She drags on her cigarette again, then, puffing the smoke out in a rush, continues:
“We got all the guidebooks before we set out. The Cook’s one told us we should read Herodotus, so as to come here not as tourists but as ‘travellers,’ ‘individual explorers.’ So we got that too. But now it turns out everybody else on our tour is carting round a copy of Herodotus—which they got told to buy by Cook. What’s individual about that?”
“Maybe—” Serge ventures; but she’s on a roll:
“And we got another book as well, that tells us how to do ‘research’: we’ve bought a sextant and chronometer, a siphon and barometer and measuring tape—oh yes: and paper to do pressings of inscriptions on these temples, like they haven’t been transcribed a hundred million zillion times before. And then, because it’s the latest edition that we’ve got—of the book, I mean—there’s a note telling us it’s now acceptable to photograph inscriptions rather than pressing them. Acceptable to whom? Who are we photographing
for?”
Her voice has gone squeaky and breathless again; Serge, looking at her neck, sees that it’s flushed. She pauses for a while and sips her drink. Serge, following the red flush from her neck down to her blouse, recalls his nights spent DX-fishing in Versoie: the sense that, in transcribing all the clicks, notating all the messages, logging the stations and their outputs, he was performing a task so vital that a single wrong entry would have disastrous consequences for whole hierarchies of—of what? Committees, subcommittees? Of
important bodies
who relied on him, who’d process and act on his dispatches, who
needed
them. Beyond that: that the stations at the far end of the dial, the signals on the edge of audibility—from ships, or desert outposts, or more distant ships and outposts ever further still being picked up and forwarded through vast, static reaches—were coming from a place so remote and enchanted as to belong to another dimension entirely, a “there” as far divorced from “here” as angels from the mortals before whom they might briefly appear in flickering electric visions. Now, though, there’s no “there”: he’s here where “there” was and it’s not “there” anymore, just “here.”
“Do you know,” Abigail’s asking him, “what happened when we went past Gizah on the steamer? Well, I’ll tell you: at exactly half past four the dragoman came below deck and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ ” She slips into a mock-Egyptian accent and repeats: “ ‘La-dies and gentle-men. If you care to as-cent un-to the main deck now, the mar-vel of the Pyra-mids will be re-vealed to you.’ So we as-cented, and the Pyramids were there, just like in the photographs that I’d already seen in all those bloody books but not looking so nice and aesthetic; and people got their cameras out and started photographing them, although I don’t know why, because their photos won’t turn out as nice as the ones in the books and brochures either. And they didn’t even photograph the things for very long, because there was a buffet laid out on the deck, and they all wanted to get at it before the sandwiches and lemonade ran out; but then of course they realised that they had to show a certain reverence towards the Pyramids, while still not missing out on lunch, so they revered and ate and photographed and drank all at once. And our dragoman said: ‘Please don’t for-get your tem-ple tick-et, as it’s valid for the Sphinx tour too.’ ”
“And what did you do?” Serge asks.
“What
could
I do?” her voice goes high and squeaky and her neck flushes again. “I looked at the Pyramids, and tried to revere them, and photographed a little. Then I looked at the others looking at the Pyramids, and photographed these people too. I tried to eat a little, but I felt sick. It was obscene—like a pornographic film: this dirty entertainment laid on for us all to gape at.”
“I had that impression in the war,” Serge says.
“You were in the war?” she asks, looking straight at him for the first time. “Doing what?”
“Observing,” he says. “Gaping from a plane.”
“That sounds quite exciting,” she says. “Tell me more.”
He takes her back to his place. During sex, her gasps have the same high and squeaky pitch as her voice during conversation, as though arousal, for her, were a heightened form of indignation. Kneeling behind her, he watches the flushes move from her neck down her spine and out along her rib-lines. Afterwards, they lie in silence for a while; then she asks him:
“So, did you kill anyone?”
She leaves the next day—on another steamer, heading down to Luxor and Assuan. He thinks of her two days later, though, when, leaving his flat by foot and turning the corner into Rue de Paris, he hears two gunshots and, looking down the street to where they came from, sees two black figures running from a growing patch of white that’s spreading across the pavement. It’s milk: their victim, an English professor at the Law School, had stepped outside his front door to collect it when they shot him—they were lying in wait. The man’s already dead by the time Serge reaches him. His blood, trickling from his head and abdomen, is running into the milk, marbling its pool with deltaed strands, like natron on a lake of soda.
iii
The Central Station has its own building, a much more modern one than that housing the other ministries. Antennae sprout from its roof; soldiers guard the compound that surrounds it: Imperial Communications are indeed, as Ferguson intimated, “protected.” Its rooms are full of people and equipment, its corridors of well-directed bustle. Macauley leads Serge past rows of desks at which men sit with headphones on, transcribing letter sequences while other men move up and down the rows gathering the transcriptions and depositing them in front of yet more men who mark them up on blackboards. In a corner two more men are working their way through a pile of newspapers—
Gazette, Wady et Nil, al-Ahram, al-Balagh, al-Jumhur, al-Akbar
—underscoring certain words, then tearing out the pages on which these have been highlighted and passing them to the gatherers, who convey them to the marker-uppers, who, in turn, copy them out to mingle with the letters on the boards.
“They use all kinds of channels,” Macauley says to Serge, obscurely.
“Who do?” Serge asks.
“Everyone!” Macauley answers. “We’re at the crossroads here, the confluence of all the region’s interest groups’ transmissions. We’re listening to the Wafdists and the Turks; they’re listening to Ulamáists and Zionists; the French are listening to us, and we to them—but we share info on the Russians, who we both hate, although not as much as we all hate the Germans, who we listen to as well. Or is it the Spartacans? In any case, we listen to them all. Telegrams, radio messages, acrostics and keywords lurking within print: we try to pick as much of it up as we can. A thankless task, of course; who knows what tiny fraction of it all we actually get?”
“And that’s what all these men are doing?” Serge asks.
“All these men and more: my
décryptage
department. Headed up by Egyptologists. Got the right minds: used to cracking New Kingdom texts or something. Rebus logic. It all goes above my head, to tell you the truth. This stuff,” he continues, leading Serge through a door into the next room, “I can understand a little better: at least it looks like something vaguely recognisable.”
He’s pointing to a wall on which a huge map, as big as eight or so of the other room’s blackboards, is painted: a map extending from Izmir down to Khartoum and from Tunis to Baghdad. Pins of various colours have been jabbed into this—some small and some with heads as large as ping-pong balls, some all alone and some in clusters. More pins are being added all the time, by men consulting photographs, hand-written notes and smaller maps.
“ImagInt,” Macauley says. “Aerial, terrestrial, snapped, painted, scribbled on some scrap of fabric: it’s all there. Even livestock movements, locust swarms, what have you. All adds up—or at least, it’s supposed to. HumInt too, of course.”
“What’s humming?” Serge asks.
“HumInt: Human Intelligence. Got agents everywhere: here; Suq Al-Shuyukh, where the sheiks all meet; Nasiriyah, from whence sedition seems to spread down the Euphrates to the Arab tribes; the Shia holy cities, hotbeds of intrigue and points, if memory serves me rightly, of contact with Damascus, which, via them, can exercise remote control of Persia … or is it the other way round? Either way, we’ve got to keep an eye and ear out for what’s brewing. We have men doing the Hajj, or wandering around with herdsmen, or hanging out in mosques, bazaars, communal washhouses, village meetings …”
“Folklore?”
Serge asks, pointing to a table labelled with this word, across whose surface lies a mish-mash of handwritten pages crudely illustrated with pictures of lions and eagles.
“Supposed to contain useful information,” Macauley responds. “Stories of curses going round, or afrits haunting districts, may be telling us something … or not …” He sighs. “It’s all pretty intangible: whispers and rumours drifting like some kind of vapour across swathes of desert …”
“Back in London,” Serge says, “I was reading about some chap named Laurice, Lorents, Laudence …”
“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense … ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad … Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home … Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”
“How?” Serge asks.
“With the other parties all spying on us, if we appear to take something seriously, well, they take it seriously too. We call it ‘feedback’—no, hang on a second … ‘bleedback’: that’s it. Lots of those sequences you saw being written out across the blackboards in the other room get bled back too, mutated but still recognisable, in telegrams, transmissions, new acrostics … Make sure they’re confused as we are, eh? Plus, who knows? We might actually hit some nerve, activate something … maybe … Oops! Don’t let us get in your way: carry on!”
This last phrase is directed at a man who’s arrived bearing more photographs, maps, foolscap pages. As Serge and Macauley move aside, he sets them down on the table next to the folklore one and starts sorting them, stamping each with a different scarab-sized seal as he does so.
“Half the people in the region are spies,” Macauley says as they move on. “Engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists: you name it. If they’re not spies, they’re suspected of being spies, which makes them just as much a part of the whole maddening caboodle as if they had been. To give you an example: we’ve been keeping a close eye on a consignment of butterflies that’s at quay here on its way from Baghdad to the Tiergarten in Berlin. Butterfly eggs, to be precise: they’ll hatch when they arrive. The French have been showing a keen interest in the consignment. The Italians too. The Wafdists not—which might be because they already know something we don’t. The eggs are being escorted by some acclaimed naturalist, Professor Himmel-This-or-That von Something-Else. Papers in order: all legitimate, perhaps; or perhaps not. We’ve picked up intimations that the whole operation forms part of a larger German rearmament plan, although how it does this isn’t clear; also, that Prof Von’s in cahoots with the Bolsheviks; or, in fact, the Turkish CUP. And it has been decided, at some juncture, that, for our part, we should act as though each of these theories held water.”
“But what’s the truth?” Serge asks.
“The truth?” Macauley repeats. “Who’s to say? Scientists—physicists—are telling us that two things can be true at once nowadays. The point is, if we think the butterflies are something other than what they are, or that they serve some purpose other than that which they serve, or if we act as though we think this, then the French will also think they are—do, I mean—or think that they’ve tricked us into thinking this, and the Italians will follow suit, which means the Germans will … I lose track beyond that point … It’s quite frustrating …”
He sighs again, and leads Serge from the room. As they move down a corridor, Macauley continues, wistfully:
“One of my men’s working on mirages: trying to prove they’re real …”
They’re in his office now. The box files have been rehoused on new shelves; the desk has one large folder on it, labelled “EmpWirCh.” Macauley holds his thumb and finger to his scrunched-up eyes for a few seconds after he sits down, then opens them again and says to Serge:
“So, finally: the pylon at Abu Zabal is to be completed. It’ll be switched on in May, they say. About eight years too late—eight years in which the nation that had radio before all others has slipped hopelessly behind. The French alone have high-powered transmitters in Beirut, Bamako and Tananarive; America has five times more foreign stations than we have; even the Germans match us kilowatt for kilowatt worldwide. It’s an embarrassment. And all because the Post Office Department and the Committee of Imperial Defence couldn’t agree; or if they did they couldn’t get the Admiralty on board, or the Treasury, the Board of Trade, the India Office, the Air Ministry or whatever other gaggles of failed politicians had to be in accord in order for the whole thing to progress. Do you know,” he asks Serge, “how many committees have been set up to address the Imperial Wireless question in the last eight years?”
Serge shrugs his shoulders.
“Six! The technology’s not even the same now as when Marconi first proposed the whole chain idea: arc-transmission’s giving over to the valve method; there’s talk of a new beam-system that’ll enable long-distance communication without intermediary stations; who knows what else? The man himself, meanwhile, seems to have lost his marbles. Last I heard he was heading to Bermuda, to find out if Mars is sending wireless messages to us.”
“Marconi?” Serge asks.
Macauley nods.
“But I thought,” Serge says, “that he wasn’t involved in the whole chain thing anymore.”
“Oh, he’s not,” Macauley reassures him. “The Cabinet felt he’d have a monopoly, which is precisely what they wanted for the Post Office. They forgot, though, to consult with their Australian and South African counterparts, who’ve thumbed their nose at Whitehall by developing their own high-powered transmitters with him—Marconi, that is. Now Whitehall’s worried the Dominions will start distributing counterproductive content through the airwaves—which is why they’re setting up, back home, a national Broadcasting Corporation, to pump a mix of propaganda, music and weather reports all around Britain and, eventually, to every corner of the Empire. Which, in turn, is why they’ve realised that they’d better get the Abu Zabal pylon up and running, and start working on the next one, and the next …”
“Strange timing,” Serge says.
“What’s that?”
“That we start broadcasting central content Empire-wide just as we lose our empire …”
“The irony is, as they say, striking,” Macauley concurs.
“They should play dirges,” Serge suggests.
Macauley breathes out heavily, then tells him, in a voice that’s laced with fondness: “I can see your father in you.”
“You know my father too?” Serge asks.
Macauley looks back at him bewilderedly. “Well, yes, of course,” he says. “After all, he’s the one who sent—” He stops, as though catching himself, and looks away, then, shifting in his seat, continues: “The new chain will run in parallel—through Egypt at least.”
“Oh yes, you mentioned that,” says Serge. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Macauley tells him, “that beside the Abu Zabal pylon, which we’ll visit after lunch, Egypt will host another mast. The chains will split beyond here: one running through Nairobi down to Windhoek and the other on to India and Singapore.”
“And where will the second Egyptian mast be?”
“Where indeed? That’s where you come in. I’m sending you upriver to scout out a possible location.”
“When?” Serge asks.
“Few days from now,” Macauley tells him. “There’s a large party heading up to Sedment. We’ve been helping them with the Antiquities Service: concessions and the like. French interests prevail there, I’m afraid.”
“We’re going to a place called Sediment?”
“No: Sedment. Falkiner’s the archaeologist: a good man, friend of the Ministry. He’s been digging there a while; returning there this week with some equipment too large to transport by train. The Inspector of Monuments is sending a man too. Then there’s some Frenchie—chemist, I think. Keep an eye on him.”
“And you want me to decide whether the second transmitter should go there?”
“ ‘Decide’ might be too strong a word. ‘Advise.’ Assess the spot’s particulars: whether it’s got easy landing, flat ground, raised rather than sunken—that kind of thing …”
A bell sounds somewhere down the corridor. Macauley rises from his chair and beams:
“Ah: lunch!”
Their table seems to be the refectory’s senior one: its occupants are older, all Macauley’s age, and ooze the same air of confused frustration.
“Falkiner got his concession at last, did he?” a moustachioed colonel asks. “Thought the whole thing had passed right out of our hands.”
“We had to let Lacau send one of his men along,” Macauley explains, buttering his bread.
“Is that the chemist?” Serge asks.
“No: that’s Pacorie,” Macauley answers.
“That cad?” the colonel snorts, spraying his soup.
“Méfie-toi!”
“French are being sneaky as hell of late,” a red-faced HumInt officer adds, pouring wine for himself and the others. “They’re setting up semiautonomous local states within Syria.”
“Why?” asks Serge.
“They’re tied in with Amir al-Husayn,” the HumInt officer says.
“You think so?” asks Macauley.
“Without doubt,” the other answers. “They’ve been undermining us right from the off by siding with the Arabs.”
“We’ve sided with the Arabs too at times,” Macauley reminds him. “Fomenting unrest and all that.”
“Yes, but for other reasons than the French,” HumInt responds.
“Half the Wafd have spent a good long stretch in Paris,” says the colonel, whether by way of agreeing or disagreeing with his colleague Serge can’t quite work out. “They were liaising there with Comintern envoys. Bolsheviks are the real villains of this piece.”
“Oh, let’s not forget Constantinople,” cautions HumInt. “They’ve got their finger on the button as far as Mecca’s concerned. They could summon up an armed conspiracy at any moment—one that would spread like wildfire through the entire Muslim world.”
“So in stirring up the Arabs, we’ve been doing the Turk’s work for him?” Macauley asks.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On the role of the Muslim Soviets in Jeddah.”
“Exactly!” the colonel sputters excitedly, pushing his bowl away. “It always comes back to the Soviets. Arabia’s becoming Bolshevised: the Zionist immigration to Palestine is seeing to that.”
“But I thought,” Serge chips in meekly, “that the Jews and the Arabs hated one another.”
“Maybe they do,” says the colonel. “But Moscow’s perfectly capable of playing them both.”
The main course comes. More wine is poured.