Jerusalem Commands

TWENTY-ONE

I HAD PASSED THROUGH the final gate, the gate to eternal death. Anubis was my friend. I had won a kind of immortality. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades, but my future remained uncertain and my terror would not leave me. I possessed a knowledge I had never wanted and of which I never dare speak. I had been in the presence and the power of purest Evil.

There is an old man, a kind of vagrant who walks up and down the Portobello Road on weekdays, when the market is only fruit and veg. He is sometimes mistaken for me. Even Mrs Cornelius mentions it. He is Irischer. I am not insulted. We would call him rorodivni. He is, says Father P., what his own ancestors named da-chearde, a son of two arts; an oracle. Barnum the Jew says he is a nebech-meshiach and gives him a shilling, but I am not sure this is blasphemy. Arabised Berbers of the Tripoli desert might identify him as an achmak ilahiya and perhaps also consider him an oracle. And why should he not be one? He declaims only what we fear to whisper. He quotes the Bible. He speaks of God’s mercy and how it might be earned.

There is no reason to disbelieve him. His logic is soundly based in conventional theology. Perhaps he is actually the medium for God’s voice. And none of us listens. Not even I. But I know when to be silent. In the desert I learned silence and I learned the art of the fool. Otherwise I should not have lived.

He does not seem to care for the Pope. I think they give him something at the Poor Clares across from Mrs Cornelius. He would therefore be a Catholic, perhaps an ex-priest. Those who say God never announces His presence might wish to spend an hour or two with Mr O’Dowd. He speaks not through ritual or parable, but is the direct medium of God’s command. And still we do not listen! I saw him with those new nuns who so resemble social workers, with their sensible stockings and skirts and little heels. They are always Irish; they have that screeching, unnatural laugh that needs whisky to make it melodious. They remind me of the fellaheen women. I think they keep an eye on him. My friend Miss B., who was once so famous as a dancer, was also a Catholic. She went to the big church near me, which was how we met. All her friends are Irish or Polish, from Hammersmith. She herself lives in Sporting Club Square, West Kensington. I used to go and visit her, but Brodmann put a stop to that.

It was a fine evening in February when Brodmann discovered me again, or, more properly, I learned he had picked up my trail. After tea I had left Miss B.’s eccentrically Ludwigian terracotta mansion, deciding not to use the square’s Mandrake Road entrance but to cross the gardens and enjoy the last of the evening light. I had a particular fondness for Sporting Club Square. With her tall wrought-iron railings and surrounding trees, her botanical gardens, the creation of Halifax Begg, offered a sense of sanctuary. By some fluke they had always shut out the busy noise of nearby North End Road and I could easily imagine I sat enjoying the solitude of my own ancestral estate near Kiev. The gardens possess that special sense of well-ordered security one finds so often in Arab courtyards. It was a Monday, at about five o’clock. The sun was setting, a red pulse through the dark branches of the massive oak which sixty years earlier had been the dominant landmark of some Fulham pasture. I smelled grass and evergreens. The pungent fumes of coal-fires seemed to intoxicate two tabby cats chasing each other across the lawns, through ornamental grasses and flowerbeds, laurel hedges and waxy botanical oddities. Maintained by a bequest from Begg himself, the little park was as well-kept and as varied in its flora as Derry and Toms Roof Garden, another favourite retreat for meditation and recollection.

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.

At last we were ready to take the road to al-Khufra, leaving the mountains behind and crossing a plain which glittered with cornelian, flint, mica, agate and obsidian worn by the hooves and sandals of all the animals and men who had passed this way for three thousand years or more. The splintered peaks were below the horizon and the desert widening under the evening sky before Kolya grew at once more light-hearted and more cautious. ‘Soon, Dimka, you will understand the real temptations of the desert.’ But he refused to expand on this.

Each caravan has its own rhythm, pace and character. Our party now consisted of a miscellaneous collection of Bedouin merchants, Tebu camel-breeders, Sudanese slavers, pilgrims returning from the Haj, and the camp-followers who served us in various ways. Kolya assured me it was nothing compared to the great oasis at Khufra.

In those days, before the half-track conquered all, a caravan was exactly like a train, with connections at various oases for other caravans following a variety of fixed routes. You waited for the next party going in the direction you desired. It was Stavisky’s people, he eventually admitted, who were supposed to meet Kolya at al-Khufra, near the Toom road. He would turn over our pack camels to them in exchange for cash. Then, he hoped, we could head for Tripoli. I remarked gloomily that the camels couldn’t be worth very much but this only amused him. ‘Enough to get us a room and breakfast at Bagnold’s, never fear!’

At night our trail across the golden dunes turned to gleaming silver and remained easy to follow. We were rarely far from water. With a good caravan it was a route as uneventful to travel as the railway from Delhi to Bombay. Gradually the desert became what the Bedouin called sarira, hard sand, flat, all but featureless and spread with a thin layer of gravel. Later I would come to know the gruelling boredom of caravan life which would teach me the habit of patience. But then my head was filled with an understanding my body still refused to accept. I was free! I had escaped God’s punishment. God, Kolya assured me, was slain. It was as if I had passed every test I had tried to learn from my book. I had answered all the questions, made the proper statements of repentance, all the time believing I would still at any moment be struck down, further humiliated and weakened. But I had gone safely through the First Gate and Anubis was my friend. Why should I still be afraid? No rationality would release me from the fear that at any moment God might stand again before me, telling me that I had merely drifted for a short while into a dream. Yet if I dreamed, then I experienced a nightmare within the dream. I was yet to be blinded. I remained terrified of a future which could only be horrific, grotesque and disgusting. I had seen the boy turning in circles with his own living eyes clutched in his bloody fists while al-Habashiya had chuckled softly. I had seen the mutilated girls. So still I capered and giggled, the compliant object of all their foul-mouthed speculation. I even suffered their gross sexual advances. (I have often thought that the reason the British and the Arabs have such a love affair is because each race is as sexually repressed as the other.) Sex, my enemy, continued her tyranny.

I was conditioned to please them. I had earned my life through pleasing them. I had very little capacity for logic at that time. I was at any fellaheen’s mercy whenever I was caught alone relieving myself behind a rock or running to fetch a wandering goat on the far side of a dune. But then some of them took to calling me casually, for their own perverse amusement, al Yehudi, and I began intellectually, as well as instinctively, to fear for my life again. Then Kolya issued some subtle decree to my tormentors (which I do not think was an appeal to their better natures, but a suggestion they discontinue handling his property). I was grateful for Kolya’s intercession, but might have hoped for a more dignified appeal. He did his best, he said. He had, after all, to behave thoroughly like a desert Arab. Anything else would arouse suspicion. I assured myself that I need have no more rational fear of them. Anubis was my friend. If, by God’s command, I was already dead, I had nothing at all to lose. Any sensation of life would be a gain. There remained, however, the knowledge that anyone whom the Arab intended to murder was always first cursed with the name of ‘Jew’ and so the crime became legitimate. It was the same, of course, in parts of Germany, as I discovered to my cost.

God continued to haunt me; her smothering flesh, her organs still threatened my soul. My bowels would knot in agony for the loss of Esmé, my muse; the little goddess who had betrayed me so badly. I had not wanted any of this. I had done everything I could for her.

Within caravans, disputes and quarrels are rarely allowed to blossom into full-blown affairs. A people whose law is the blood feud and who are in constant conflict with the elements cannot afford extra antagonisms. Kolya’s words were heeded. My days became happier. What if I had gone from being a Cossack’s pet Jew to an Arab’s pet Nazrini? I now stood every chance of reclaiming all I had lost. I still had a small fortune in my California bank. In the fullness of time, Kolya would get us to a town with civilised conveniences and I would wire Goldfish with a brief account of the truth. Calling upon our funds, I could return to Los Angeles before the year’s end and start my career again without encumbrances. I would look back on these months of inhaling sand and living off brackish water and miscellaneous beans and, no doubt, even I would romanticise it, softening the details, embroidering certain facts until it was suitably similar to The Desert Song for the civilised world’s demanding sensibilities.

Even the most persistent of my persecutors lost interest in me as we neared al-Khufra which, we were warned, now had a large Italian garrison on the look-out for slavers and gun-runners. The Wormeater’s incapacity to distinguish a gunrunner from a blind mule was a source of wild amusement amongst those Arabs who had already experienced Italian occupation. They of course were equally unable to tell an Italian musketeer from a Norwegian matron. One fierce rumour had it that the soldiers had been ordered to erect a Christian church on the site of the oasis’s chief mosque. In the mythology of these people Christians were forever hatching complicated (usually extremely petty) plots and spending considerable resources merely to bring insult to the Moslems. It had reminded me of Kentucky, whose people credited the Pope with similar ambitions against their dissenting congregations. As I said to Kolya: Considering the army of crazed zealots which between them the Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Bishop of Constantinople can rally, it’s surprising they have not thought of combining resources before now!

Such racialist paranoia is disgusting. It only clouds the issues and makes us lose sight of the real enemy. ‘These Moslems are bound to be touchy,’ said Kolya, lapsing into Russian as the bulk of the caravan fell away to our left. ‘What would you think if you suddenly realised, in your heart of hearts, that you and your ancestors had backed the wrong religious horse - and were still insisting the useless nag could win the Petersburg Straight? Yet when you listen, in Cairo for instance, to their political ideas, you wonder which came first, the self-destructive religion or the average Arab, who would always rather shoot himself in the foot than not shoot at all!’

It seemed to me that his understanding of Islam was limited, but I said nothing, for I was as anxious to agree with Kolya as I was with the Arabs.

He had by now been accepted as a rebel, a sharif (minor noble) and a scholar, while I was identified as his idiot kinsman, employed from the goodness of his heart. This story was thin, but perfectly acceptable to our confederates who rarely demanded the truth of anyone, but felt it a matter of good form for someone to present a lie with grace, wit and dignity.

In the main the Arabs are a tolerant people prepared to take any man at his own value until he proves himself an antagonist. My Arabic being specific and limited, I had no other choice but to accept the idiot rôle.

I was, for those first weeks, incapable of speaking anything but the Arabic God had trained me to speak. Since we had joined the moving sprawl of burdened camels and trudging drivers, following the old trading road from oasis to oasis, up and down dunes as high and steep as the English Pennines, deep into the Western Desert, I dreamed of nothing but God’s penis and every night relived my terror, my mouth now bound at my own request for fear that the Bedouin in their nearby tents might discover that a Nazrini had insinuated himself into their company. If they suspected me, I would have been betrayed by a double blasphemy, for which I have since been redeemed, but Kolya quieted me with his familiar soothing ways and turned terror into comfort and comfort into pleasure, until I began to calm. He said I was like a terrified stray, jumping at every sound.

Inta al hob. Inta al hob. I shall never forget her yearning voice, that woman singing from the Bedouin tent. It is you I love. You are the love. I could not tell if she sang to God or to a man. Kolya wept when I asked him this. ‘Who can say?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Can she?’ Once or twice he also wept at the thought of my humiliating ordeal but we were both consoled by his opium which we smoked in the traditional style, through the narghila. This brought me some rest at last. Little by little I recovered my old personality. So far, I said, the desert lacked the romance I had come to anticipate from Pierre Loti or Karl May. Kolya believed the former too feminine, the latter too masculine. Actually the desert was paradoxically a place where such divisions ceased to exist, where even life and death were blurred, and yet always there was the threat of sudden extinction. He said the desert quickened the senses but offered no easy release. It produced, in a subtle being, an extraordinary state of perpetual piquancy. Fine wine and good cocaine were to a true aesthete, he said, mere substitutes for the desert. I had not until then encountered this epicurean definition of the Sahara. It reminded me that Kolya was truly born a little too late. Sometimes it seemed the flawed genius himself, a slender Oscar Wilde, rode his beautiful aristocratic grey camel at my side. The Arabs, who constituted the bulk of our party (we also had blacks and, of course, the Caucasian Berbers), treated my prince with a certain respect while making comradely fun of his poor riding, saying he had spent too long in the cities with the Franks - now in the desert he would learn to become a true Arab again. They were impressed, however, by his elaborate garments, which he wore with considerable panache. To the Arabs they suggested he had powerful family connections. Contrary to the ridiculous myths which the tourists take out with them, the Arab is as vain as any other man and likes nothing better than posing for a camera or an artist’s pencil. It is not the Koran but puritanical tradition, an interpretation of our common Old Testament, that forbids images. The Arab’s love of display makes a Neapolitan gigolo’s seem like modest shyness. One glance at a French drawing-room wall shows how gladly these people will model. They have learned, too, that the tourist expects to reward them for their delicious experience! The Brownie is raised, the hand is held out in demand, the exchange is made and the happy Arab, like his fellow spirits throughout the world, adopts the most romantic and unlikely posture, thus confirming every stereotype which ever put a distance between himself and his equally ordinary brothers around the world. Any picture taken in the Middle East and North Africa bears the unmistakable stamp of this gamecockery, whether it be Haramin posing on their borrowed camels before Giza’s pyramids at sunset or Marakshi riders galloping about and letting off their rifles for the benefit of wealthy Europeans watching from the balconies of the Atlantic Hotel. But these are Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the ordinary reality of prairie life. The long dull days of the caravan trek teach the European the thorough lesson of this ordinariness. However, if the average life of a desert warrior is somewhat less stimulating than the daily round of a suburban office worker, the Arab’s imagination is more vivid and his vocabulary is on the whole more colourful, resembling the combined invention of a French sansculotte, a Russian whore, a Greek cab-driver and an English public-schoolboy, developed through use and habit into an instrument of extraordinarily fluent and specific obscenity. As a people whose chief entertainment is from spoken language it is no surprise they have evolved an oral art no whit less impressive than our own Ukrainian tradition. Such an art cultivates the mind as well as the tongue. It is never a mystery to me that so many poets under Stalin were capable of committing whole volumes of verse to memory. An oral literature depends on intonation. A good Arab story-teller learns the music of discourse and dramatic narrative. He has developed and refined his conventions as Western novelists have developed subtleties of punctuation and grammar. Only on the page is an Arab’s story simple. His literary conventions seem theatrical and whimsical only to those who do not understand their function. It is much the same with Shakespeare. I think however my own raving obscenities would have shocked those Arabs. Happily I had vented most of them on Kolya alone in the desert three hundred miles west of Aswan, before we joined the caravan. But I still asked Kolya to bind my mouth and sometimes my limbs at night until, gradually, though I used Arabic, I raved only of God. This was acceptable to the Moslems who became convinced that I was actually some kind of idiot divine. But it was not until we were nearing the great oasis city of Khufra that I trusted myself to sleep only with the aid of the hashish. As slowly the devils were driven out of me I became more comfortable in my consciously-acted part of cheerful fool whom all men sought out, with a kind word and a coin, for the blessing of my sweet smile. I had become, in God’s care, a far finer actor than ever I had been in Hollywood.

Gradually the more visible aspects of my terror were brought in check. The Bedouin became familiar. I grew to enjoy their bluff good-heartedness towards any creature not a sworn blood enemy. They are at once less cruel and less noble than the characters of Karl May and the more doting arabistes of my boyhood.

Benighted barbarians that they were, the majority showed courtesy and concern for those they accepted. They were like peasants anywhere in the world. Once Kolya saved me from their more amorous notions I received the best of their hospitality, their rough, manly affection. Of course I perceived the irony of my position, yet in my miserable loss of dignity and self-respect I discovered a kind of innocence. In this way I had something in common with the devoted Musselman.

Those qualities we so despised in the camps can, in certain circumstances, be a kind of strength. I remained proudly glad to be free of their worst sexual banter. I remained terrified of sex. Sex had brought me to my present predicament.

They called me the Lucky One, Beloved of Camels and they liked to call me al Sakhra, the Hawk, when I flapped my arms for them and imitated the screech of the hunting bird. They said they would catch me an ostrich for a mate. Amongst themselves they continued to indulge in a farrago of boastful reminiscence and slavering anticipation of the women they would fuck in Khufra, where (Kolya told me) only overworked and generally clapped-out old whores would be available to them. They discussed the qualities of Nubians and Jews with all the authority and sophistication of schoolboys in a locker-room. Another irony; while my Bedouin comrades longed for the sexual experience they had never known I longed to forget all that I had ever learned. I wish I could have distributed my wealth of memory to them, scattering amongst a hundred or two the unsought-for sensual knowledge of an unnaturally concentrated lifetime; which might have had the mutually beneficial effect of satisfying their frustrations while saving me the disturbance of their conversation. I was grateful that the Bisharim, the long-skulled Nubian nomads whose forms of religion were a matter of dismay to our few Wahabim, generally spoke their own language but sometimes told stories in Arabic of the Berber women warriors - whole tribes who would set upon a man in the desert and make use of him until he died. They also spoke of the Berbers’ general partiality for human blood and the sacrifice of babies, of their hideous methods of torture. I came to realise that to these people a Berber was merely the manifestation of all their unfocused fears. He was to be avoided if possible and traded with only cautiously, for in the art of bargaining he was worse than a Jew. Sometimes the astonishing and complicated racialism of these people was blood-curdling! It was only matched by their sense of commonality. This, as usual, resulted in the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Berbers, Jews, Nazrini or Nubians and so on; that is to say, the ones with whom you got along personally were evidently good; the ones you despised, feared, loathed and were sworn to kill on sight were the ones you would never meet. We have similar notions of our own about Arabs. Such ramshackle logical adjustments do admittedly reduce potential bloodshed and, because it is alert to mysterious danger, makes the average caravan as prey to banditry as the average Pullman. I have yet to meet an Arab or anyone else who would not, if left to his own devices, prefer to talk and trade, in that order, rather than fight. Anyway it is only the unfortunate Jews of the mellah who get hurt in any numbers during an Arab war, as one side or another ‘takes’ a town and performs a little ritual slaughter before riding out again. The Jews themselves seem singularly free from any genuine sense of outrage. It is as if the loss of a few sons, the rape of a few daughters, is some kind of local tax they must pay. Those Jews of the oases make me afraid. I was abandoned to the shtetl, but their darkness was worse than the shtetl, perhaps because here, in their own birthplace, they had more choice. They had chosen this life! Every honest Arab will agree that even amongst such creatures, with their ostentation and their devotion to usury, you can often find one or two of the noblest type, great craftsmen, intellectuals, artists. But it is not the Jew’s love of art the Arab fears. It is the Jew’s love of money, his substitute for patriotism. With a love of money comes a quest for security. A quest for security becomes a quest for power, a quest for power becomes a lust for land, and there you have full-fledged Zionist imperialism against which of course the jihad is the only effective weapon! Such a Holy War began the Nazi success. Hitler’s lowly origins were, in the end, however, his downfall. Someone better educated and better bred might have tackled the Jewish problem with greater moderation. In the end the exterminations lost them the support of many ordinary decent Germans. Herman Goering was the only gentleman in the group but unfortunately had not been well educated. He had found, as it were, his natural level. In another age he would have gradually become the butt of the Bierkeller, but, as I have reason to know, he was a good-hearted creature in his own way and had an excellent grasp of engineering principles. Goebbels had more intelligence, but he was incapable of gentlemanly behaviour.

The rituals by which we order and contain our terror of death are as varied as they are immutable. Before we ever dare to re-examine and perhaps change them we defend them by herculean efforts of the imagination, sometimes to the very death we most fear. I remarked on this to Kolya. ‘Is there a vicious circle of terror and tyranny which is destined to enslave forever even the most enlightened of us?’ He thought this was a pointlessly pessimistic question brought on by my ordeal. He saw in everyone, no matter how degenerate or immoral, a spark of goodness which would always respond to what he called the ‘reasoning voice of love’. Only rarely did there emerge a truly terrifying intelligence which could take even that spark of goodness and corrupt it.

I was relieved, when he mentioned this idea, that I had been unable to kill the blind boy. I remember an old rabbi telling me that when he was asked, ‘Where was God in Auschwitz?’ he would say ‘God was there with us, violated and blasphemed. Ask rather - Where was Man in Auschwitz?’ For my own part, I never became a Musselman. I still know exactly what he means.

I told Kolya how Esmé had betrayed me; how I had given up the chance, nevertheless, of escape without her. I still hoped to find who had bought her. He was oddly unsympathetic, but he had not known her as well as I. I was surprised, however, at his next response. ‘I doubt if you will ever realise the extent or the nature of her suffering. I would imagine that, perhaps on a level she dare not admit, her anguish is now nearly unbearable.’

I laughed. I might imagine him to be in love with her himself! But now I think he meant, like Mrs Cornelius, that it might have been better if I had never taken her from her Constantinople whorehouse to offer her a future in Hollywood. She did not possess the character for it. But at least she had more than most girls of her type who are merely promised such things!

This was to be the last rigorous step of our journey into the desert. At night, when it grew chill, tents were pitched for almost a mile along the trail and fluttering fires disappeared into infinity. From everywhere came the aroma of cooking, of hot charcoal, of dung and urine, of spices and perfumes, of animals mid men. I wondered if it had been like this in the Old West, on a wagon train, or perhaps more closely a great cattle-drive such is the brothers Butch and Hopalong ramrodded into Mexico. I saw it on the television. The cowboy films are the only things that have any real morality, these days. Sometimes I hope in all the Hoot Gibsons and W.S. Harts they will turn up one of mine. But those days are too distant for them. Our work is no longer entertainment, it is now a social archive. They want to forget those old lessons, I suppose. Even John Wayne seems happy to play some Falstaffian lawman in mockery of all he ever stood for, so I do not hold out much hope. The Western no doubt descends into sensational bloodshed, substituting violence for technique, like the detective story, the exotic romance and the chiller.

At this time of year the day’s heat was not unbearable; for Russians, used to the most modest summers, we adapted well. We took the precaution of wearing thick headcloths and veils against the glare and dust while we did everything ‘Arab-fashion’. We were sparing with all our supplies, even the cocaine. I was surprised at the quantity and quality that he carried. He was amused. He told me mysteriously that the hump of the camel was the choicest part of the beast. Had he murdered al-Habashiya for his drugs? He laughed. ‘That fat pervert got into a business dispute with someone who had his measure, that’s all. Nobody will mourn him. But yes, I think we are probably both hoping to escape, if that was your implication. I need to be my own man again, Dimka dear. I would like to be free of Stavisky and there could be an opportunity in the offing. I could still be his agent. It depends who is waiting for us at al-Khufra. Meanwhile no one will spend much time searching for us, even if they see our tracks. They will not know who we were. The news will travel through the underworld, as it must, and those who do know us will assume us killed in the dispute. There was, you know, quite a quantity of corpses and general shambles in the end. Poor, silly Sir Ranalf was left holding a somewhat messy baby. But he’s been a lazy beneficiary of al-Habashiya’s bounty for many years. He’ll no doubt be paying a proper price for his pleasures.’

I was thinking of the film. There must have been miles of it. Could its origins be identified? Somewhere in the world, even today, my poor, scarred black and white bottom rises and falls between bruised little legs as I perform the rape scene and few who watch will even think the people on the screen are real, will even want to ask how they came to be there. If they watched it today they would be howling with laughter at our quaintness. It makes me wonder if our increasingly abstract society is not wholly the creation of Mr Kodak and his colleagues.

I told Kolya that I would not feel easy until we were in Europe again and all this far behind us. I pointed out that I no longer had any identity papers. ‘I left your passport behind deliberately,’ he said, ‘and changed my own for something more suitable. That gives us a double opportunity.’ That night in our tent he showed me a variety of passports he had taken from al-Habashiya’s. ‘I was looking for money. But he was too old a dog to keep much there. At least we can take our pick of identities now, Dimka dear. I know a man in Tangier who can work wonders with documents.’ His hope was to get to Tripoli and from there reach Tangier by ship. From Tangier, with new identities, we could go anywhere we wanted.

The pile of passports disturbed me, recalling a dozen ghoulish images, but I said nothing. Indeed, I still had little urge to speak, even after five weeks in the desert, and publicly contented myself with the grinning gesticulation which so pleased the other travellers. Alone with Kolya, I mostly sat and wept. Frequently, with superb tact, my friend would leave our tent and stroll about in the desert, sometimes for hours at a time, respecting my grief.

The stink and constant bustle of the caravan became a familiar comfort. There was always an incident, usually domestic, always gossip and banter to while away the patient hours, and the five prayers gave a welcome structure to the day as we proceeded at a camel’s walk across the hostile waste of sandstone, dust and biting winds, of unwholesome heat and wells gone dry, of yielding dunes and barren wadis on a trek that was for some of us the first stage of a journey the equivalent of a walk from New York to Los Angeles - three thousand miles of desert, of sudden death and infinite boredom. Those extremes created the Arab’s unique soul and made him such a frustrating enemy, forever changing sides on a whim; for an Arab is a fatalistic and practical creature used to thousands of years of unchallenged despotism. He is encouraged by his religion to submit, encouraged by his traditions to aspire to power through a cruel despotism, for shame and pride are his poles, and his society demands of him at least a well-advertised display of violence. The Israelis have learned his language. They have given up trying to speak to him in the reasoning vocabularies of America and Germany.

I see parallels all around me. I am not the only one to argue that we ourselves socially are barely out of the Middle Ages, judging by the broad ideas of the hoi polloi. Our philosophy - from Aristotle to the present - which has made us so great is meaningless to the man in the street, who benefits, incidentally, from it. Left to his own devices, he would cheerfully drink his beer, whistle his little tunes, study his pools, while his priceless institutions, for which so many sacrificed themselves, his very security as an individual, crumble noisily about his ears. Indeed, I could easily prove that the average Wahabi, for all his obnoxious piety, would be able to debate the Greek and French schools more fluently than any modern middle-class Briton!

As the familiarity and sense of security grew, as it became less and less likely that our disguises would be discovered (I had even heard some Hadjizin claiming to have fought beside my ‘sharif’ at some wadi famous only in their own annals) I grew to appreciate my position. My life in Hollywood, almost certainly in ruins, could be restored; I had escaped an appalling fate with my health and mind intact and I was reunited with my best and oldest friend. I needed time for my mental wounds to heal, for all my nightmares to be banished and my usual cheerful optimism to return in full. By assuming the role of a simpleton I found for myself the least demanding persona. When I at last reached Tangier in a couple of months or so I would be fully able to resume my place in the civilised world. My California money could be touched by nobody save myself. Yet I had grown used to the caravan’s pace. I had made pleasant acquaintances, including several young women who trusted an idiot far more than any fully-sensed youth. Sometimes I could hardly conceive of any other life, or of wanting any other life. I had come in particular to appreciate the beauty of the camel and to enjoy the subtle meaning of a sunset sky and to take pleasure, as my colloquial Arabic improved, in the story-tellers who moved among us (sometimes with a single laden camel), earning their place with a mixture of traditional tales - including most of Aesop’s - misreported world news, snatches of doggerel, prejudice. Ignorant and with a relish for sensation, particularly sexual sensation and local sport, they were, in effect, complete walking tabloid newspapers. For those who preferred more highbrow fare there were a few other sharifs ready to debate matters of Koranic law, recite verses from much-loved books, even from the Holy Book itself. Our train grew longer as smaller trains joined us, until it stretched out of sight across the red-gold dunes and valleys of the wide Sahara. Its general mood resembled more closely the mood of an Odessa public holiday in August, of good-humoured determination to make the most of all the hours God granted. As a result they could be the most tolerant and in the main the most honest of people. It was necessary to cultivate these virtues. There was nothing worse, all agreed, than a mood of ill-feeling or mistrust on a caravan which might be together for months. Such a mood could, what was more, be highly dangerous for all.

Compromises were sought first in every sphere of their lives, from trading to surviving - even to war. From this mixture of Bedouin grain merchants, Sudanese traders and Berber camel-buyers, of tribes and races as unique and as far apart in culture and experience as people from Birmingham and Bratislava, in all their clannish specificity of costume and courtesy, was developed a level of social stability, a sense of the individual’s responsibility to the common good, that any Western democracy would envy. This was a world acknowledging few kings or governments, a natural democracy, almost an anarchist ideal. Sadly, though, such perfection is probably only possible in a desert or a vacuum. Why do we in the West believe we have the right to determine what is progress and what is not? We have created the power to destroy the very star around which we whirl. We, surely, are crazy? That, at least, was what I came to believe as I capered and shrieked for the entertainment of grinning Wahabi and chuckling Sudanese. As we moved deeper into Italian Tripolitania we were joined by a small band of blue-veiled Berber Hadjim returning from Mecca, their skin stained deathly grey by the indigo from their robes, so that they might have been a gathering of the dead on the walls of some kingly tomb. They had green or blue eyes, most of them, and the same fine swaggering control of their camels which a Cossack exerts upon his half-wild horse. Their long rifles and spears were slung over their backs; their bandoliers and belts were festooned with knives and the very latest in German automatics and English revolvers. These were the famous Tuareg, regarding themselves as the natural overlords of the Maghribi Sahara, the Land of the West. On their way back to their hidden cities they rode apart from the Arabs and the other Berbers, their cream and golden camels reined in silver and brass, the blue leather decorated with tassels of scarlet and white, the embroidered blankets carefully matching the rest of their costume in a display of magnificent challenge. The weapons, the vivid colour, the workmanship of their harness and clothing, were all a cautionary display of power. This display had its desired effect on their Semitic co-religionists whose chief prayer was that the veiled ones would not take against them or demand tribute for the privilege of their aristocratic company. I threw myself more enthusiastically into my rôle. Western newspapers had frequently reported cases of Europeans slaughtered by these unrulable desert warriors whose women, the Arabs said, went unveiled and worshipped equally with their men. Women even held power in the Tuareg councils and, in certain tribes, rode with their men to war.

But the blue warriors left the caravan as swiftly and as suddenly as they had joined it, disappearing back into the desert long before our camels began to sniff the water of al-Khufra. After they had gone, a prune-skinned handsome old man in a huge white turban considered old-fashioned even by his contemporaries, Achmet al-Imteyas, began to speak of a Tuareg, al-Khadbani, the raging one, who for years was the terror of the Sahara from Fezzan to Timbuktu and only in old age was revealed to be a woman, the mother, she boasted, of five sons, the ‘husband’ of a considerable number of wives and concubines. It was her sons who claimed the Sahara in her name and whose secret city lay somewhere within the Takalakouzet Massif in French West Africa. The Tuareg figured largely in al-Imteyas’s tales, usually in some fabulous way and frequently as the personification of supernatural evil, to be feared, avoided and, very occasionally, tricked into releasing some legendary wise-guy (the same Ali Baba who had for instance managed to get a rabbi in Benghazi to pay for a new mosque).

I was doubtless the only one to appreciate al-Imteyas’s sole critic, a pale Kurdish deserter from the Imperial Army in Astrakhan who, with a miscellaneous bunch of self-elected outriders, made himself useful to the caravan. Not one of them had a horse worthy of the name. The Kurd spoke mostly in Arabic. Sometimes, when moved to strong emotion and believing everyone but himself ignorant of the language, he would curse or disagree in Russian. ‘The Tuareg,’ he said in that language, ‘like the Turk, controls his empire thanks to the Arab’s own profound suspicion of change.’

I wish it had been safe to speak. I would have suggested his scepticism and resentment made him a suitable candidate for the Red Army. I would have suggested he return at once to his homeland, where his fellow-cynics would welcome him! Given his sympathies it was hard to understand why he had left his country to join the hundreds and thousands of Russian subjects scattered across Europe, Asia and America, even down into Africa, even to Australia, in a diaspora of previously unimagined scale. Kurds were always dissatisfied grumblers, like Armenians, but it was pleasant to listen to my native tongue, no matter how barbarously pronounced, and it helped me find further inner peace. Kolya, at this stage, insisted, in his role of Syrian renegade, on speaking only French and Arabic. It was important to convince, he said, the Italians.

The greatest comfort of my almost timeless existence was a developing appreciation of our camels, especially Kolya’s lovely pale gold doe. Sadly, my affection was never reciprocated. For some reason no camel in the world will ever do anything more than tolerate me. Most hate me on sight. Twice, when wandering in the vicinity of one of the herds, I would be warned by a shout from the drivers and turn to see a beast, its neck stretched out before it, its great yellow teeth bared, its nostrils flaring and eyes glaring, galloping down on me, enraged and infuriated by the very fact of my existence.

As I picked up my ragged gelabea and dashed over the rocky ground towards the main party I would see them whooping and ululating, some cheering for me, some for the camel, providing them with enough amusement to keep them in gales of laughter for days. To them my discomfort was almost as funny as the old woman, one of those miscellaneous creatures providing us all with general services, who caught fire and could not be doused. The inept antics of those like myself, who made some attempt to help her, were the chief source of their merriment. Yet they were good-hearted in their own way and one of the Russian deserter’s comrades was given a few coins to despatch the hag with a bullet from his Martini. They would have done the same for any creature without hope of survival in the desert. They valued life as readily as men of the civilised world, but the desert has no room for sentimentalists, nor for morbid introspection.

At length the wide shallow valley of Khufra came in sight, a sprawl of townships surrounding a marvellous stretch of blue water. The shuddering greens of the palms, the glittering whitewash of the mosques and houses, the shining oasis itself, were at first almost blinding. I was awed by it but Kolya said the oasis struck him as vulgar, though he admitted it was a scene which a few months earlier he would have gasped at. Even the fine palm-shaded houses and gardens of the wealthy failed to impress. He had cultivated those ascetic desert disciplines which produced the spare beauty of Al-Hambra; he had grown to prefer deeper colours, the textures of red stone and tawny sands, repeated in an infinity of subtle variation like some classical Egyptian melody. The settlements of Zurruk, Talalib and Toilet were spread out across the valley, their myriad shaded stalls selling the bounty of Africa and the Mediterranean, the detritus of Northern Europe and America. Above all this brooded the eroded Libyan mesas, while here and there the orange, white and green banners of Italy flew upon the few bastions of Western civilisation. From these our latter-day Romans, unsupported by the rest of Christendom, attempted to control the growing threat of Carthage which their ancestral blood recognised, respected and feared. Kolya and I avoided the whirling dust of the Italian half-tracks and lorries, their staff cars and their motorbikes. To Kolya their presence was an offence - as if a rowdy party were taking place in a sanctuary. Realising I was a little unnerved by the size of the garrison, Kolya became warily amused. ‘They presumably plan to claim the whole of Central Africa for their Empire. Will they raise the new Byzantium in the Congo, do you think, Dimka dear?’

Even then, still lacking most kinds of discrimination, I thought Kolya’s remarks in doubtful taste, but he was distracted. His friends had failed to meet him near the Toom road. Approaching the centre of Khufra across from the largest mosque and a comfortable distance from the nearest army post, an agitated Kolya left me in charge of the camels while he went about his business. He was clearly familiar with the town and its satellites. I sat down in the shade of a shrine and whenever anyone addressed me I simply grinned at them and screeched, flapping my arms, ‘al Sakhr! al Sakhr!’ while our camels, chiefly from habit, made desultory nips at my person. Kolya returned with a spring in his step, evidently much relieved. ‘Stavisky’s people went on. By now they’ve already crossed the Red Sea and are into the Hadjiz. They were carrying too much contraband to risk waiting for me. That’s excellent news, Dimka dear.’ His smile was wonderful. ‘They’ll hear rumours of my death. It won’t be in anyone’s interest to pursue me. Stavisky will write off his losses and forget all about me. Even if he finds out eventually that I’m alive, we’ll have disposed of any unwelcome evidence.’

I pointed out, sotto voce, to Kolya that we might well be overheard. He shrugged and said, in English, ‘We’ll ride with the caravan as far as al-Jawf, but we can’t risk being recognised by any more of Stavisky’s people coming up from Benghazi so we’ll have to head further over and get to Tunis, perhaps. I’m going to need a buyer. We’ll steer clear of Tripoli and Tangier because someone’s bound to spot one of us. That means selling to a local dealer up here, which means going to Zazara, I suppose. Another oasis the authorities deny exists!’ He was satisfied with his plan. ‘From there, if need be, we can make our way south, following the tropic of Capricorn all the way across the Sahra al-aksa!’ Even I had heard that such a route was a myth, frequently searched for and never found. Kolya shook his head at this, laughing. ‘Everyone knows Zazara and the Darb al-Haramiya here, though they wouldn’t admit it to the Rumi. The Darb al-Haramiya is the old Thieves’ Road. It’s the secret slavers’ route out of Chad and French West across the top of the world. The Arabs insist it is the most dangerous trail in the whole Sahara. The Berbers, who are its undisputed masters, call it the Road of Courage.’ His smile continued to broaden. ‘Isn’t it strange, Dimka! It has a thousand names yet appears on no map. That’s why it’s safe for us. The British and French, for instance, have officially declared its non-existence. The Italians claim to have destroyed it. Are these the responses of men who have failed to control something, I wonder? Sour grapes, as Achmet al-Imteyas might point out.’

I ventured that not one of those names made it sound in any way attractive. I had no further curiosity about any other aspects of the slave-trade. So far we had travelled in easy-going, amicable company. But I had seen the blue-veiled warriors. Such as these would doubtless be our company on the Thieves’ Road. How would they receive us?

‘They will recognise men of courage,’ Kolya informed me with cheerful insouciance. ‘After all, there is no route mapped to Zazara. Men must find it for themselves. With a map and a compass.’ He held up an old leather case attached to his belt. I admired my friend in so many ways but I must admit I had no great faith in his scout-craft. I believe now he was more desperate than he admitted. He was, I gathered, in the process of stealing a commodity of huge value. Stavisky had a hold over Kolya and had been blackmailing my friend in Paris, perhaps threatening to give him up to the Chekists, now about half the city’s émigré population. There had been some trouble, too, over an Apache girl. I did not judge. I, too, have had moments when I have been unable to act like an absolute saint. Il fallait être idiot ou hypnotisé pour périr dans ces fameux camps. Chacun a toujours être maître de son destin.

Our journey, which would end, we hoped, in Tangier, had hardly begun. All we knew was that it would not be the leisurely and predictable trek we had so far enjoyed. By now, however, I had learned to respect the desert and never to trust it - the only attitude permitting survival. As yet we had hardly experienced the ‘real’ desert, that ‘abomination of desolation’ as Leonard Woolworth had it, although he was referring, I think, to Ur.

Egypt conquered Phoenicia but made the mistake of letting her people settle in Canaan. They had a theory that the ‘Philistines’ would control the Jews. And of course reckoned without Samson.

Paradoxically relieved to leave the lonely citadel of Christendom behind us, we took up with a party of tall white-robed Sheul making a trading circuit which would bring them back to Chad as wealthy men. They spoke thickly-accented Arabic and bad French. But the blacks were cheerful company for the two weeks it took us to reach al-Jawf, a typical oasis with the usual assemblage of clay hovels, ramshackle places of worship, ragged awnings and rickety stalls, but boasting a collection of Jew merchants who, judging by their relatively rich clothing, possessed the only wealth in the place and with whom Kolya did some discreet business. He disposed of our oldest and weakest camel at a price which surprised and delighted him. When he showed me the purse of gold, my heart sank. Now the Tuareg were bound to attack us. I had been listening to some of the drivers and suggested we follow one of the other routes down as far as Djarba and from there make our way to Tunis, but he said it would be too dangerous. We must be sure never to live in fear once we returned to Europe. Also we could not risk the French and Italian patrols who nowadays habitually covered those roads. The only sensible route for us was the one he had chosen.

I asked him if he was absolutely certain the Darb al-Haramiya existed. He laughed loudly at my question but did not offer a direct reply. He said I should prepare myself. In less than a week we would be making our way into the Sand Sea, en route for ‘the Lost Oasis’. ‘We’ll be the first white men ever to see it!’

With good riding-camels and three of our pack animals exchanged for two fresh sturdy beasts we had traded with the Tebu who had brought them to al-Jawf to sell, we allowed the momentum of the next caravan to carry us from the oasis while our prayers were still echoing amongst the eroded hills. Kolya had insisted we needed cover so we were carrying fabrics and clothing, much of it in colours favoured by the Berbers. We now claimed to be Palestinian haberdashers from Haifa. As I had guessed, the Zazara Oasis was not marked on any map, and most believed it a myth, but Kolya’s information came, he said, from an Arab slaver in al-Jawf who travelled that way regularly. It lay far into the Sand Sea, a place of lush vegetation and sweet water, hidden by a great rocky overhang so that it could be seen neither from the air nor from the ground. ‘He swore it gives the purest water in the world.’

Everyone on the caravan guessed we were planning to go south-west to trade with the Tuareg and to a man declared us both mad. One Sudanese spice-merchant told Kolya he now realised he was ‘as foolish as your brother. You are clearly of one blood!’ He begged Kolya as a friend not to choose certain death. This caused me to sink into a peculiar, expectant calm from which it was almost impossible to arouse myself. Having failed to convince us to avoid the Thieves’ Road, he shrugged and left us to the Will of God, but continued to behave as if he had persuaded us to stay with them and give up all thoughts of the Darb al-Haramiya. This was a form their courtesy took.

Again, I found it remarkable how different were all these people, all of whom were conditioned and moulded by the desert. The Sahara is a pitiless wasteland of sand and rock relieved here and there by peaceful waters and waving fronds of blood-red flowers when the palms and cactus are in bloom, yet places of sanctuary are found even in the most run-down and overpopulated of the oasis townships. It is the basis of the desert nomad’s sense of order. Outside is threatening Chaos, uncertain Fate. Within the tribe, within the camp, within the family, within the tent, must be harmony. It is why the Moslem divides his world into Zones of War and Zones of Peace. Their architecture provides havens of tranquillity in the din of the city. They have developed a philosophy which seeks to accommodate the world’s realities, not abolish them. This is a fundamental difference between the Christian and the Moslem and especially between the Moslem and the Westernised Jew who has done so much to tinker with the great machinery of our existence. With his ‘social experiments’ and his theoretical physics, he has led us nowhere but to self-destruction. This the Arab understands; it is what informs his realistic assessment of his old friend, the Jew. Otherwise he has more in common with his Semitic cousin than he has differences. This is the only ironic amusement one can gain from the Arab’s superstitious notions of race. Those superstitions, to which he clings with proud insanity, are the rocks against which he dashes even his finest brains, all his ambitions, his yearning desires. Like the natives of New Guinea, he has developed a religion of self-destruction, of perpetual defeat. Sometimes, to me, this Arab seems noble in his quixotic combination of hard common sense and crazed hallucinatory vision. Perhaps Don Quixote has his most profound psychic origins in some Moorish desert where to survive you must also go mad.

These people are tender and kind-hearted. They care for one another. Finally, however, the desert allows room for too much abstract thought, especially when it concerns the outside world. Inevitably the desert gives you the mentality of a hermit, a great tendency to think in terms of broad and simple issues. The hermit comes in from the desert after ten years and he goes to the city’s central square. ‘I have,’ he says, ‘a message.’ The people gather around him. They send their friends to fetch other friends. They wait, patiently, but with mounting eagerness. And when they are all congregated there, in silent respect, he looks upon them and smiles. ‘Love one another,’ he says.

It could be that the city complicates issues. The city is a complicated organism after all, the finest creation of mankind. What human mathematics can describe a city? The city’s complexities mirror the complexities of God’s universe. Yet the nomad has a clarity of vision the city-dweller will never know. That is why our cities must fly; the best of both worlds.

‘It makes yer git everyfink art o’ proportion, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Like orl big spaces. It wos ther same when we went ter Dartmoor. Or up in Yorkshire. Ya git a littel bit o’ news an’ yer blow it up too much.’ It made me think again of the attitude towards Christians which, say, the Wahabi Arabs have, or indeed, how the Cossack perceives the Jew. Perhaps that was why I sensed such a feeling of belonging in the desert. Stippi or baria’d, the invariable view has much the same effect on the mind. As I discovered from the Bedouin, the less one sees of a supposed enemy, the more sinister he becomes. Then, of course, one’s imagination has done its work. You do not recognise your enemy when you see him. Not all Jews, for instance, are Communist Fifth-Columnists; not all Christians are hypocrites.

I told Kolya I thought the Sudanese had made sense. We should employ a guide. If not a Bisharin some kinsman of the Tuareg, perhaps? But he was adamant. ‘The trail is not known. The trail that leads to the trail has been lost. That is why Europeans have failed to locate it. When we find it we shall be establishing our own route. A secret which will give us a permanent advantage if we wish to do further business in this area.’ Then he showed me the map the Senussi had helped him draw. It could have been of anything. But he had longitudes and latitudes. ‘Once we reach Zazara, there is a well-defined trail again. More than one. Most of the rest, of course, lead to the interior. The slave roads come out of Africa, here and there, out of French West and Rio d’Oro, out of Abyssinia. Almost all black slaves go through Zazara now. From there they can go east to Cairo and the Hadjiz, to Iraq or Syria; west to Tripoli, Algeria and Morocco. The Romans no more invented the road network than they gave us mathematics. We owe both to the Arabs.’

It is true that the Arabs invented algebra. It is also true that Einstein used algebra to invent the nuclear bomb. A fine example of Arab and Jew working together. Nicht wahr?

And who was responsible for the triumph of the primitive decimal system over the subtle duodecimal? The Sumerians, first to celebrate the discovery of their own mental treasure-trove, gave us the flexible mathematics of the dozen, infinitely more manipulable and therefore infinitely better able to represent and examine the world. But it was the rationalising Jews with their tens of this and their tens of that, the Arab’s undivided finger, who found a way of narrowing and simplifying our achievements. This numerological imperialism earned its final great victory when Britain fell to that mathematical dullard, Monsieur Dix. Twelve groats to the penny, twelve pennies to the shilling and twelve shillings to the pound would have been ‘rationalisation’ enough! Without her ‘illogical’ currency, England was nothing. Use of such currency cultivates a subtlety of mind. The history of this century will record with cruel irony that our worship of Lord Rationality was our most ludicrous folly.

One must, I suppose, blame the French for this. In the hospital it was the same. That psychiatrist told me he was experimenting with cats. The human brain, he said, is like a computer. Oh, certainly! What he meant was he had found a model he could understand. So he promptly called the model Reality. I pointed out to him a simple truth, that the computer is the invention of Man. Man’s mind, however, is the invention of God; the former comfortably finite, the latter unfathomable in its infinite variety. And for that the double-six is a better representative than the half-score. We are spurning the heritage of our first great city-builders. God gave them twelve. We have since converted His gift to ten. With our present education standards we shall soon be asking for ‘one and one and one’ because we no longer know how to count to three. By means of these economies do we slip steadily away from Eden. Shall we ever begin the journey home?

We left our caravan at night, before the morning call to prayer. We were out of sight beyond the rocks as the dawn rose to reveal the flat daffa. This waterless and barren plain of unbroken brown monotony eventually gave way to dunes which stood like rollers frozen in time, a memory of when huge rivers had boiled down the shallow dales and everywhere had been green and rich and in these lush lands rose the cities of the people who came before Atlantis, who made laws and developed great arts and sciences and knew peace. Now, with all this unearned wealth, the Arab could easily make his homeland blossom again, see it grow rich with trees and grass, but of course he has made a virtue of his desert necessities. Now his ambition is to create further wastelands wherever he has the opportunity. I do not blame this on the Moslem religion. Persia does not waste her wealth on weapons. ‘But an Arab,’ as Captain Quelch would say, ‘genuinely loves a gun.’

That was why, I think, Kolya had hidden our Lee-Enfields within heavy bales of cloth. Under our robes and general Bedouin impedimenta we carried Webley’s revolvers with a dagger or two for outer decoration to show, as the Mozabites say, we had not taken the Woman’s Way. A man without weapons was looked upon with considerable suspicion by the Bedouin who, like the American cowboy, tends to wear a gun as a form of sexual identification. Some of the cowboy guns were so old, and in such bad condition, that they lived in terror of ever having to fire one. This was also true, I was told by Buffalo Bill’s nephew, himself a famous Circus Master, of the Old Frontier, where a knife, an axe and a bow remained, for many years, the only reliable weapons. Only the rarest of buckaroos sported a good Colts’ or a Henry’s and was usually loth to employ it in any action which might mark it. Young Cody asked me to imagine how difficult it was for the Chief of Scouts to keep his buckskins, especially the white ones, so clean and bright on the buffalo trail. Constant changes were needed to ensure that the Dandy of the Plains was never dusty. And Custer took a valet with him, said Cody, to the Little Big Horn. Indeed, one legend spoke of the same valet surviving the massacre and attending his new master, Sitting Bull, on his famous Grand Tour of Europe. Wherever he went Texas Jack, for instance, would always take three wagonloads of outfits and a fourth wagon full of weaponry. Kit Carson, called Pe-he-haska (Golden Curls) by the Sioux, was known to have escaped at least twice from certain death with the aid of nothing but his manicure set. And, Cody had added, Jim Bridger’s Palomino was the best-groomed and sweetest-smelling pony in the whole Arizona territory. He had showed me pictures of all these people. It was true. I had never realised before what emphasis America’s great frontiersmen placed upon personal hygiene and smart appearance. Their spacemen are the natural successors to the plainsmen of yore. There is a lesson in this for those boys of today who come into my shop and complain because I have had an overcoat cleaned before I feel I can offer it for sale!

I had taken to Cody when I was still in Hollywood and he had promised, when we next got together, to introduce me to Pecos Bill’s hairdresser. Sadly, Fate intervened. I was driven, willy-nilly, into Egypt. The hairdresser, I discovered when Cody and I met again years later, had shortly afterwards been killed by a disappointed customer up in the Texas Panhandle.

One has only to see Mr Dirty Spaghetti Eastwood to see where standards are today! I think it was one of the ways we maintained self-respect in the desert. No matter how gruelling the day’s journey and how little sleep we had had during the night, we always maintained a smart appearance.

Neither plain nor dunes revealing the slightest sign of a trail, we proceeded only with the aid of Kolya’s inexpert compass while he forever bemoaned his inattention during his army orienteering instruction as a cadet and cursed the British for having no talent for map-making. We were now heading more or less due south, towards the Tropic line. By this means, Kolya believed, we were certain to find Zazara or, if not, one of the slave roads which would lead us to the oasis. Under my friend’s baffled guidance I had rarely felt as exposed and vulnerable. With new fatalism, however, I sat comfortably on my camel as she followed Kolya’s up and down the great frozen wastes of the red Sand Sea. For some reason my female had been christened ‘Uncle Tom’ - actually Um-k’l-Thoum by Arabs, who cannot pronounce the letter ‘T’ any better than we can make that discreet throat-clearing sound they use in preference to the ‘k’ (and not so alien to a Russian as it is to a Briton). Still psychologically escaped into the Land of the Dead, I saw no sign of potential enemies in all the vast world around me. I had the tranquil satisfaction of my own company. I no longer had to caper and squawk to ensure my life. At first I was also glad to lose the burden of the five daily prayers; yet, paradoxically, after we had been moving across the dunes for a while and our pace had become steady, I began to miss the routine and discipline of the call to prayer and would gladly have resumed it. I now realised I had found a peculiar happiness and security with the caravans and felt homesick for them. I prayed our journey through the trackless Sahara would not be long, that we should soon meet another great caravan and travel with that all the way into the Maghrib. I asked Kolya if the Zazara were used only by slavers. ‘And drug-smugglers and gun-runners,’ he reassured me. ‘It will be good to give up a few of our prejudices for a while, eh?’

I protested I had not yet come to think of the people he described as my natural comrades. He grinned at this, remarking on the wonderful sense of piety in the ‘convent’ of Bi’r Tefawi. I knew instinctively that his sharp tongue betrayed, as they say, a soft conscience. I did not torment him further. My friend was of the Romanoff blood. It pleased him no better than I to consort with the riff-raff. We already had sufficient money, I said, to get a passage back to Genoa or Le Havre. From there we could return to America where I had a small fortune awaiting me. All Kolya could do was remind me that I was now a Spanish citizen, Miguel Juan Gallibasta, resident of Casablanca, born in Pamplona, and a Catholic. He pointed to the passport I had picked. I told him that I had preferred my American passport and would have been willing to take my chances. Free at last of the caravan’s security, we came close at that point to bitter quarrelling. Perhaps we allowed ourselves this release of tension knowing that to part now would increase considerably our chances of perishing. Frequently travellers died within a mile or less of the water whose location they had lost. I must admit, it did not seem to me to be an advantage to go from American to Spanish citizenship, especially since I had never set foot in my ‘home’ country.

How, I asked, would ‘Gallibasta’ prove himself ‘Peters’ back in Hollywood? Matters of identity were growing at once more complicated and less secure. The world looked up to an American film star. How could it make a myth of a Moroccan café proprietor? Kolya said that I was worrying over trifles. As soon as I presented myself back in the USA, with a tale of my capture, torture and escape, I would be a bigger hero than ever. My career was assured. I would be able to tour the country on the strength of my adventures. I said that I hoped my adventures would not be illustrated with film.

We were veiled, now, against a fine dust borne on an uncomfortably steady breeze. As yet we had to experience a full-fledged sandstorm. The Sudanese had warned that it was nearing the season of storms. Another reason, I suggested, for picking a different time to find the Lost Oasis. The Arabs adored such tales. Frequently books circulated among them -Where to find the Buried Gold of Egypt, The Sweet Wells of Nubia, and so on. They believed these much as Americans believed their National Enquirer or Australians their Sun. They told stories of men who had foolishly set off to look for these places. Even the Nazrini, the Sudanese had said, with their noisy machines, had failed many times to reach Zazara. I was conscious of the ghosts that must flock all around us, wondering how much the sand buried. How many souls had been driven like dew from the sun-withered corpses of men who had risked everything merely to prove the truth of a legend? I remembered the melting snows of Ukraine during the Civil War, that white purity hiding the evidence of a million tragedies, a million violent crimes. Perhaps now we rode over the final remains of all the travellers who had perished here in Africa, from the time of Atlantis to the present?

The ash of those dead Japanese drifts through Annaheim and settles on Pluto’s gigantic ears; the ash of Greeks and Egyptians and Arabs and Jews blows back and forth on Mediterranean winds; ash from the Congo and from India and China sweeps across the surface of oceans and continents. There is so much death, so many dead. Every breath we take carries human cells to our lungs, to our blood, to our brains. We can never be free of our ancestors. Perhaps the desert contains nothing else. I fell into the peculiar trance, that state between the sleep of ages and the alertness of the instant, when we come to contemplate the nature of existence and our fulfilment of God’s intentions. I blew the sand from my nostrils and spat, occasionally, on the ground. I hated to spit. I hated to lose even my urine or my sweat. I had an instinct to preserve any liquid, no matter how noxious, in the knowledge that it surely had good use in a waterless world. The dunes - great russet drifts in this part of the Sahara - glared in the heat of the day and little rivers of silver ran through them, always the mirage of water, to a point where by the time you actually saw water you had learned to ignore it. This, too, was how desert venturers met their end within very sight of the oasis. Once we passed a litter of camel and other bones, marks of a camp still in the sand, undisturbed for a century, perhaps, and a presentiment of our own slow death. Again I thought of the mummified corpses, the thoroughly preserved bodies of all those others who had sought Zazara and never found it. Why should we be favoured, when God had determined that the Zwaya’im and the Tebu’um, who were native to this region, had perished in the same quest?

My other fear, perhaps a more practical one, considering Kolya’s orienteering abilities, was not that we should become irretrievably lost in the desert but that we might turn in a curve and encounter to our embarrassment just the caravan we had quit with such discreet grace. Our discretion, accepting full responsibility for our decision, would have been admired by our companions. They would be suspicious, however, if we returned for no clear reason. I had begun to concoct a suitable tale involving overwhelming Tuareg attack when Kolya interrupted my train of thought with the somewhat unoriginal observation that we might, for all intents and purposes, be traversing the sands of Mars. From my reading of Mr Wells, I said, even the Martians had no great desire to live on their home planet! Why had we to remain any longer than necessary in an environment in which no sane man - or monster - would choose to spend more than a day of his life?

Everything I said amused my friend. Eventually his laughter became so frequent and so loud I suspected he had been too long exposed to the sun and the monotony. Soon I realised that my poor friend had lost his grasp on his reason, that he had probably been insane for some while. Ironically I had linked my fate with that of an obsessed lunatic!

By the fifth day even the few distant bluffs had either disappeared or proved themselves far from unique. We roamed a trackless wilderness and all we knew for certain was the position of the sun and our relation to it. With Kolya cackling and roaring from his uneasy seat on his camel, breaking off occasionally to whistle a few bars from Lohengrin or Tannhäuser while my own sweet Uncle Tom growled and snapped with re-invigorated foul temper, as if she sensed we should never see water again, I once more reconciled myself to death.

The dust became grit, blowing steadily onto our lacerated faces. Every time I ventured to voice some trepidation Kolya would bark with laughter, informing me we were still in Senussi territory; the Tuareg would not dare attack us here. I would have welcomed a Tuareg, or anyone able to lead us back to a familiar track. Kolya said we were Bedouin now and must think like Bedouin, putting our souls into the hands of Allah. He reminded me that this was what Wagner had done and roared out some chorus from The Ring. Allah, I declared under my breath, I would trust rather more readily than my poor, singing fool. I should have stayed in Khufra and waited until I found a caravan heading towards Ghat, I thought, but I knew in my bones the best I could hope for without Kolya’s protection would be to become a Senussi slave. (The Senussi were known to be fair, though strict, and tended to adhere to the Koranic system of punishments. Their slaves were known, therefore, for their honesty as well as their plumpness.) I remained grateful to Kolya for his rescue of me from Bi’r Tefawi, but his characteristic over-confidence, a result no doubt of his aristocratic upbringing, was an increasing source of dismay. I gave up attempting to debate these matters with him. He bellowed some phrase from The Flying Dutchman. Since he automatically kept goading his mount forward, I let my camel follow him, though I began to regret this when he later took to composing long alliterative verses in Old Slavonic and sang snatches of folksong, or Greek liturgy, availing himself freely of a sudden supply of drugs which he had not previously revealed to me. No doubt he planned to sell these at Zazara or some other mythical oasis. On the first night we lost a sheepskin of water as two of our pack camels crushed against one another. We still had several more skins and a couple of tin fantasses slung over our camels’ humps, hidden under our equipment and trading goods. We could survive for at least a week. But the event depressed me. No man on earth can go without water for more than four days whereas a camel, far from plodding into infinity, can never be trusted to survive! Some will trudge for weeks, even years, seemingly the sickliest of animals, giving no hint of weariness; others, young, healthy and pretty, might decide to fall down and die for no apparent reason, their hearts suddenly stopped. My own belief is that the camel, a noble and independent beast by nature, has always been resentful of his role as carrier of Man and his goods. One of the few important choices he can still make for himself is his time of death.

Through days of relentless blue, under a sun which increasingly demanded obeisance, under a night of extraordinary, comforting darkness, in which the stars became identified, each an individual, whose intensity changed with the hours, over dune upon dune and rocky pavement or parched wadi, we trudged due west into the widest and least-travelled stretches of the Sahara, moving steadily away from any charted or inhabited region, so that we might indeed have accidentally crossed to some incompatible planet!

Ironically, I had ceased at last to be afraid. The desert, our animals, the sky, all had become marvellous and beautiful to my eyes, for I had discovered that composure of spirit which is the mark of every desert gentleman. Karl May described it. I was at one with Death and with God. My fate was already written by Allah. I trusted to the moment. I relished the moment. I was free to wander in the Land of Shades. I was reconciled to my destiny. I had won a kind of immortality. And Anubis was my friend.