From the Elephant's Back (39 page)

The first, the capital, change became immediately and delightfully plain: the uncovered faces of the Egyptian women. The veil had been set aside. And this was a change to be acclaimed, whatever the conservative elements of the country might say. But then, as if in revenge, they had pronounced against the bare breasts of the famous Egyptian belly-dancer, and forced her to wear an ignoble muslin shift. But this we were to encounter later in the journey. We had decided to motor by night to Alexandria, and once our film gear was loaded we nosed across the dusty rumbling metropolis with here and there a gleam of polished Nile water flowing, it seemed, out of the sky into the earth, and set off down the long road towards the famous old seaport.

One was immediately reminded of the war period because of the long stream of lorries heading the same way, mostly without tail-lights—an endless crocodile bearing bales of dusty cotton towards the ships which would take them across the world. How often I took this night journey during the war; but the convoys then, rustling along in the darkness, bore our tanks and carriers and ammunition and every kind of weapon towards the Eighth Army front.

A very tired file crew arrived in Alexandria in the middle of the night and piled up at the old Cecil Hotel, with its echoes of
Justine
.
[2]
Here we found that our rooms had been given away because of our lateness. However, after long argument, we recovered them and went piously to bed to awake next day to brilliant sunlight and a fine race of blue sea dashing the spray over the seafront with its aged palm trees clicking in the damp sea wind. Alexandria! Yes, it is shabbier, more unkempt, and it has lost its superficial cosmopolitan society, but some of the old magnetism is still there. The newcomer might just manage to feel some of its ancient charm, some of the attraction which excited the minds of Cavafy, E.M. Forster, and Seferis. And there are still small corners which have not budged—like the quarter where Scobie
[3]
lived, or the mosque where he worshipped. The markets still pulse and vibrate with their exotic wares, and the fortune-tellers are still in business, as are the tattooers. There are still Greek taverns, like Diamandakis, in full swing, and several new Egyptian ones where one can eat well. But a great deal of the old leisure has gone, indeed there is little feeling of opulence to the place—Nasser
[4]
discouraged that, as his little blue-trousered university girls will explain to you seriously. Perhaps it is for the better. At any rate, in their blue trousers and unveiled now, one can see Egyptian girls are the most beautiful in the world.

We were sorry to leave them, and they pretended they were sorry to see us go up-river—back across the desert this time, stopping for a brief brush with the Coptic monks of St. Bishoy,
[5]
whose philosophy and life offered a marvellous austere commentary to the noisy, discordant, and tragic tempo of the towns. The air was like breathing ancient parchment. One was appalled by the harshness of their lives but one wanted to stay forever.

The next stop was Cairo, with its famous pyramids and the whole extraordinary placid life unrolling around them. They form the Hyde Park Corner of the Middle East. Now they crawl with tourists, but during the war we had them to ourselves—like the hotels, which had been taken over and turned into HQS. You were likely to get caught in the revolving doors of Shepheard's Hotel, because General de Gaulle
[6]
used to enter at such a rate that if you were light you would get swept round and round. At that time Egypt was neutral, Cairo an open city, and the blackout was something mysterious that had happened over there in Europe. Here we lived in a blaze of light. It was all the more extraordinary because people managed to get back from the line quite often for the weekend, for a drink and a dance, for a cinema or an art show. Fifty miles away the armies gnashed and gnawed at each other. I remember attending a party on a Nile barge which included a belly dancer. The host had invited far too many people, and this boat was badly anchored. The belly dancer rotated like an enormous top—she was one of the big ones—and every time she approached one side the whole boat listed. So we had to try to persuade her to stay in the middle of the floor. Finally she went too near the rails, the entire barge turned over and we all found ourselves in the Nile!

Cairo, of course, is vastly changed. Now five times as many people live in the city as did when I was there. Most of the old places are gone. So we lost little time there and travelled south to Upper Egypt. You feel the river wind at once, and the long muscle of the Nile as you go winding up to Luxor and Aswan. Aswan is a kind of paradise, out of time. You put your feet up, mentally, physically and spiritually. The massive battered remnants of the ancient civilisation which surround you are so different from anything you could imagine down in Cairo: the temples of Abu Simbel and Karnak, the Valley of the Kings. The desert is ever present here, the burning glass of Egypt. Where the water is flowing through your fingers, the desert is flowing through your mind. These barren dunes are the last museum—nothing ever rots; the wind may blow tomorrow and uncover a whole civilisation.
[7]

What struck me during the filming (which took us all over Egypt) was that previously I had never seen the country at all. All I had seen then was, literally, Alexandria and Cairo. Working as a press officer at the British embassy, I had no time to register impressions. The war was the most exhausting period, I was really too numb to make a sort of paper model of Egypt. Now, having come back, I can construct it much more happily. I realise now that I must keep a leg in Egypt, because the new novels
[8]
I am writing span the war period. The war tore a hole in the beginning of my creative life and tore a hole in the lives of my characters at precisely the same point. You can't send people away and have them come back six years later without explaining how or why. Wars are so terribly boring to describe. So Egypt is the answer.

I was relieved to have my feelings reassured by this visit. The terrifying thing about film-making is that one has to work against Egypt, because it is so damned beautiful, so extravagant, that everywhere one puts up a camera one is in danger of the picture postcard. But a film can catch that wonderful feeling of stillness that Egypt always conveys: the slow, green blood-time of the Nile. We have such an album of pictures, and I realise that the still image is not comparable with the moving one, because the camera is actually photographing time passing. All this, of course, constitutes distress which directors must feel, as opposed to what writers feel.

It is very strange to come back to Egypt now, after such a lapse of time, and find it relatively unchanged—because of the emanations of the ground. One verifies them by going from one sacred site to another, in the course of making this film, and they seem to me on the same frequency, with the same vibrations. The landscape is scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. The changes are simply superficial.

With Durrell in Egypt

1978

WE WERE STILL HIGH IN THE AIR
, enjoying a brilliant sunlight. The sun had not yet disappeared behind the horizon but was climbing steadily down through the golden bars of cloud. I did not need to be reminded that the two royal colours of Egypt, gold and green, were a kind of symbol of her sunsets, which are almost always the same, hardly ever differing in their primary colours. But below us the world had turned on its side and Cairo had foundered into near darkness—a provisional darkness, because the dust of the desert obscures outlines—and we were sinking down toward it into a pool of night punctuated by drifts of stars and the lights of the city just coming on. We could glimpse the sinuous backbone of the old serpent, the Nile, polished and gleaming and, strangely enough, giving off steam like a hot flatiron. Then darkness closed in abruptly, our own lights came on, and the capital swam up to meet us.

I was not reassured by Cairo's aerodrome, simply because I am always thrown into a panic by a great deal of noise and screaming, and Cairo rather specializes in a state of total pandemonium. This comes about, I have discovered after long analysis, because the bureaucracy, which is saddled with rather arduous and meticulous work, is not 100 percent literate, so that most orders are given verbally and there is no record of their having been carried out or not. As everyone is both officious and zealous, the resulting pandemonium—there is no other word except a Greek one, though there must have been a hieroglyphic for it in ancient times—has to be seen to be believed.

This creates a terrible state of distress. You find yourself so helpless when someone takes your passport, throws it on a desk in an empty booth and then walks away and is lost in the crowd. Somebody else, meanwhile, is forcibly trying to clean your shoes, holding the ends of your trousers so that you can't move, and screaming at you. Somebody else has stepped forward and is charmingly offering you a rusty syringe, in fact, a free injection of something which you do not need, having been injected with the necessaries before leaving.

It was with great relief that our team—a BBC crew come to make a film about Egypt and about myself—recognized the editor of
Le Progès Égyptien
,
[1]
who had so kindly come to meet us. He was waiting at the barrier and he did a great deal to smooth down the overzealous ministrations. I must add, too, that we received very special treatment partly because Dr. Mursi Saad el-Din
[2]
happened to be an old, old colleague, in the realm of poetry. He had published his first poems in
Personal Landscape
in 1940 when he was an obscure official. Now he is the important chairman of the State Information Service and he, too, had actually come down himself to meet us, but we were so woefully late that he finally got hungry and went home to dinner, leaving an invitation for us all to come round and share it. But we were in a quandary because we had planned to pick up our little bus as soon as we arrived and drive it straight up to Alexandria that same night. Moreover, the bus was there already, in perfect trim, with all our equipment. What to do? After a moment of scattered debate, Peter Adam, the director of the film, decided that we would go up to Alex by night so that we could start work there the next day.

It was a good decision. In fact, it was a comfort to get into the little van that was to be our transport for some time to come. We did not take the lonely desert road for fear of getting stranded, but decided on the inner one that leads through a straggle of ill-lit villages. This is the road that had been kept open while we supplied the Eighth Army during World War II. It was always a mystery to me how it was never hit, or sabotaged, or damaged. I was excited, and delighted in the darkness as we started to take our place in a long, long convey loaded down with bales of cotton. Cotton, indeed, was drifting everywhere. The whole night was filled with shreds of cotton, instead, of course, of tanks, because every night, all night, during the period when I did this little jaunt during the war, the Eighth Army was being supplied (largely by the Americans at that time) in semisecret with the Shermans and other elaborate tinware that enabled Montgomery to bring off the Alamein victory.
[3]
But now we were only carrying cotton, yet it was much the same procedure atmospherically, and we went through the various villages. They had not changed at all. The petrol pump is still broken at Damanhur and the man still winds it up by hand and unleashes steams of petrol all over the place. And the desert is always there at your elbow, the dust blows in; it is very, very deserted, the desert. The flesh is sorely tired in Egypt, it becomes desiccated, and the eyes are tired by the dust, and it's such a relief when you clear the last headland and suddenly feel trees and the cool they bring and then, abruptly, sand dunes and the seafront.

We didn't get to the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria until after midnight. The lift didn't work terribly well. It was largely a handheld lift, so to speak, and I could foresee that the man who operated it, who was called Ibrahim, would very shortly be left without a limb because, like a gorilla,
[4]
he kept putting his hand through the bars to excite knobs and pull switches so that the tenuous electric current would push it. However, in Egypt you learn to cover your ears, mouth and eyes, like those three monkeys in the Indian frescoes, and trust in fate. It hadn't changed all that much after all; not fate, Alexandria.

Lying awake that night in my high-ceilinged room, I tried to recapture old impressions and to square the feeling of this dark Alexandria around me with the old half-forgotten Alexandria that I had once known, and I found that the one constant was the wind. The wind that comes straight out of the Greek Cyclades and invests the entire town. It's a nimble-fingered wind. It strays everywhere. All the flags rattle, the palm leaves rattle. Every time it lets up you feel as though you had suddenly gone deaf, but most of the time it's fingering you all over, even in this huge blank old hotel room. It must, I suppose, have been once a rather opulent Edwardian-type room with large Voltaire chairs and scrolls on the ceiling and white plaster moldings, and now it was simply a shell of its former self, with the wind coming in under those clumsy great doors and shutters and through the bathroom window. There was this constant pressure of wind, and feeling it I was reassured and back in…well, in a Greek island, and I dropped into sleep like a lamb.

On the morrow there was a brilliant ripe sunlight and the whole of the city to explore again. The centre is so small that one can traverse the length and breadth of it during a comfortable morning's shopping. But all the smart shops seemed to have folded up and all the old businesses—the French, the Italian, the Jewish, the Armenian—had vanished. The Arabic language had replaced all the other languages on the medicine bottles, on boardings, on posters, which gives the whole city a feeling of having been plunged into Arabdom. In the old days, a restaurant invited you to six different types of menu, and the whole thing had gaiety and charm. In fact, it's not possible to see the little watercolours of Raoul Dufy of the Cannes waterfront about forty years ago without realizing that that was how Alex used to look. It was a thoroughly cosmopolitan Mediterranean town.