I had nothing but false hope now. I became obsessed with the small Book of the Dead Quelch had given me. I began desperately to learn all the words and responses needed to make a successful journey to the other world. God understood the nature of my torment as thoroughly as Paganini understood his violin. By convincing myself of this afterlife’s reality, I might find the courage to choose death. I could not sleep. My eyes, refusing to understand that these were their final functioning hours, began to blur and close. My last moments of sight would also be my last moments alone. Tomorrow I would join the others in the pit to be tended by the eunuchs and the hermaphrodites until I was healed or became incurably infected and my face rotted, covered in black flies like a calf s head in a market. I had seen such creatures, still living, in God’s garden.
Behold me. I am come to you, void of wrong, without fraud, a harmless one; let me not be declared guilty; let not the issue be against me. I feed upon Righteousness and drink of an Uprightness of Heart. I have done that which man prescribeth and that which pleaseth the gods. I am one whose mouth is pure and whose hands are pure to whom there is said ‘Come in peace’ by those who look upon him. I am one who glorifieth the gods and who knoweth the things which concern them. I am come and am awaiting that inquisition made of Rightfulness, when the Balance be set upon its stand within the bower of amaranth. I have made myself pure. My front parts are washed, my back parts are pure and my organs steeped in the Tank of Righteousness. There is not a limb in me which is void of Righteousness. I execrate, I execrate. I do not eat it. That which I execrate is dirt. I eat it not, that I may appease my Genius. Let it not enter my stomach, let it not approach to my hands, let me not tread upon it with my sandals. Let me not drink lye, let me not advance blindly into the Netherworld . . .
The effect of this reading was to give me at least a dim understanding of what God had meant when He told me that one day I would long for death as helplessly as He Himself yearned for it. For I am the God of Death and I am not allowed to die. I knew without any doubt that His prediction would come true and that soon I would yearn for death as once I had yearned for a bride. Was this Egypt’s whole secret? Was she still a nation for whom the pleasures of life were merely a prefiguring of the pleasures of death? By making death preferable to life, Islam allows every barbarism to flourish. What is this but a deep perversion of the old Egyptian creed?
The book could not distract me. I began to pray for the very death I would tomorrow refuse and was babbling some foolish smattering of Old Slavonic to myself when my door was opened. ‘I have several hours, yet,’ I pleaded. ‘It is not morning.’ There was no light behind the figure. He was illuminated entirely by my reading-lamp which cast a warm orange glow over his white linen thob, his cream and white silk zebun and his rich blue wool aba. In such princely nomad finery I guessed him to be God’s executioner. I prayed for him to be only an hallucination conjured by my terror.
Then he had pushed back his headcloth to peer hard into my eyes and grin with delight at my astonishment.
‘Kolya?’ (Perhaps this was a finer form of madness than I had understood possible?)
He knelt. He took me in his arms. For a moment an expression almost of compassion crossed his face. Then he frowned. ‘Ugh! You stink like a Prussian whore. Get to your feet, Dimka my love. We have to try to reach Libya before the British arrive.’
I asked him where God was. Where were the guards? I began to feel this to be another of God’s games. Doubtless He now owned Kolya, too.
But Kolya did not understand my first question. ‘The creature’s guards were bribed. They were growing nervous at their master’s excesses. God? What do you mean? Did you have a vision, Dimka?’
‘Al-Habashiya.’ I summoned enough courage to whisper the forbidden name. If I dreamed, I could not be harmed further.
‘Oh!’ He moved his fingers across his chest and then shrugged. He reached down to pull me upright. ‘God is dead.’
The scarab is unrecognisable, burnt off in the accident. I do not think I could have lived with it on my body. Even the scar is loathsome. I would not speak of those events, not even to Kolya, who had some idea of what had transpired within God’s garden. He had seen the pit, he told me. He had decided to leave it for the authorities to find. They were less likely to pursue al-Habashiya’s murderer for long. I began to record this only after Suez. I felt it my duty. People should understand the influence of Carthage. They should know what it is to exist in a world where perverted negroid Semites enjoy the power of life and death over us. All I can do is warn you. I have sent these accounts to every newspaper and radio programme in the country. Most of them ignore me. Reveille ran a story but they made fun of me. sammy davis jnr secret world ruler says polish mystic was their headline. You can imagine the rest. Some say I disgust them. Certainly it is disgusting, I agree. It happened to me. They think I am not disgusted? I am one of the few who survived with sanity and my speech intact. Without studying evil we cannot resist it and we can so easily be deceived into taking the wrong path.
I told Kolya that God was a darkness to me and that something of myself had grown to love Him. Kolya said that it was always possible to find a little scrap of darkness in one’s own soul, some scrap that longs to join the greater darkness and share in the power of its Prince. It is what we mean by Original Sin. His understanding of religious matters was considerable. He had spent some of his youth at a seminary. He understood the Greek creed far more thoroughly than I ever shall. At that time, however, it was of little comfort to me because I was beyond comfort. I was beyond emotion and sensation. Listlessly, I let my friend hurry us through the gates to the waiting camels, who groaned and complained at being awakened so early. He made me mount a tall, pale doe who got to her feet with all the offended grace of a dowager instructed to remove her chair from the park’s verge. Then he perched himself on his own beast’s hump, tugging on the rather large number of pack animals, goading my animal forward with his long whip and thus propelling us all willy-nilly into the cold night. An oily stink was drifting from the house. It stayed with me for hours. Only as the desert air cleared my lungs did I realise how familiar I had become with the smell of death.