"It"s not a problem," he says. "I"ll speak to the governor of Minya."
"Really?"
"Of course. Now, if you like." He walks to the desk and picks up the phone. He asks his secretary to check whether Muhyi Bey is in Cairo. When she rings back it is to say that he is in Cairo but will not be contactable until after three. Tareq looks at his watch.
"It"s one o"clock. Let me take you out to lunch."
At a corner table of Rive Gauche we order Mediterranean prawns and salads and start to reminisce over those school holidays so long ago when we played together in Tawasi, the university days when we spent time together at the club.
"Then you went abroad and vanished," he says.
"Yes," I say, "I fell in love and got married."
"Is your husband with you here? Let me take you both out to dinner."
"No," I say, "no, he"s not. He"s in England." That is all I say. Then I say, "Have you been down to Minya recently?"
And he tells me how he had bought out the fallaheen he didn"t want long ago, how he had modernised the farm and kept on only the people who could keep pace with what he wanted to do. "It makes a reasonable profit," he says. "Not like business, of course, but it"s history and roots. And it can probably be made to give more. I"m going to bring in a good Israeli team to redesign the infrastructure. We"ll see what they"ll do."
"A what team?" I say.
"An Israeli team," he says. "To revamp the whole place -"
I stop eating. "But how can you do that? How can you bring Israelis into your land?"
"They"ve got the technology," he says, "and the experience. You look shocked."
"I am shocked. I"m amazed. After all these years, all these wars - and what about the Palestinian cause?"
"The Palestinians are doing business with the Israelis."
"But Tareq, how can you do it? Don"t you know that"s what they want? To get into Egypt. To get into the whole area -"
"You know, I think you"ve been away too long. You sound like you"re still in the Seventies. Things have moved on."
"But they can"t move on. They shouldn"t move on. Not while they want power over the whole region."
"It"s up to us not to give them power. If I hire a few Israelis on my land, transfer their technology - how does that give them power? I"m transferring their power to me. You think it would be better to hold on to our old methods and pretend they don"t exist? That"s hiding our head in the sand. These old ideologies are no good any more. Everything is determined by economics."
"Everything?"
"Everything."
"I thought you were a patriot," I say bitterly. "We went out on demonstrations -"
"I am a patriot. I do more for my country by strengthening its economy than I would by sitting in a rut and hoping things will take the course I want somehow."
We fall silent and then I say, "What you are saying offends me. Hurts me, even ..."
He smiles at me, with all the warmth of our old friendship. "You"re being emotional. But this isn"t an emotional issue. It"s a practical one."
"It"s done," he says, back in the office, putting the phone down. "The unit will be reopened next week. The school can open if the teachers are approved. You"ll need a list of their names, and once they"re vetted, the school will open."
Isabel, of course, can"t see why the fallaheen should mind giving a list of names to the authorities. "They won"t be doing anything wrong," she says. "They"re volunteering to man the school."
I try to explain: centuries of lists being used to tax people, to take their sons away to dig ca.n.a.ls or till the Khedive"s land or be killed in wars; centuries of distrust, broken only briefly by what the fallaheen now call "the good time": the time of Abd el-Na.s.ser. She looks quizzical and I try to steer our conversation to where it"s safer, where I feel more comfortable: to the past. It"s not difficult.
"I want to see Sharif Basha"s house," she says. "The one in the story - I mean the one in the journals. Is it still there?"
"Yes. It"s a museum now," I say. "You can go whenever you like."
"I"d like to visit it with you," she says.
And so we go. Along the river, then eastwards into lanes broad enough for a carriage to roll through, but strangled now by the cars parked on either side. A lane opens on to a clearing and the house stands before us: three storeys of mellow cream stone broken here and there by the dark brown of the mashrabiyyas. To the western side is the extension with the small green dome. A group of women in black galabiyyas sit outside it with their children.
We pa.s.s through the ma.s.sive doorway of the old house. Out of the bustle and noise and heat of the city, we enter into the cool, hushed, ordered s.p.a.ce and once again the feel and smell of the past wraps itself round me - even though the house is stripped to a sh.e.l.l and the guide who insists on taking us round tells us proudly that it has been used as a film set for an Agatha Christie movie. But we see the storeroom where Anna spent her first hours, the haramlek drawing room with the two divans where she and Layla slept and woke to a new friendship, the courtyard where she played with the one-year-old child who was to be my father. We see too the room hidden under the floorboards of the main bedroom where Sharif Basha"s father must have taken refuge after the failure of the revolution. When things calmed down he found he could not live under the Occupation, but he could not fight against it, and he would not go abroad. He moved into the shrine of Sheikh Haroun attached to the house and there he spent the last thirty years of his life. We found the door to the shrine chained and padlocked. When I asked if we could go through, the guide laughed.
"No, no, ya Sett Hanim, it"s become a proper mosque now and you can"t get to it from the house. The door is outside, on the street." He said that when the house was turned into a museum, a waqf had come into place for the upkeep of the mosque and the support of one sheikh to live there.
As we leave, Isabel asks if she can go back with a camera.
"Ahlan wa sahlan," he says. "But there"s a charge of five pounds."
The house has cast its spell on us and we walk around the district, reluctant to leave. The women have gone and the door to the small mosque is closed. Behind it rises the great old mosque in whose shadow the house was built back in the seventeenth century. To the left, where the gardens would have been, small houses, shops and lanes have grown over the last thirty years. But in a clearing with a small kiosk we find a group of trees, dusty now and uncared-for. We stand under them. We touch and name them. There is a jacaranda with a few loose blue pyramids of flower, a sarw and a handsome poinciana, a magnolia with no flowers, a zanzalacht and a sifsafa. We sit on two upturned crates by the kiosk, sipping Pepsi-Cola, and Isabel tells me she"s going back to the States in August.
"I need to see him. And I want to see my mother. You know, there"s so much I want to ask her and now it"s probably too late. Even the biggest things in our lives we never really talked about -"
"Did she ever talk about her grandmother, about Anna?" I ask.
"Yes." Isabel plays with a twig, tracing triangles in the dust. "She used to say Anna had set a pattern for the women of our family: they would all marry foreign men and live far from home." She glances up at me. "My mother married an American. Her mother, Nur, married a Frenchman. I married someone from my country, from the States - but then I left him. And do you know, my mother was not even surprised."
When Isabel decided to leave Irving for no reason other than that the days had grown grey and the nights greyer, she arranged to meet Jasmine to break the news to her. They met in the Metropolitan, for her mother liked the museum and Isabel wanted the setting, at least, to be on her side. Over steaming corn chowder, in response to the unsuspecting "And how is Irving?", Isabel said "We"re getting divorced", and was taken aback when her mother merely nodded. Jasmine patted her mouth with her napkin and said, "You"ll both get over it, I guess."
"But you don"t even seem surprised," Isabel said.
"Well, you"ve neither of you been happy for a while now, have you?" her mother said.
"I thought you"d ..."
"Make a fuss?"
"More than this, anyway."
"If you"re not happy, you"re not happy. You don"t have kids. There"s really no reason for you to stay together."
"I thought you liked him?"
"I do. He"s a lovely boy. But that doesn"t mean you have to stay married to him."
"Well, that"s settled then," said Isabel. She was relieved, but she was disappointed too. What was it she had wanted? To make her case? To overcome her mother"s objections? To surprise her? Why was it so easy? Because her mother knew her? Or because she didn"t care? All the questions that Isabel continues to ask.
As they walked towards the exit, Jasmine lingered by the Pompeii mosaics. "Just think," she said, "there they were, having lunch or whatever, and suddenly the volcano erupts and it"s over. Just like that. It"s so easy."
This was dangerous territory. "Let"s go," said Isabel, and steered her mother out of the museum.
"Maybe she"ll have a remission," I say, and then I think, how foolish! People don"t have remission from Alzheimer"s. But Isabel says "Maybe", and we linger under the old trees as the daylight starts to fade.
And now it is evening. Nothing more can be asked of me. Cool in my loose dressing gown, with a tall gla.s.s of mango sherbet in my hand, I can sit down at the table in my room, free once more to join Anna Winterbourne and Sharif al-Baroudi as, dressed in the flowing white of the Bedouin, they ride together into the Sinai Desert.
16 March 1901
I have just come back into my tent from an evening of revelry and fantasia and I am so tired, yet my puke is so quickened that I have been pacing the confines of my tent, unable to settle either to sleep or to my journal.
What a pity it is that I can write neither to Sir Charles nor to Caroline, for I should so delight in describing to them all the events of this day - there are so many aspects of it that I am sure each one would enjoy. But that pleasure will have to wait until I am back in England, I think, and can persuade them by my presence that my adventure was not foolish or rash. Although I confess that earlier today it was difficult to persuade myself of the same thing.
We had travelled the day mostly in silence - and I was grown somewhat uneasy. The plain we traversed was of unbroken gravel, the landscape desolate. I knew from my guidebook that the magnificent scenery was yet to come, but I was almost overcome by a sense of my own foolishness; for the trek to St Catherine and back will take some fourteen days and I could not rid myself of an unease of conscience that I had so precipitately removed Sharif Pasha and his men - not to mention Sabir - from their daily concerns and occupations. As to my host himself, I could gauge nothing of his thoughts, for the kufiyya, hanging down on either side of the face, protects its wearer against the casual or surrept.i.tious glance, and on the few occasions when he turned to speak to me his expression was impa.s.sive, his manner distantly polite. His French would pa.s.s for that of a Frenchman. I cannot believe he has no knowledge of English, but he seems a man who would not do a thing at all in preference to doing it less than perfectly - and perhaps his English is not perfect. French suffices for what little conversation we have, however. He has informed me that my name is Armand Demange, and my father is none other than Maitre Demange who defended Captain Dreyfus in that infamous trial three years ago. It appears that the Maitre is a friend of Sharif Pasha and I have been given information on my mother, our estates and my schooling - none of which I expect to need as we are hardly likely to come upon an enquiring pa.s.ser-by in this desert. When he was satisfied that I could ride as well as any of them and that I suffered no undue weariness, we rode without break except for prayers and a little food and drink at mid-day, mid-afternoon and sunset, and I came to feel that there is something about the desert that discourages idle chatter. And besides, of the men with us only Sabir and Mutlaq knew the truth about me, and perhaps he feared that I should raise my voice and so betray myself. His manner towards me is courteous but most reserved and distant. I am happy that it should be so, for, after all, any true friendship between us cannot - in the nature of things - be possible, and there is no form here that needs to be preserved through polite conversation.
I was surprised that we did not make camp at sunset. As dusk fell, we saw a group of men on horseback come cantering towards us. I glanced towards him in some alarm but he said "Friends" and, raising his arm in greeting, rode forwards to meet them. They were the men of the Alawi tribe, for we had entered their territory, and they rode out to welcome us and escort us back to their settlement, where we are camped tonight as guests of their Chief, Sheikh Salim ibn Husayn.
Their encampment is in a most pleasant spot, in the Wadi Gharandal, through which runs a clear stream of sweet water, sweeter still for being the first we have come across in this desert, and there are many acacia trees about which are spa.r.s.e and th.o.r.n.y, the better to survive the harsh climate. The Alawis" homes are black tents woven out of goats" hair; the people subsist through grazing their flocks of sheep and goats and trading in thoroughbred horses, of which I have seen several fine examples in the fantasia that was held tonight in our honour.
And indeed, they did honour us with sheep roasting on a spit, large dishes of aromatic rice and a light, bitter coffee poured out of elongated jugs, any one of which could be fittingly displayed in the South Kensington Museum.
The old Chief is a small man with a hand as hard as a desert stone (indeed they are all small men and, I think, have to be so - like the acacia - to live in the desert). He was most gracious to me and sat me down on his right - Sharif Pasha being on his left - and pressed morsels of lamb upon me and apologised for not speaking to me in my "native" French, and he seemed much pleased at my delight with their fantasia which truly is a most wonderful affair, the men performing feats of horsemanship, bareback, to the accompaniment of wild cries and whoops and drumming, and the whole scene lit by flares. In that company Sharif Pasha seemed to shed his reserve and leaned back on his cushion, talking and laughing with the old Chief. For a moment I even had a suspicion that he had apprised the Chief of my true nature; I cannot tell whence that suspicion came except that they seemed on such frank and easy terms with each other and that the Chief"s smile was of a conspicuous broadness as he bade me good night.
My only regret tonight is that I could not spend any time in the company of the women but perforce saw them only as a man would: slight figures in long, embroidered gowns, flitting about as they handed the food to the men who served us, their movements light, their sequined veils glittering in the firelight, their black eyes above them darting at me with curious looks which added piquancy to my situation. And although they took no part in the feats of the fantasia, they joined in the drumming and clapping and their voices rose so that I thrilled to that ululating joy-cry which I had read about but never heard.
If I am to believe my guidebook, tomorrow we should traverse the terrains which have given this desert its fame for magnificence. So far I have found that the book, like my friends at the Agency, has a fairer view of the land than of its inhabitants.
And in Anna"s Thomas Cook I read: The people who live in the desert have always been a favourite subject of romance, but a very short experience is sufficient to dispel such youthful delusions. The Bedouins, at least such of them as are found between Egypt and Palestine, are of a very prosaic character; rude, ignorant, lazy and greedy, they offer no points of attraction ... the ordinary Arabs are dest.i.tute alike of grace and strength; their clothing is ragged, their feet are never furnished with shoes, and only occasionally with very rude sandals, and their hands and faces show very plainly that water is scarce ... [They] are ignorant and careless of the advantages of civilised life; they constantly carry arms if they can obtain them; a man whose best garment is an untanned sheepskin, will wear a sword, or shoulder a gun, or both ... Yet they are apparently a cheerful, contented race, very much like the American Negroes in their simplicity, thoughtlessness and good humour ... None of them fails to understand the word baksheesh; it is the first word the young child learns, the last the old man utters.
19 March 1901
Oh how I wish it were possible to go without sleep entirely, or that the hours of each day would be doubled, that I might have time to see and to feel all there is to see and feel, and then still have time to reflect on it, to let the impressions wind their way through my mind, settling here and there in small, shining pools, or merging with other thoughts and progressing towards some great conclusion! And then again I would have time to write it all down, to record it all, for in that act, I have found my thoughts clarify themselves and what starts as an hysterical burbling of impressions resolves into a view, an image as lucid and present as a painting.
I have never cared for the paintings of the Sinai that I have seen, preferring to them the intricate interiors, the detailed portrayals of domestic life. The paintings with grander ambitions never seemed to come to life for me and now I understand why. I have found myself thinking of the wonderful Turners hanging in Petworth, for surely no lesser genius than his could do justice in watercolours to the magnificence of these landscapes. And in oils, of all the painters I can think of, perhaps Corot comes closest to the possibility of rendering these mountains - and yet a painting would do justice only to that spot it depicted, and the viewer would be mistaken in thinking that now he had an idea of the whole of the Sinai. For each day brings us to a different aspect of this amazing land, this conjunction of the two mighty continents of the Ancient World. One day it is a bare gravel plain stretching as far as the eye can see, and then you are surprised by a small stream and th.o.r.n.y acacias digging deep into the sand for the little water that will help them sustain the small life that is their lot; the next day you find yourself amid stupendous ranges of solid rock, some black, some purple, some red, and you are treading the same land in which the Ancient Egyptian laboured to extract copper and turquoise - indeed, you can see the remains of his excavations still. You then come out on an open plain by the Red Sea and there you are joined by huge flocks of birds, pausing, resting for the night on the sh.o.r.e where you are camped, and as the sun rises, while the men perform their morning prayers, the birds too rise. They soar and wheel and call out to each other and set off in a great swooping cloud across the sea and towards their summer homes in the North. And then, opening out among cliffs more than a thousand feet in height, a wadi lies before you and life is plentiful again, with gardens of tamarisk and apple trees and fields of wheat and barley. What one painting could even suggest all this?
Tonight we are camped a single day"s ride from the Monastery of St Catherine and in full view of the mountains of Sinai. We rode, Sharif Pasha and I, through the most spectacular pa.s.s, called the Nugb Hawa, so precipitous and narrow that camels cannot go through it but have to be sent the wider and more level route through Darb el-Sheikh. Sharif Pasha put the question to me: would I prefer the spectacular route or the easier one? And naturally I chose the first. He said, "It can only be done on horseback. And since we have only two horses, we would have to go alone."
I said, "You will have to convince Sabir," and he smiled.
For the first time Sabir consented to leave my side, and Sharif Pasha and I broke off from our companions and rode off into the narrow pa.s.s of Nugb Hawa. The granite cliffs on either side of us rose to fifteen hundred feet or more and at times, by leaning slightly to one side or the other, I could have touched both walls of the pa.s.s with my hands. Sometimes it seemed that we were riding towards a solid rock face, but as we drew near, an opening would miraculously appear and we would turn into it. The incline meanwhile was for stretches so steep that only the most surefooted and even-tempered of horses would have climbed it without harm to his rider. Our mounts were willing and agile, however, and we rode on, mostly in single file with me at the front, but sometimes my companion drew abreast and with the briefest of looks satisfied himself that all was well with me.
It was on one of those occasions, and sensible that this was the first time we had had a possibility of private conversation, that I started to tell him how grateful I was for all he had done for me and a.s.sured him that I was well aware of the great inconvenience this must have caused. But he cut me short with "C"est rien. You would have made the journey anyway."
"I would have tried," I said, "but I think I would have met with a tour in Suez and travelled with them, and that would not have been the same thing at all."
"Why not?" he asked, seeming surprised. "You would have travelled in comfort and without the necessity of disguise."
"I would have ..." I did not quite know how to put this. "I would have remained within the world I knew. I would have seen things through my companions" eyes, and my mind would have been too occupied in resisting their impressions to establish its own -"
"Have you always been like this?" he asked.
"Like what?" I said, surprised in my turn.
"So insistent on making up your own mind."
"You make me appear wilful."
"And are you not?"
"I have not given free rein to my will before," I said. And with that the pa.s.s narrowed and he pulled in his horse and fell behind. He had not said it was no trouble, nor a.s.sured me that he did not find my company irksome, but I was not displeased with our exchange - and I was glad that I had thanked him.
Nugb Hawa ended as abruptly as it had begun and suddenly we emerged from the dark cool of the pa.s.s and into a bright open plain with the majestic mountains of Sinai in full view before us. We were rejoined by the men on camel-back and Sabir greeted me with smiles and with no evidence of any anxiety. I believe he now trusts that I am in safe hands. Indeed, as the days pa.s.s and we go deeper and deeper into Sinai, I am quite frightened (although I would not for the world admit this other than to my journal) to think that I tried to do this with only Sabir for company. I had not spoken falsely when I said to Sharif Pasha that I had thought I would meet with a company of Cook"s travellers in Suez and perhaps travel with them, but there was a strong part of me that did not wish to be in the company of my own kind here. As though I had an instinct that their conversation, their presence itself, would preclude my truly entering into the Sinai. And I know now that it would indeed have been so. The encompa.s.sing silence and the ease (or indifference) of my companions have left my soul free to contemplate, to drink in the wonder of this place. How fitting it is that it should have been here that Moses heard the word of G.o.d! For here, where Man - if he is to live - lives perforce so close to Nature and by her Grace, I feel so much closer to the entire mystery of Creation that it would not surprise me at all were I to be vouchsafed a vision or a revelation; indeed it would seem in the very order of things that such an epiphany would happen. I have found myself, every time the men stopped for prayer, offering up prayers of my own; simple offerings in praise of Him who fashioned all this and who sent me here that I might see it. I have also prayed for His mercy to be visited on the soul of my poor Edward, for I have fallen, from time to time, to thinking that if he had come here as a pilgrim instead of going to the Soudan as a soldier, he might have been alive today and at peace.
21 March
It is afternoon and the monks have retired to prayer and we to our siesta.
We have been to the summit of Jebel Moussa and have watched the dawn break to the accompaniment of the melodious chant of the Muezzin calling for prayer.
The air is dry and light and its effect on the mind is similar to that of a gla.s.s of Champagne before dinner.
I have not written anything of this Monastery where we are lodged. The Father is very kind and - as the men are encamped outside the walls - Sharif Pasha has told him who I am on the grounds of it being wrong to accept hospitality under false pretences.