THIRTEEN
THE MIGHTIEST CITY in Africa, Cairo smells of coffee, mint, sewage, camel-dung and raw saffron; of jasmine, patchouli and musk; of lilac and roses; of kerosene and motor oil. And she smells of the far desert and of the deep Nile. She smells of ancient bones.
Through alleys and boulevards crowded with the monuments of five thousand years and a dozen conquests, each individual, be they European, Oriental, African or Native, carries upon their person a certain mixture of scents: of sweat, rosewater, starched linen, carbolic soap, tobacco, incense, macassar oil, garlic - borne on Parisian frock, Savile-Row suit, flowing gelabea or black chaddurah. A flux of trams and trucks and limousines, donkeys, camels, mules and horses, flows back and forth across the bridges spanning these narrower reaches of the Nile between Old Cairo and Gizah. This constantly moving flow of people and vehicles pours into the twitterns and parades of that infinitely tangled knot of streets until they are filled to capacity. Outside every mosque, every church, synagogue and shrine, squabbling men, youths and children scramble to sell you some tawdry fake to remind you forever of the city the great Arab poet called the City of the Book, because here, through the centuries in relative harmony, have co-existed the Jews, Christians and Moslems who share a common testament.
‘Cairo is the apex of this whole land,’ declared Malcolm Quelch. ‘She is unlike the rest of Egypt yet she contains elements of everything.’ He paused to peer through our window at the busy boulevard which, were it not for palms and tarbooshes, might have been Paris or Berlin. Cairo was the most reassuringly civilised-looking city I had known since leaving Paris. Any doubts about venturing into this hub, this nerve-centre of intellectual and fanatical Islam, were thoroughly dispelled. Wahabim or Wafd, those zealots dare not expose their crazy eyes to the light of the Cairene day.
On Professor Quelch’s advice we had chosen not to stay at Shepheard’s well-known hotel, where Cook’s had an office and to which every naive tourist aspired. There is always just such an hotel in every city, soon deserted by those who made its reputation. We were in fact beyond the trees and flowers of Ezebekiya Square at the Continental, an altogether more pleasant and restful place than Shepheard’s, which, as Professor Quelch pointed out, was forever packed night and day with people who would not feel their visit was complete without visiting the pyramids, taking afternoon tea in the restaurant or sipping a cocktail at the long bar. One was always coming across ill-mannered sightseers in the corridors who had failed to resist an urge to explore. ‘And there’s also an unfortunate semi-bohemian element,’ Quelch added priggishly. ‘Both conform to type. If they did not insist on their individuality, one might forgive them more easily their folly.’ The Continental, he said, reminded him of the best class of Broadstairs hotel, where he had holidayed as a child. For a moment a wistful expression crossed his hatchet face as if in his mind’s eye the Sahara were transformed to the Kentish sands and in his mind’s hands he clutched a red tin bucket and spade.
We had become fairly good friends and were sharing a room at the hotel, but that particular bond which had existed between his brother and myself was simply not there. Malcolm Quelch lacked both Maurice’s charm and optimism, his gentlemanly ability to put almost everyone immediately at their ease. I still missed the captain’s dry, easy wit, his enthusiasm for literature and the arts, his determination to enjoy every experience. Perhaps I had a tendency to hero-worship in those days. I had never known a father. Mrs Cornelius was always linked in my mind with my mother but Captain Quelch had, by a subtle process I could not understand, become something of a father. History (a Marxist’s euphemism for this century’s appalling triumph of human evil) had robbed me of all my family, as well as my sweetheart. Mine had been a violent and terrifying progress into manhood and I had survived with only my life, my talents, and a pair of Georgian pistols, to begin the building of a new future. I wish that I had been able to settle, as I had originally planned, in Paris or London, in those hopeful years before the Depression, before the War. I might have founded a proper engineering business. We would have built from small inventions up to the larger ones, as the public’s confidence in my abilities grew. Within ten years I would have become the greatest inventor-engineer since Brunei or Edison, with my own company, with branches in every Western country; a vast empire of technical resources. A knighthood would have been inevitable. Britain would take a firmer grip on her Empire, her Christian responsibilities, and commission the first of my great flying cities! Instead I remain unhonoured, an outcast from the world of science and the intellect, seeing all I dreamed of stolen, devalued, misused. Towards the end of the War I had a notion of a kind of stove which could use radio waves to heat food, cooking it in a fraction of the normal time. I called it my ‘Radio Stove’ and talked about it enthusiastically with the airmen on leave in the Portobello Star, fellows with sufficient technical literacy to be stimulating, intelligent company. More than enough technical understanding, it emerged, to take my ideas for their own and apply them to the profitable new business of cooking plastics! A perfect example of that abuse of an idea! I had hoped to benefit the busy housewife. In my ideal future a Pyatnitski Radio Stove would grace every home, the greatest labour-saving boon since the Hoover. But it is some while since I expected to discover any justice in this world. A parent might have helped me avoid the pitfalls of my career. As it was I had Kolya to help me for a little, and Captain Quelch and, of course, Mrs Cornelius, but no permanent guiding hand to take the tiller, as it were, when my bewildered soul was flung upon the conflicting currents of a singularly threatening century. I should be proud, they say, to have survived so well. I escaped the carnage of the Stalin years, the hysteria of the Nazis when they began indiscriminately to arrest anyone suspected of being a Jew. And it is for these two things that I thank God most. God alone provided me with the courage, the brains and the skills to save myself from the final humiliation and degradation, or at least from death. Professor Quelch often remarked that it was ‘one of God’s ironies. He bestows his gifts of intelligence and sensitivity upon us and then fails to provide us with the means to make the fullest use of those gifts. This surely is the crux of the human condition?’ He, too, had been cheated of his inheritance. His whole family had been ruined by a speculating and dishonest lawyer. The family was related to the Mauleverers on the distaff side. ‘We were never, in the past thousand years, anything but uncommon stock.’ There being a dearth of university positions for archaeologists like himself, men with Classics degrees, he intended never to fall into a backwater like his brother in England. ‘Reigning over an empire of grubby thirteen-year-olds scarcely a stone’s throw from where we were born. My hat! I can’t believe he’s happy. What a fate, eh?’ I gave him the confirmation he seemed to demand, but I thought I detected a note of envy. Wanting desperately to be the adventurer his brother was, his temperament was nonetheless closer to the more conservative twin’s. This seemed to me the central paradox of his character. I could see him leading crocodiles of Egyptian schoolboys in their little grey English-style uniforms up to the pyramids on a Saturday afternoon to lecture on the glories of their mutual past in which the British Empire and the Egyptian became strangely blended, as perhaps they had done in Ptolemy’s time, or in Augustus’s time, or even, just possibly, in the time of Suleiman, when the Arabian Empire was at its most powerful, its most opulent and its most liberal, when it carried the light of science, literature and the natural arts across the Mediterranean and gave Europe her mathematics, scientific instruments, alchemical and medical lore. And all this in spite of Islam! Only as the true expense of maintaining an empire manifested itself did the Moors and their co-religionists again take to squabbling amongst themselves and, having no means of moving beyond this stage of their social development, began that irregular decay into their present barbarism. Those people once envied for their decorative arts, their music, their learning, their poetry and the tolerance of their rule, became known as the world’s cruellest people, the scum of the Barbary Coast, without honour, cleanliness or conviction. And this was their shame; for they had been better and known better. Here in Cairo the dead hand of the Turk had fallen upon a once-vigorous people and it had lain there too long. To be fair, Egyptians had recovered much of their former self-esteem. The British had already granted them independence with the sole provision that a peacekeeping and administrative force be maintained in order to protect their commercial interests in the Suez Canal. The British in those days were still mainly from the old mould. They were fully aware of their Christian responsibilities to the ‘lesser breeds without the Law’. Today it is unfashionable to accept responsibility for our less privileged brothers. Then it was our duty to offer a helping hand, to pass on the wisdom of our experience, to demonstrate, without any other kind of coercion, the benefits and beauties of the Christian faith. I hardly think this is an ignoble notion. Good, brave men died in its service, as did good, brave women. It is in the nature of the generous Christian to want to spread the word throughout the globe, especially in the dark places, the cruel and evil places, where the Light of Christ is the only means of driving away the devil and his minions. If this is ‘imperialism’ then, yes, I am an imperialist. If this is ‘racialism’, then, yes, I am a racialist. I am content to leave that judgement to posterity! If, that is, anyone can still read or think when the country’s Dark Age is over! This is the time of the Beast, when all conscience and morality are powerless and those who still dare claim Christ’s birthright are derided.