky, all had become marvellous and beautiful to my eyes, for I had discovered that composure of spirit which is the mark of every desert gentleman. Karl May described it. I was at one with Death and with God. My fate was already written by Allah. I trusted to the moment. I relished the moment. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades. I was reconciled to my destiny. I had won a kind of immortality. And Anubis was my friend.
TWENTY-TWO
IN THE DESERT God came to me again and I no longer feared Him. We had suffered together, He said. Now He brought me comfort. I had not realised how thoroughly I had learned the habit of prayer, of giving myself up to my creator, of keeping faith in His plans for me. I was convinced that I was lost, that we must die in those endless dunes, but we trudged up one after another, losing our footing in the soft sand. God straightened my shoulders and cleared my eyes. He gave me back the dignity which that other abomination, that quintessence of falsehood, had stolen from me.
The back window of my flat looks out upon a great pollarded elm, protected by city isolation from the Dutch disease which destroyed his rural relatives. He stands like a triumphant giant, his head lowered, the bark of his oddly muscular arms gleaming in the misty sunshine, knotted fists of gnarled wood lifted like a champion’s while another thick branch juts from below like a petrified prick. This benign monster stood there, much as he does now, a hundred years ago, before the speculators thought to evict the gypsies and pig-farmers, to get rid of the tanneries and race-track, to clear the way for respectable middle-class London expanding into confident new comforts and sentimentality, begging a suburban tree or two be spared for old times’ sake.
Now the enduring elm is for me God’s most immediate symbol and evidence of my own belief in our ultimate redemption. In the desert, as one dies, it is easy to understand how one might worship the Sun, coming to believe it the manifestation of God, beginning that profound progress towards the conception of God as a unity. Nowadays it is not difficult to sympathise with the ancient Slavs, those Franks and Goths who worshipped God in the form of a tree. What is better? To worship God in the form of a Bank? Or even to worship Him in the form of a Temple? I speak, I suppose, as a kind of devil’s advocate. But I have never hidden my pantheistic sympathies.
In the city, sometimes, there is only the church or the public building in which to find peace to pray, but the Bedouin can create a tranquil sanctuary virtually from nothing. I have warned Christendom for many years of how Islam carries the barbarous blood of Carthage into the very veins of Europe and America. Yet I am no hater of the desert Arab. In his desert, the Bedouin is a prince, a model of gentlemanly dignity and manly humility. However, in the deadly element of some oil-founded sheikhdom, the traditions of absolute certainty by which he has survived (prospering only through blind luck) will make him everyone’s enemy. The noble Bedouin becomes a paranoid aristocrat. The great traditions of the Senussi, which brought law to the Libyan Desert, bring only bloodshed and chaos to Cairo. Jews and Arabs both are never entirely comfortable with political power. It is what makes them such dangerous enemies. Today it is fashionable to sneer at the philosophy of apartheid, as if it were a simple matter of black and white. For years the Arab practised it successfully. He had no problems until he himself began to break his own rules. The young today use those words like blunted weapons. They have no idea of the convictions lying behind them.