All I could smell was jasmine. Under the awning, by the piano, Wolf Seaman had begun to play some repetitive Scandinavian polka and sing mournfully to Sri Harold Kramp in his native tongue. From time to time he darted wounded and significant looks at Mrs Cornelius, who, having pursued Malcolm Quelch and the boy below decks, now returned, grinning to herself. Grace, overwhelmed by excitement and alcohol, was puking over the rail and O. K. Radonic was waltzing with our captain, Yussef al-Sharkiya, a gargling fat man who held a cigar in one grubby hand and a defiant glass of whisky in the other. Our Charon had a faded blue gelabea, a dirty white turban, a pair of sandals made from tyre-rubber and lips permanently stained from the nuts he chewed. Earlier that week he had approached me with effusive good humour, making some mysterious proposal. When I failed to understand him, he had withdrawn in disgust; thereafter speaking to me only in the most formal terms while having nothing but greasy smiles for most of the others. I believe he had somehow lost face with me and was embarrassed. I had no notion, however, of the circumstances or the cause. Resting for a moment in a chair near the port rail I watched Captain Yussef cast glances of extraordinary heat at Mrs Cornelius and, had I been a little more sober, would have offered him some sharp admonishment. I already knew such men frequently lusted to possess a beautiful European woman but those around us were generally discreet with their fantasies. The captain, his habitual caution banished by unfamiliar alcohol, was now incapable of hiding his disgusting longings. Soon even Mrs Cornelius herself noticed his glances and wagged a chiding finger. She wished no man to get into trouble on her account. Returning from the lavatory, Esmé suggested we dance. I summoned as much of my resources as were left and once again took the floor, uncertain whether to follow Radonic’s groaning, wound-down Am I Blue? or the erratic chords of Seaman’s Nordic folklorique. Meanwhile, from somewhere amidships, I thought I detected the tumbling rhythms and twanging catgut of a Nubian concert, as our servants celebrated the director’s nativity and our saviour’s sacrifice in their own quarters. The steam-whistle’s vast bellow drowned all of this suddenly when the captain returned to his wheelhouse, intent on alerting Luxor to our imminence. There was a stirring of comic Bedouin, fanciful Pharaonic dignitaries, caricatures of tarbooshed Cairenes and Theban soldiery as members of our party understood the signal to mean we were sinking and ran about shouting loudly before being calmed. Esmé became urgent, drunkenly eager, leading me below decks to my cabin forward. We reached it. She was already sinking to her knees before me. To my angry frustration, my door was stuck. It did not occur to me that the cabin was anything but empty as I put my shoulder to the panel and flung my weight to smash the lock, exposing my angel to the nightmarish sight of Professor Malcolm Quelch lifting a red and terrified mouth from the rampant genitals of our youngest Nubian.
EIGHTEEN
LUXOR IS DOMINATED by her two greatest monuments. The dreaming ruins of Karnak and the confident edifice of the Winter Palace Hotel dwarf a miscellany of native houses, official buildings and hovels, the modern village. The hotel is the magnificent pride of all Englishmen and the envy of every other race; she is fully worthy of the ancient city. A huge white building, her wide, winding twin stairways to the long outer terrace dominate the river-front and look directly across to distant Theban mountains. From her flowery balconies you can see ancient temples, the dim battlements of Medinet Habu and the twin colossi who are all that remain of the lost temple of Amenhotep. Then come the dusty terraces of Deir el Bahari. Between these, on the cliff-side, is a curving honeycomb of nobles’ tombs. Then the great shoulder of the hill hides the Valley of the Kings, beyond which is the wide, unwelcoming desert and the hostile borderlands where wild Bedouin still rove and raid.
The hotel’s great garden faces east. One can almost forget Egypt, taking one’s meals in the company of other upper-class Europeans. With its imported shrubs and its tall walls, the Winter Palace is magically self-contained. All one sees of Luxor are the far-off eastern hills, blue and translucent as chalcedony in the morning light. The gardens boast every kind of familiar English flower - roses, carnations, pansies, irises, geraniums surrounded by smooth green lawns as sweet-smelling as any English cricket pitch, constantly tended by impeccably uniformed gardeners.
‘Luxor is the soul of Egypt,’ Malcolm Quelch insists. We sip our afternoon Darjeeling. (I had slammed the broken door swiftly that night but was convinced he had in that instant seen us both. He had chosen to pretend amnesia, perhaps to save us all embarrassment. Save for a single passing reference to his two years of medical training with the army and his willingness to use his skills to help any native who might be in discomfort, he did not attempt to explain the affair. Indirectly, I had let him know I was a man of the world and that Esmé had no notion of the world at all.) ‘Karnak is perfectly fitted for a great city, don’t you think? On the east we have the long stretch of rich plain, a shadowy changing green reaching to the very foot of the hills! To the west we have that wonderful view of the western plain. Then, between east and west is our sinuous Nile!’
With Esmé I had already taken to renting a kalash to explore the vicinity. We had trotted beside fair fields, dotted with palm thickets, through hills which rose low to the south before suddenly towering, knife-edged, to the Red Mountain -that huge and fantastic outcrop, scarred white as Odysseus’s old wound by a pathway descending from the ridge. ‘That mountain is as the ghost of the greatness of Thebes,’ declared Quelch, drawing closer, ‘as a liss of the Earth-gods, as a thunder-cloud advancing out of an open sky! Whether it be close upon you, grim, brown-red, hot, arid, impenetrable, rugged against all time - or far away, a mass of shimmering rose with paths of faint blue shadow in the early morning! And it is always immense and immediate, my dear friends, upon all things and all men!’
He has become emphatically lyrical since we disembarked. Far from avoiding Esmé or myself, he takes to seeking us out, as if needing to impose upon that graphic moment a different image of himself which we can respect and which might even erase all memory of it. His manner is more urbane, and increasingly avuncular. ‘No Ptolemy, no Roman, no Frenchman ever built anything as magnificent and practical as this hotel,’ continues Quelch as I begin to consider escape. ‘Monsieur Pierre Loti, in that peevish and decadent epitome of Anglophobia which he entitled The Death of Philae, murmurs fretfully against this hotel, you know. But don’t you find it has a fine presence? It dwarfs the modern village to forgetfulness. That alone is surely a valuable quality? I have said all this in my book. I was flattered to receive a personal letter from Thomas Cook’s and, before the War, could sign for anything I pleased at the bar or in the restaurant. The War lowered the tone of so much. What sort of Will was it that drove us to such terrible self-destruction?’