The Levant Trilogy (40 page)

Harriet had never heard of poliomyelitis. Angela
said, 'If you get it here, it hits you hard. You're gone in no time.' Though
she essayed this information herself, it had a dire effect upon her. She sat
silent, staring out at the graves and the palm fronds that were drying and
turning yellow. Soon they would be blown away and the graves with them. They
would be sifted by the wind, one into the other, until the ground was flat
again and the dead forgotten. She whispered, 'People can die so suddenly,' and
she was distraught by her own fancies.

They drew into Luxor. Outside the station, a
funeral was passing: a flimsy, open coffin, held aloft by four men, was
followed by the family and professional mourners who enacted grief by howling
and throwing dust over their heads.

Angela, about to call a gharry, stopped and
said, 'Harriet, I can't stay. I must go back.'

'Oh, Angela, surely you're not afraid?'

'Not for myself - of course not. I just can't
bear being so far from Bill. Anything might happen to him. Suppose he died in
the night as Beamish did?'

'It's not very likely. And even if you went
back: what could you do? What difference would it make?'

'Only that I was there. I would be near him, not
four hundred miles away.'

Harriet tried to reason with her: 'Be sensible,
Angela. Beamish was only one person. Think of all the English people who
haven't died here, So why should Bill be in peculiar danger?'

'In this place, we're all in peculiar danger.
Any one of us might die any minute.' Angela's face, with its delicate, dry
skin, was taut with fear, and Harriet saw that reasoning was useless. Even if
she could be persuaded to stay, she would be miserable. Persuading her against
her will would be a cruelty.

Harriet, reconciling herself to their return,
said, 'Very well. If we must go back, we must. Let's find when the train goes.'

'No, not you. You must stay. I'll go alone. It
doesn't matter about me, I've seen all the sights, I know the place inside and
out. But it's all new to you. You must stay and enjoy it.'

Harriet, who had no wish to enjoy it alone,
tried to argue but Angela insisted that Harriet remain in Luxor while she went
back to Cairo. Finding that the train would not return until late in the
evening, she decided to go to the hotel with Harriet. She must wait for time to
pass.

Angela had booked them into the old Winter
Palace, a pleasant building beside the Nile, its portico heavily embowered with
verdure, its terrace overhung by palms.

The day was still early, the light pale and the
soft, cool air scented by some flowering tree. Harriet said, 'What a delightful
place,' and driving in the gharry, silent on the sandy roads, she longed for
Angela to remain with her. But the funerals, passing one after the other,
aggravated Angela's nervous condition. She explained to Harriet that only the
bodies were buried, the coffins were kept to be used again. Some of them,
padded, draped and fringed, denoted victims from affluent families but others
had been too poor even to hire a coffin. The bodies, closely wrapped in cloth,
were carried on a board with a symbol to denote the sex: a fez for the male and
a flow of hair for the female. But each, whether rich or poor, male or female,
had its dusty crew of women mourners, the wails of one procession scarcely
fading before those of another could be heard.

The piercing ululations followed Harriet and
Angela even into the haven of the hotel. As they sat under the palms, watching
the traffic on the narrow waterway between the quay and the island opposite,
Angela was too distracted even to order a drink. Seeing her with her face set
in a mask of suffering, Harriet knew she was thinking of her son, a beautiful
boy for whose death she had, in a way, been responsible. In those days she had
painted pictures and while she was too intent on her work to notice, he had
picked up a live grenade which had exploded in his hand.

As she remembered this, Harriet could understand
Angela's state of mind. After such a tragedy, how could she trust anyone to
remain alive? - least of all Castlebar whom she loved and longed for.

They went in to luncheon where, for a while, she
discussed the question of what they should or should not eat, but this did not
last long. Throwing the menu aside, she said, 'What does it matter? If I could
die, it would be the easiest way out.'

Somehow they got through the day. After supper,
the gharry called as arranged and Harriet, glad of something to do, went with Angela
to the station. At the station, she made a last appeal: 'Don't you think you
could stay for a couple of days?'

'No. I'm sorry, Harriet. I know it's mean to
leave you alone here. But I must go back.'

There was no one else in the first-class
compartment. Angela was given a berth in a long row of empty berths and,
standing in the doorway, she said, 'Don't wait, Harriet. Goodbye,' then shut
herself in to suffer through the night.

As she returned in the gharry to the hotel, an
intense loneliness came down on Harriet. At that time of night, the streets
were empty, the river empty of shipping. The gharry driver, and the horse
plodding silently through silence, seemed to be the only other creatures in a
deserted world.

Above the low houses the sky appeared vast and
its great staring but indifferent expanse enhanced the solitude. Her bedroom,
when she reached it, looked as void as the town. It was very large and her bed,
shrouded in a sand-fly net, was islanded in the middle of the floor. Getting
into it and covering herself with a sheet and a single blanket, she closed the
net against the dangers of the night. Angela's flight had reduced her to a
sense of friendlessness but as she lay down to sleep, she, too, said, 'What
does it matter?' though she did not intend to die. Instead, she said, 'I've
survived other things. I'll survive this,' and so went to sleep.

The desk clerk offered her a number of
sight-seeing trips and she accepted them all. The first started immediately
after breakfast. The tourists gathered beneath the riverside palms in air so
cool, it seemed to blow off the sea. Harriet thought, 'Paradise must be like
this,' then the funerals started again. Those who had died during the night
must be buried before the heat of mid-day.

A string of gharries stood outside the hotel.
Harriet, seated alone in the first of them, found funerals passing beside her.
She could look into the open coffins and see the dark, peaked faces of people
who appeared to have died of starvation. This went on until the dragoman, appearing
to take charge of the tourists, ordered the mourners to the other side of the
road. They shifted ground without protest and without a pause in their
lamentations.

The dragoman, complacent in his authority, was a
large Nubian, his size enhanced by a full, dark blue kaftan, lavishly trimmed
with gold. His stick was taller and heavier than those usually carried and it
was topped by an ivory head as big as a skull. He chose to ride in Harriet's
gharry and though he sat beside the driver, it was evident he saw himself as
superior to the members of the party.

The gharries went from hotel to hotel, picking
up nurses and army officers. At the last hotel there was only one person
waiting, an officer, and as he, too, was alone, he was directed by the dragoman
to the leading gharry. He paused, his foot on the step, and staring at Harriet,
asked, 'Are you real? - or have I conjured you out of a dream?'

It was a rhetorical question, expressively
spoken, and Harriet laughed at it: 'Get in, Aidan. If I'd never seen you
before, I would have known you were an actor.'

'
Was
an actor,' the officer corrected her
as he sat down beside her. On the London stage he had taken the name of Aidan
Sheridan but in the army had reverted to his real name which was Pratt. He was
a captain in the Pay Corps, based in Syria but as often as he could, came to
Egypt on duty or pleasure. In the past, Harriet had heard him speak bitterly of
his broken career but that morning his tone was one of humorous resignation to
his present position.

As soon as he could without appearing
precipitant, he asked, 'I suppose Guy isn't with you?'

It was the question Harriet expected. When he
came to Cairo, it was in hope of seeing Guy, and though she pitied him, she
could only say,'I'm afraid not.'

'So you're here alone?'

'I didn't come alone, but I'm alone now. I was
abandoned.'

He gave her a startled glance, suspecting some
interrupted liaison, and she laughed again: 'A woman friend came with me, but
at the sight of the funerals, she went straight back to Cairo.'

'I can't say I blame her. I, too, felt scared
when I realized what was going on here.'

'Oh, Angela wasn't scared, at least not for
herself. She began thinking of death - someone else's death - and she couldn't
bear to stay.'

Aidan, aware that the only death he had thought
of was his own, grew red and, taking her words for a reprimand, turned away.
She had forgotten how easy it was to upset him and regretted what she had said.
He was morbidly sensitive but, more than that, he had been marked by some experience
that he promised one day to reveal to her. He was a young man, still in his
mid-twenties, but his large, dark eyes were set in hollows of dark skin and
their expression suggested a rooted unhappiness. They had seldom met yet they
had become friends. She had taken him to the Muski where he had bought a small
votive cat made of iron and mounted on a block of cornelian. It was a gift for
his mother but he had asked Harriet to keep it for him, saying he lost things
because he no longer had the sense that anything was worth keeping. Speaking of
the experience that had so terribly impaired him, he had said, 'There are some
memories that are beyond bearing, except that we have to bear them.'

Now, meeting him again in this delectable place,
she saw he was still burdened by a memory beyond bearing.

A long, riverside road was leading them to the
site of Karnac.

The gharries stopped outside the walls and the
dragoman, walking impressively, led his party into a compound and, making a circular
movement with his stick, required its members to stand about him at a
respectful distance. He pointed to the temple of Ammon.

'This am very great place. Biggest building in
the world. This avenue is sphinxes, only not sphinxes. They is sheep.'

'Rams, surely?' Aidan murmured.

Ignoring him, the dragoman swept round like a
whirling dervish and strode towards the main complex of buildings: 'You alls
follow me.'

In the Hypostyle Hall, while the others were
held by a rigmarole about Ramses XII, Harriet slid behind the group and made
her way among the crowded pillars that stood, calm but watchful, like trees in
a forest. She felt that their number and closeness were designed to puzzle, for
apart from puzzlement she could see little point in congestion simply for
congestion's sake. As for the puzzle: she had the curious illusion that she
had, at one time, solved it but had forgotten the solution. Gazing up at the
capitals, she saw that only some of them were bud capitals, the others were
decorated with the papyrus calyx, and she imagined that in the irregular
placing of these two designs there was a clue to the mystery. But the heat was
growing and as she wandered about, all she could feel was wonderment without
hope of understanding.

Aidan, coming to look for her, said, 'Our
dragoman's a mine of misinformation. I'm not surprised you made off. Come with
me. The sun's almost overhead - there's something I want to show you.'

She followed him out to the courtyard and across
to a small building that was lit by a hagioscope in the front wall. Putting his
eye to the hole, Aidan smiled his satisfaction then gestured to her to come and
look for herself. She, too, put her eye to the hole and saw inside, lit by a
shaft of sunlight from the roof, the head of a cat. It was the same cat whose
image Aidan had bought in the Muski but this was more than life-size, a black
basalt head on top of a column, gazing with remote, mild gaze into its own
eternal seclusion.

'The god in the sanctuary.'

'Yes,' Aidan looked pleased: 'I thought you
would recognize it.'

The afternoon excursion was to the tombs on the
other side of the river. Crossing in a boat, Harriet felt on her bare head a
pressure that was almost painful, and she realized how soon the respite of
winter would be over and this paradisal little town would become an inferno for
those not born to it.

On the opposite bank, in a field that had once
been inundated by the Nile, two ruined figures sat enthroned among the sugar
beet. Their dark colour, their immense height, their worn and featureless faces
looking towards Karnac, imparted such an impression of regal dignity, Harriet
would have chosen to contemplate them in silence. The dragoman was not
permitting that.

'Them, all two, is Memnon, not singing any more.
Memnon very brave Greek man killed in battle. Him buried here.'

Aidan said, 'Nonsense.'

A nurse with a guide book, agreed. 'It says here
they're statues of Amenophis III.'

The dragoman stood in front of nurse and book as
though to obliterate them and pushed his face towards Aidan. His eyes, brown,
in balls of glossy white, started in anger from their sockets. He shouted, 'You
is guide, then, Mister Officer? OK. You go guide your own self. I finish. I
go.'