Another distraction was the general attitude of the crew. Grace was almost constantly in a state of bridling offence and disappeared one night, apparently with a Greek soldier on leave, while O.K. Radonic clearly had no respect for the director or sympathy with the story. He spent most of his time looking for cigars, operating his camera only when forced to do so, and displaying all the signs of the heat fatigue which eventually brought him down. He was taken to the Hungarian doctor in Luxor and was declared unfit to work. Seaman solved the problem by turning the camera himself until our two lighting people deserted with a pair of wealthy Swedish women they had met in Tutenkhamun’s tomb. We began to look less like a film company than a small dramatic troupe, yet the beaming Sir Ranalf was undismayed by anything! He assured us that new staff would soon be entrained from Cairo. He knew only the best Egyptian film professionals and could easily get skilled technical staff from Italy if necessary. Eventually we were joined by an Alexandrine Greek, who was impressed by what he called our ‘modern’ equipment, but showed himself a competent enough cameraman under Seaman’s direction. Two more Greeks and several Copts followed until we had a full complement again, although Seaman moaned constantly about their incompetence and laziness. The Copts, discovering Esmé to be fluent in Turkish, spent most of their time chatting with her. She was soon on excellent terms with them until Sir Ranalf objected. Her friendliness was not good for discipline. We should keep a proper distance.
Finding himself with only moderately expert help, Seaman grew increasingly distracted. Few of the team spoke English, one spoke a little German and Seaman was forced to rely on those of us with French to translate the simplest instructions. Eventually, when I was unable to fix the run-down old generator brought to us to power our lights, he announced he could no longer work in such conditions. We had set up our camera in Tutenkhamun’s tomb, a rather chilly, narrow place for a king to be buried, with tiny chambers and unimpressive paintings like bad comic strips. None possessed the beauty or the inspiration I had seen in other tombs and temples where it was impossible not to become familiar with ancient Egyptian art. Eventually the two-dimensional form seemed perfectly natural to me and it was easily possible to distinguish sublime from crude. There were wonderful bas-reliefs and tomb paintings, temple art and monumental sculpture, but there were also, thousands of years on, wretched copies of the great originals, heartless academic facsimiles, just as exist in our own world. Age does not improve bad art. There are never many great artists alive at any one time and Tutenkhamun’s fame appears to rest on his gold and his physical beauty rather than upon the magnificent workmanship of his burial goods, the artistry of his tomb’s paintings. They believed the tomb was really meant for a minister, but that the boy king died suddenly and it would have taken too long to quarry a fresh tomb from the rocks of the Wadi el Mulak. The stars in the dark roof were lifeless; the blue, green and red figures in procession on the walls seemed without direction. I found the place depressing. But that, I suppose, is the nature of tombs. I do not share the public’s fascination with such places. While everyone else spent their free time exploring the various resting-places of the much-disturbed dead, I contented myself with sketching designs for a new project in which I hoped to interest Sir Ranalf. I had conceived the idea some months earlier. I called it my Desert Liner. Finally the patient camel would be discarded as ‘the ship of the desert’ in favour of a gigantic motor! My vehicle would carry passengers across the dreaded Sahara Desert in the comfort and luxury they enjoyed on an ocean liner. I showed the plans to Sir Ranalf one afternoon as he sat in his car watching Esmé playing cricket with the Alexandrine, Mrs Cornelius and Professor Quelch. ‘Howzat!’ he would cry, and, ‘Well caught!’
‘My Desert Liner,’ I told him, ‘will have its dining-saloon, recreation-room, look-out deck, state-rooms and other comforts. A fleet of them could easily be built. The prototype would be a hundred and thirty feet long. She would be forty-two feet high from the bottom of the wheels to the top of the upper deck, and twenty-six feet wide. In general arrangement she will closely resemble a passenger steamship, with the exception that she will run on wheels of colossal dimensions!’
‘Splendid!’ said Sir Ranalf. ‘Astonishing! Go on, brave sorcerer! Prithee, tell me the rest of thy tale!’
‘The wheels will measure thirty-nine feet in diameter,’ I explained. ‘As you can see here, by the employment of an ingenious (you’ll forgive my pride) compensating mechanism they hold closely to the sand and soil in every possible position. This means the hull of the ship is kept always at a comfortable level. Whatever the relative position of the wheels may be, the hull remains steady!’
Clearly surprised by my engineering vision, Sir Ranalf nodded his plump head. ‘But what would power such a monster, my boy? The engine would have to be huge! The weight! The weight!’
I was ready for this. ‘It will be driven by two Diesel motors of four hundred and fifty horse-power, of which the second is kept in reserve. Two dynamos furnish light and electromotive force. Steering is effected by means of this hydraulic apparatus.’ I folded back the plan to display it.
‘You should patent this, brilliant youth!’ Then some action of the cricket game caught my patron’s attention and he let out a mysterious gasp.
‘The machine is built to ascend grades of thirty degrees. Steep hills are very numerous, as you know, in the Sahara. Great speed has not been my aim because the friction of the sand on the wheels will generate tremendous heat, some of which, admittedly, I can convert for a variety of purposes. The ship will travel at about nineteen miles an hour.’
‘So slow!’
‘Faster than a camel, Sir Ranalf! It will carry a hundred and fifty people, including passengers and crew members, two hundred tons of merchandise, oil and water and a supply of fuel sufficient for a journey of ten to twelve thousand miles without replenishment. The vehicle will be more than able to cover the greatest desert surfaces in the world!’ There would be four decks, I explained. The upper deck held the control cabin, the wireless cabin, the cabins of the commander and three officers, two-berth passenger cabins plus four cabins de luxe. On this deck, as I showed on my plans, would be the washrooms, an office, a baggage-room, and a large promenade sheltered by a roof from the sun’s burning rays. The two intermediate decks would contain cabins, the dining-saloon, the kitchen, the reading-room, the smoking-room and more baggage-rooms. I showed him where I had sketched the two derricks, weighing 2,000 pounds each, which could be fitted on either side for the handling of baggage and cargo. I was particularly pleased with a novel and important feature. My land-ship would have a cooling-room always maintaining artificially low temperatures. Here passengers overcome by the desert heat could rest and recover. The extreme clearness of the desert air allowed the sun’s rays, as we had all grown painfully aware, extraordinarily powerful penetration. Exposure to them was, of course, dangerous, since they penetrated the brain and spinal cord (the practical reason why, I reminded him, Arabs had always worn heavy turbans over heads and necks).