A misty stillness filled the whole square with that timeless calm one often used to find in London until her streets filled up with yelling immigrants, middle-class colonists and the antisocial family saloon. In those days during the afternoons only the centre had crowds of people. Most of the square’s flats were occupied by middle-aged people who had moved here at a time when the rents were reasonable. Today it is a landmark. All taxi-drivers know it. Tourist buses bring visitors on their way to Earls Court. Each of the mansion blocks is in a different style, many of them daring when raised, but the place is now I believe in a book and up for development. It was just as I approached the ornate north gate, with its cast-iron Imperial Eagles imitated from St Petersburg, that I saw Brodmann. He must have been following me. Perhaps he already knew of my association with Miss B? Or perhaps Miss B. had betrayed me? It was even possible that they had been shadowing her and accidentally found me. It no longer mattered, of course. The inescapable fact was that Brodmann had picked up my trail again. This was just after the War when I was praying he had either been recalled or, better still, killed in the Blitz. I believe he thought I had not recognised him. I took my single advantage and pretended bafflement. He was disguised as a tramp but nothing could hide his leering triumph! My warm reverie was utterly destroyed. My peace of mind was exploded. I felt my hard-won harmony fragmenting into a vacuum. Now, at any moment of his choosing, Brodmann could report me and have me forcibly returned to my homeland. Like those other Cossacks the British lords sent back to Stalin, I faced inevitable torture. This is why I can never reveal certain names, including my own. Those few of us who have survived into natural old age are mutually responsible for one another. To call us Nazis, I said to Brodmann in a note, was the grossest simplification of our political ideals. He never replied. I had hoped to flush him out. Brodmann of course was the real Nazi. He was not the first Nazi Jew I ever met. They are all the same, these communists.
I was never again to enjoy the botanical tranquillity of Sporting Club Square. I caught the 28 from The Seven Stars and looked back to make sure he was not following me. I got off at the Odeon, Westbourne Grove and, rather than risk leading him to my home, I went to the pictures. They were playing a cowboy film in which some ludicrous Billy the Kid saves a town from every kind of villainy. There is a scene in the desert which I recognised as Death Valley, although the buttes and mesas of that landscape have the same sort of confusing similarity one finds in parts of the Libyan Sahara, where one peak can look very much like another. I remember very little of the ride from Bi’r Tefawi to the oasis where we joined a small camel caravan with which, Kolya said, we would journey to Ouenat and from there to al-Khufra where he expected to meet old friends. Al-Khufra was some four hundred miles due west across the Sahara. He advised me to relax as best I could and enjoy the journey. This would be the easiest part.
‘But what is Khufra?’ I had never heard of such a city.
‘A great oasis, a junction for the large caravans out of Africa and India. She’s six hundred uncrossable miles of desert south-west of Cairo. Nine hundred miles of dunes due west to Ghat and a thousand miles of wasteland and mountains north-west to Tripoli. In short, Dimka dear, Khufra is in the middle of nowhere - and yet you shall see there sights no Christian has witnessed in centuries! Be patient, dear, for at present you are riding first-class. After Khufra the real journey begins.’ I asked him what lay after Khufra but all he would say was that he hoped we did not have to go to Ghat.
The others on the caravan called me al bagl which means ‘the mule’, but I did not mind. I was safe from God at last but I retained the habits He had instilled in me. Intellectually I knew this; He could no longer punish me, but my nerves would not accept this. Somehow I had become addicted to others’ approval and would serve happily anyone who commanded me. I could not sleep until I knew I had the general goodwill of the whole caravan. Only their cheerful condescension made me feel at ease. Their mockery and their contempt, their affectionate insults, warmed me. In Arabic they sometimes called me ‘Father of Fools’ but in Tebu their names were usually more cryptic. The Goran tribesmen also had filthier epithets. These haughty blacks chose to assume me Kolya’s catamite. Kolya, with his talent for languages, had let it be known that he was an anti-French Syrian sharif on the run from the authorities. He even had a blurred newspaper cutting as proof of his credentials. The cutting was from the Parisian yellow press, a gossip column. Since few of them could read in any language, it served to give authority to his claim that he was considered an enemy by the Rumi. Why else would they print his picture? Everyone agreed on this logic.
Between Bi’r Tefawi and the first oasis I discovered a thoroughly useful talent. I had a natural skill with camels and, after only a few days, amazed Kolya with my easy seat, my deft control. Was there a part of me that sensed in those landscapes some ancestral homeland? Again I wondered about lost Atlantis. Could the Caucasian Berbers be the remnants of that legendary people? Both spoke a language that was the root of many others. There was no explanation as to how they had come to occupy the Sahara. Had they actually been my Atlantean forebears? Few Berbers were nomads by vocation. They would tell you how they had once lived in magnificent cities, ruling a world. At first I took that to be a reference to their Empire, which had included the Spanish peninsula until the Christian conquests, but later I began to realise they referred to a civilisation more ancient even than Egypt, with whom they also shared their language. The Berbers of our party were inclined to keep themselves apart from Arabs. Did their blood recall a time when these same people were their slaves? And was it common blood that bore in it a knowledge of the years before the oceans drowned Atlantis, before the rise of Carthage in all its luscious and extravagant barbarism? Before Sumer; before Babylon and Assyria and those other neurotic, brooding Semitic Empires whom greedy introspection brought so low? We came to Ouenat, a valley of red rock in a range of eroded mountains, a collection of sun-yellowed scrub and a few miserable saplings growing where rainwater had gathered in brackish pools. Our party had no intention of staying long. The place was thought to shelter afrits and djinns of testy disposition. Now the walls of the valley were steeper, masses of weather-smoothed granite boulders which could dislodge and roll down on us at any moment. Eventually we camped at the base of a cliff and a pool more palatable than most and settled to wait for the main caravan from Furawia and French Equatorial Africa. We waited a week, grumbling and fretting until bit by bit the other caravans began to come in. Yet we still could not set off until we had debated our relative positions in the train and all demands and honour had been properly respected. This involved the offering of daifa - the special hospitality of the desert - and the consequent feastings and ceremonies attending the offerings. These were followed by friendly debate between the various elders of the caravans, when they smoked and chatted and, after it seemed we must drink Ouenat dry, they rose, shaking hands, slapping shoulders and laughing to expose their few white fangs in the weathered leather of their faces.