A tent had been erected for Grace and his boxes. He would also help the actors dress. He had acquired, at Seaman’s suggestion, a little, round-faced Jewess as his assistant. She had some experience of the European beauty salon at Shepheard’s. She seemed competent, if surly. Speaking only Hebrew, Arabic and some French, she was of not much use to the rest of us. Happily Grace proved to be familiar with French and Hebrew and even seemed to have picked up a few words of Arabic. My anxieties, already ‘grounded’ by the activities of the night before, were almost completely forgotten as I saw we were building a useful team able to work with the camaraderie which makes for greater efficiency and improved artistic quality.
Malcolm Quelch, Esmé and I were not needed for at least half-an-hour while Seaman took readings and made judgements concerning light and focus, so we decided to stroll around the base of the pyramids. Quelch, used to the children and old men who begged from us, struck about him smartly with his malacca, a thin, amused smile on his face, as if he teased dangerous dogs. Cairo was out of sight and the only buildings were a few huts, the only traffic some ancient camels used to give rides to tourists. Out of all those rose the confident walls of the Mena Palace Hotel, a sprawling building in what Quelch called the ‘Swiss Egyptian’ style. The guides now claimed it as the hunting-lodge of King Faud’s ancestors. ‘These people are paying for Romance, dear friend, not Truth. One has to give the customer what she wants, I suppose. I try to educate them to the facts of Egypt, but they simply refuse to listen. Some of them become genuinely outraged. I can be attacked at any time for mentioning some perfectly ordinary reality. Did you want to climb up? These chaps will help you.’ He tapped an affectionate cane upon a couple of native bottoms. The men grinned and pointed upwards along the flanks of the astonishing edifice where, because of uneven stones, it was possible to scale the pyramid all the way to the top. Several tourists were being pushed and pulled by muscular fellaheen as I watched. I had not really been prepared for this mixture of casual use and monumental grandeur. Even the mobs of tourists and jostling fellaheen, the tramway, donkeys and rickshaws failed to diminish them. As a hundred Brownies clicked and recorded a hundred identical memories, Malcolm Quelch paused to watch a German party as it was helped aboard its camels for a turn around the Sphynx. ‘Do you think anything is being broadened other than their already broad behinds?’ he speculated. ‘Or will they go home, as I suspect, confirmed in their conformity and xenophobia? We are in danger, as the world grows wider and more available to us in all its considerable variety, of becoming increasingly parochial and insular, even of embracing simplistic systems of ideas, like immigrant Jews, like American pilgrims, as a barrier against so much uncontrollable data. Bewildered men, trained to manipulate the universe, must first instil a fear of the “outside” in their families and then define the universe, making it something they can control, drawing up a system of values merely to justify maintaining power over the only creatures they can control, their wives and children. This, of course, is the central point to any understanding of Islam. It explains why the Arab will never progress under his own initiative. He has developed a religion, out of the original creed, which makes him ideally suited to be a client of more powerful states and peoples. Always somebody’s slave. It is what he has been bred for. It is almost a crime to offer him anything else. What are these so-called “free Egyptian elections” going to achieve? They demand as a right what the British earned through centuries of experience. Yet had the British never come here, the Arabs could not have conceived of the notion of freedom in the first place! They sneer at us, call us corrupt, tell us we are cruel conquerors. And it is we who brought them the notions of the European enlightenment! But will this produce an Arab enlightenment? I doubt it. Theirs is a religion which thrives on ignorance and belongs to the darkness. No further Enlightenment can come through Islam. It’s a dead end. These chaps must eventually make a choice between perpetual poverty and illiteracy, proud, sublime insensitivity and, if not Christianity, at least a form of secular humanism. One or the other - possibly both - will free them. Solve vincia reis, profer lumen caecis.’ He paused, as if taking control of something in himself of which he disapproved. ‘I have unfortunately inherited a touch of my grandfather’s messianism. My father, on the other hand, an altogether gentler person, did not really prepare us for the world. Grandpa Quelch’s fire and brimstone has rather more to do with the actuality of life’s vicissitudes, don’t you think?’ He led Esmé and myself around a gigantic corner, out of sight of our crew and the majority of sweating Burgers and Hausfraus, successful caterers from the Bronx and cattlemen from the Brazos, dowagers and doctors from Dijon and Delft, bored children, and ecstatic maidens jotting purple lines in palm-sized notebooks. It occurred to me, as we looked upon the barren solitude of the Western Desert, that we might easily be upon a desolated planet Mars marvelling at the grave-markers of a race of giants. Might not those beautiful, untypical Pharaohs and their queens have descended in spaceships from the dying planet? Such ideas are now the stuff of cheap science fiction and nonsensical attempts to prove not only that we were once ruled by a benign race from the stars but that the Earth is actually fiat. I have attended their meetings at the Church Hall. Mrs Cornelius was very interested in the telepathic aspects of their beliefs and I must admit I have always kept an open mind on the subject. She had several stories of ‘psychic phone omina’ as she called them. She had as little success as myself in getting someone interested in her ideas. She had, she said, ‘put it to them bland bastards at the BBC but they’re so bloody busy keepin’ mellow frough a mixture of buggery and booze they don’t ‘ave time ter fink abaht reality.’ I said that since they truly believed they had both defined and accepted reality, anything outside their definitions was therefore not real. I had the same trouble with Titbits magazine. The man interviewed me about my theories and then went back and published a story which presented perfectly sound notions in a mocking manner. They make what they do not understand into a farce so as not to consider the actual implications. Even the picture of me was altered. Neither was I flattered by a caption stating that ‘Mad Scientist Max Reveals Sphynx’s Secrets.’ These people have no respect for themselves or anyone else. I would say to them Ihtarim Nafsak! This is something the Bedouin still know. True men are judged not by their wealth but by the approval they command from their peers and the admiring fear they engender in their enemies. No one can admire or approve of those Fleet Street gutter-rats. I told Mrs Cornelius she should not sink to their level.
Tugging my hand, Esmé made us fall back a short distance behind Professor Quelch. She leaned her little hip against my thigh. She had a compliant, dreaming softness I had known for a while in Constantinople. I found her mood both fascinating and alarming. She was, once again, suddenly offering me the whole responsibility for her fate, her very life and soul. Flattering as it was, this did not entirely suit me. I was scarcely more than a youth and not ready to transform myself into any woman’s tower of strength. While I was quite prepared to look after my little girl and cherish her I did not wish to become, as it were, her cause. There is a considerable strain involved in being another person’s ideal. I loved Esmé as a daughter, a sister, a wife, meyn angel, meyn alts! She was everything I had ever wanted. Yet, still I could not trust a Fate which had already snatched her from me, in different incarnations, four times. I yearned to commit myself wholly to her. I knew I must do so if ever she was to believe in my devotion, yet it was almost as if I wanted to put a distance between us again. I had always known how to master her, yet I feared to master her. Even the Marquis de Sade understood that the slave is not the only prisoner; sometimes the slave owns the master more thoroughly than the world can ever guess. I have known humiliation. I understand it. But I never became a Musselman. J’entendis l’horrible fouet de Grishenko siffler dans l’air lugubre et gris. Nous criâmes au même moment.