It was almost sunset by the time we returned to our faithful cab-driver. Yacob helped put Esmé’s purchases into the carriage with us and then, chatting the while in a mixture of Arabic, French and English, took us smartly back to our hotel. Esmé had the generalised air of affection of one who has fulfilled her every immediate ambition, and a gentle smile would come to my angel when she recalled some particularly attractive gown she had seen or piece of jewellery she hoped one day to own. I envied her this uncomplicated pleasure. That day, as so often in the past, I imagined myself a parent living through his child. It was marvellous that, with the aid of a few sovereigns, such transcendental happiness could be brought to the girl I loved. The very air we breathed smelled of honey, that evening scent of hyacinths, and stocks, and roses which the British transplanted to so many ancient capitals. We watched the sky turn to deep violet, a houri’s eyes, over a sea turned scarlet as her lips by the setting sun and, when our carriage reined in to allow the passage of a band of kilted Highlanders marching back from some musical performance, Esmé flung her soft little arms around me and kissed me with lips tender and trembling as a baby’s and said I was the only man she could ever truly love. ‘We were born for each other,’ she said. ‘We own each other, you and I, my darling Max, mon cher ami, mein cher papa.’ And she turned her head to the darkening sea to laugh, as if fearful suddenly of the depths of her own emotion. She shivered. It was becoming too cool. ‘Let us go back,’ she said.
I shall always remember Alexandria as the evening loses its heat and a wind begins to stir the palms and cedars of the corniche, when her lights appear, one by one, cluster by cluster, like jewels gracing some mighty dowager, as the scents of the sea and the desert mingle and the carriage trots on through streets grown silent for a moment, perhaps awaiting the transition from day to night, as if that transition is not inevitable, and I remember a moment of exquisite happiness when my darling called me her friend.
I have known only a few such moments in my life. I have learned to value them and not regret their passing. I am so grateful for love.
Birds die within me, one by one.
Vögel füllen meyn Brust. Vögel sterben in mir. Einer nach dem anderen.
What is there to do about it?
TWELVE
LAND OF RUINS, and of dreams, and death; land of dust and ghosts. Here all the great civilisations of the earth were born and here they come to die. Here, the British Empire perished, without honour, without nobility, without friends, like the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks and the French before them. For the British, too, inhaled the dusty seeds of Carthage and found them sweet and carried them home to England where, as Rosebay Willow Herb was once Pompei’s Fireweed, the seed was given a more familiar domestic name and soon took hold. There are two lessons that temporal empires never learn. The first: It is self-destruction to march against Moscow. The second: Never annex Egypt. Napoleon, Alexander’s only military and philosophical equal, might have survived if he had made only one of those mistakes. I hold no brief for the ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’, the myth which had brought us to Egypt in the first place, but belief in such curses reflects a deeper truth. Any other nation which tries to tamper in the affairs of Egypt attracts a curse. She is a fierce old mother and she punishes interference in her enjoyment of her declining years; especially she punishes those who would wish to ‘revive’ her. She is too tired for revival. She wishes only to be left alone, to live in her memories and the remains of her glory. By her own scale, she could live at least another thousand years.
Much of this Professor Quelch explained to me next morning as we walked to the special platform of Robert Stephenson’s magnificent railway station (the only monuments the British ever raised to rival the temples and tombs of the Pharaohs). I was a little the worse for wear. I had enjoyed many glasses of port with those fine English chevaliers of His Majesty’s Protective Government, it being Christmas Day. They, of course, were granted leave for that peculiarly English holiday, Boxing Day, in which all able-bodied men appear on their village greens and engage in violent fisticuffs. At that moment I was never more glad, as I made my dazed way through the confusion of beggars, porters, guides and the sellers of every conceivable kind of fakery, that I had not been born an Englishman. I pitied my comrades of the previous night their sporting ordeal. But perhaps they were made of heartier stuff and were already preparing for the fight with an enthusiasm which in another race would be unquestionably sexual? Certainly many of their repressions were set aside that night and their language as well as their anecdotes became increasingly colourful, so that Grace the Hairdresser and Wolf Seaman made their excuses and left. I grew nostalgic, I told them, for the mess of my old brigade. I told them how I had belonged to one of the last Cossack regiments to stand against the Reds. I described the Red atrocities in Kiev and Odessa. I said how cheap life had become, how the most beautiful girls of good homes were prepared to prostitute themselves for a twist of salt or a handful of potatoes. They believed, they said, that Odessa sounded better than Port Said. Port Said was said to be even more of a sink of iniquity than Alexandria, the flourishing centre of a white slave-trade into Africa and the Middle East about which little could be done, since none had sufficient authority over either the whoremasters or their human cattle. One learned to live with such things, they murmured, and thanked God that they had nothing like it to contend with in England. They spoke too soon! That was before the disease had been brought home. Today half of London is indistinguishable from the filthiest souks of the Levant and young girls and boys hawk the most perverse pleasures quite openly. My acquaintances in the Egyptian police would have been horrified by what I see every day in the Portobello Road. And it is so familiar to us that nobody even mentions it any more. When will they tire of their ‘progress’ and see it for what it is? Year by year the beast grows; year by year it becomes harder to find common justice, common kindness and humanity. Where will it end?