West with the Night (30 page)

It brought Blix to more than that. It exposed him to an incident that might have shattered the nerves of a less steady man.

Blix left Shepheard’s Hotel each night well after dinner and disappeared into the honeycombs of Cairo. He is a gregarious individual who loves his fellows and hates to be alone. It is one of the minor tragedies of his life that, no matter in what gay companionship the night begins, not many hours pass before he is alone again — at least in spirit. His friends may still be at his side around a table still graced by an open bottle — but they are mute and recumbent; they no longer finger their glasses, they no longer mutter about the vicissitudes of life, nor sing the joys of living it. They are silent, limp, or lachrymose, and in their midst sits Blix the Unsinkable — a monument of miserable sobriety, bleak as a lonely rock jutting from a lonely sea. Blix leaves them at last (after paying the bill) and seeks comfort in the noises of the night.

One night in Cairo Blix came across an old friend and a gentleman of doughty stock. He was the younger brother of Captain John Alcock (who, with Lieutenant Arthur Brown, made the first successful Atlantic flight), and moreover he was a crack pilot for Imperial Airways. Alcock the younger, who has rarely if ever been put hors de combat by anything that can be poured from a decanter, was the realization of one of Blix’s most fervent hopes — a man to whom the undermost side of a table was an unexplored region.

At some bar — I cannot remember which, any more than Blix or Alcock could if they were asked — there began an historic session of comradely tippling and verbose good-fellowship which dissolved Time and reduced Space to an anteroom. On the table between those good companions the whole of history was dissected and its mouldy carcass borne away in an empty ice bucket. International problems were solved in a word, and the direction of Fate foreseen through the crystal windows of two upturned goblets. It was a glorious adventure, but the only part I had in it came close on the dawn.

I was asleep in my room at Shepheard’s when a fist hammered at my door. Ordinarily I should have climbed out of bed and groped for my flying clothes. Ordinarily that knock would have meant that somebody had forced-landed in a cotton field, probably in the middle of Uganda, and that they had communicated with Nairobi asking for a spare part. But this was Cairo, and that insistent fist must be the fist of Blix.

I groped for lights, got into a dressing-gown, and let fly a few whispered maledictions aimed at the head of Bacchus But what I saw before me, when I opened the door, was no reeling Blix, nor even a swaying one. I have seldom seen a man so sober. He was grim, he was pale, he was Death warmed over. He shook like a harpstring.

He said: ‘Beryl, I hated to do it, but I had to wake you. The head rolled eight feet from the body.’

There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’) and then scream — remembering always that the scream is of secondary importance to the book-end.

Shepheard’s in Cairo is one of the most civilized hotels in the world. It has everything — lifts, restaurants, an enormous foyer, cocktail rooms, a famous bar and ballroom. But it has no book-ends. At least my room had no book-end. It had a green vase with an Egyptian motif, but I couldn’t reach it.

‘The damned fools just stood there,’ said Blix, ‘and stared at the blood.’

I went back to my bed and sat on it. This was our sixth day in Cairo. Almost hourly either Blix or I had telephoned to see if our papers had been stamped for passage into Libya and each time we had got ‘no’ for an answer. It was wearing us down, both in cash and nerves, but I had thought that the most redoubtable White Hunter in Africa would have survived it a little longer. And yet, as I sat on the edge of the bed, there was Blix leaning against the wall of my room with the vitality of a bundle of wrinkled clothes awaiting the pleasure of the hotel valet. I sighed with the sorrow of it all.

‘Sit down, Blix. You’re a sick man.’

He didn’t sit. He ran a hand over his face and stared at the floor. ‘So I took the head,’ he muttered, in a low voice, ‘and brought it back to the body.’

And so he had, poor man. He found a chair at last, and, as the daylight grew stronger, he grew stronger too, until finally I got the whole of what was in fact a tragic happening, but whose coincidence with Blix’s homeward journey from his rendezvous with Alcock gave it, nonetheless, a comic touch.

Blix had not been left alone that night. Drink for drink and word for word, he had been met and matched according to the rules of his own making. At about four o’clock in the morning, hands were clasped and two suspiciously vertical gentlemen took leave of each other. I have Blix’s word for it that he walked toward Shepheard’s in a geometrically straight line — an undertaking that no completely sober man would even attempt. Blix said that his head was clear, but that his thoughts were complicated. He said that he was not given to visions, but that two or three times he had humanely stepped over small, nondescript animals in his path, only to realize, on looking back, how deceptive shadows can be in a dimly lighted city street.

It was not until he was within two blocks of Shepheard’s, and doing nicely, that he saw at his feet a human head completely detached from its body.

Blix’s presence of mind never left him on safari, nor did it here. He merely assumed that, being a little older than he had been, all-night revelry left him more shaky than it used to do. He squared his shoulders and was about to carry on when he saw that other people stood in a circle on the concrete walk — all of them staring at the severed head and babbling so idiotically that it came to Blix with violent suddenness that neither the people nor the head was an hallucination; a man had fallen across the tramlines in the path of an onrushing car and had been decapitated.

There were no police, there was no ambulance, there was no effort on anybody’s part to do anything but gape. Blix, used to violence, was not used to indifference in the face of tragedy. He kneeled on the walk, took the head in his arms, and returned it to its body. It was the body of an Egyptian labourer, and Blix stood over it pouring Swedish imprecations on the gathered onlookers, like an outraged prophet reviling his flock. And when the authorities did arrive, he left his gruesome post, stole through the crowd, with his lips clamped tightly together, and came to Shepheard’s.

All this he told me while he slumped in a chair and the morning traffic of Cairo began to hum beneath my windows.

After a while I ordered some coffee and, while we drank it, I thought that anyway there was hope for the world so long as the fundamental decency of a man was strong enough to triumph over all that the demon rum could do with six hours’ start — and more cooperation than any demon has a right to expect.

‘Are you giving up all-night parties, Blix?’

He shook his head. ‘Oh, but I think that would be so very rash and so very unsociable. Walking home from them is the thing to avoid — I promise you!’

About noon on the sixth day of our stay in Cairo, the Italian authorities, having convinced themselves that our entrance into Libya would not result in a general uprising, returned our passports, and on the following morning we left, flying north to Alexandria, then west to Mersa Matruh, and on to Sollum.

From Sollum to Amseat is ten minutes by plane. Amseat is a post on the Italian Egyptian border; it consisted then of wind, desert, and Italians, and I understand the wind and desert still remain. You had to land there before proceeding to the interior. The post is on a plateau and the landing field is merely a piece of Libya bounded by imaginary lines.

We landed and were at once brought to bay by six armed motorcyclists who plunged toward the plane as if they had lain in wait behind the dunes for many anxious days before springing their trap. This advance guard had barely dismounted before about thirty other cyclists roared smartly across the sand, surrounded the Leopard, and thus completed what, for them, was apparently a military manoeuvre of singular brilliance. Only one detail of organization seemed to have been ignored: they lacked a leader. They all spoke, argued, and waved their arms at once with great energy, displaying a tendency toward republican methods that would have been highly significant to a keen political observer. It looked for a moment as if the first rift in Il Duce’s tight-seamed order was taking place right in front of our eyes. But not at all. Eventually a swart soldier announced in a firm tenor voice that he spoke English, which was an exaggeration, but which served to quell the ripples of hysteria instantly.

‘I will have this papers,’ said the swart soldier. He extended his hand and collected our passports, special permits, and medical certificates.

The sun was hot and, after Cairo, we were impatient, but the inquisitor with the tenor voice was unhurried. With most of the Amseat garrison peeking over his shoulder, he stared at our papers while Blix swore first in Swedish, then in Swahili, and finally in English. This is not an inconsiderable ability, but it passed unnoticed. After half an hour or so, a man leapt to the saddle of his motorcycle and spluttered away across the desert. He was back in five minutes with a portable canvas chair which was unfolded and set up in the sand. Everybody waited in solemn silence. Blix and I had got out of the plane and we stood leaning against it, under the savage sun, thinking harsh thoughts. Minutes had begun to accumulate into an hour before still another machine arrived, complete with side-car, and out of which popped an officer draped in a long blue cloak that bore enough medals to afford about the same protection, during the heat of battle, as a bullet-proof vest. The man who supported all this glory also supported, we observed, the official posterior for which the canvas chair had been spread. He sat down and began to study our papers.

‘I should have brought my rifle,’ said Blix. ‘I will bet you a gin and tonic I could hit the sixth medal on the left-hand side right there where the enamel is peeling.’

‘You’re casting ridicule on a Captain of Caesar’s Legions. Do you know the penalty for that?’

‘No. I think they condemn you to read a Gayda editorial daily, for life. But it would be almost worth it.’

‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘Silence!’ This was uttered in punctilious English by the Captain himself, who followed it with some crisp orders in Italian, and the effect was magical. Four soldiers dived into the Leopard, dragged out everything movable and spread it on the sand — and once more our papers vanished across the desert in the keeping of a dispatch rider who handled his machine with impressive skill.

Three and a half hours after our landing at Amseat, word came (I suspected directly from Rome) that we might proceed to Benghazi.

‘
But’
said the Captain, ‘you do not follow the coast. It is required that you take the desert route and circle the forts — three times for each.’

‘There is no desert route.’

‘You will circle these forts,’ said the Captain, ‘or be arrested at Benghazi.’ He clicked his heels, gave the Fascist salute, as did the entire garrison, and we took off.

Our map had been marked with three X’s — each indicating a fort. The X’s were at intervals across the Libyan Desert on a zigzag course. It was the first time I had been prevented from landing at Tobruk, and there could be no doubt that the Italians were making elaborate preparations, even then, for something more grandiose than just the defence of Libya. Their forts and their chests extended outward far beyond their usual confines.

From the air, the first fort looked like a child’s conception of a fort, executed in sand with a toy shovel. But that was only because of the vast and empty stretches that surrounded it; any desert fort, regardless of the flag that flew over it, would look like that. But we had spent a lot of precious time searching for this one and done a lot of grumbling about it too. Having achieved the goal, we found it disappointing.

The barracks were set around a huge square which appeared to be quite empty, and there were turrets like those of a penitentiary. If there were guns, they were well hidden. Either by design or necessity, the material from which the fort was built was the exact colour of the desert itself. As we circled, men came out of the buildings, and some of them waved their arms. A few waved violently — half in anger, I thought, because of the tantalizing liberty of our plane as against their dry drudgery, and half in welcome of a sign that the world was still a reasonable world that left men free to fly — or some men, anyway.

No spirit of gallant adventure emanated from that dreary fort. It was peopled by men whose roots had been pulled up and planted again in the sand, and whose cheerless houses, too, rested precariously on the same uncertain stuff. The simulated belligerence of a passive people was symbolized there. Like the pompous medals on the Captain’s chest, this fort was one of several medals pinned vaingloriously, if with doubtful permanence, on the great grey torso of the desert.

We circled again and levelled off and continued our search.

‘One bomb,’ said Blix, ‘would wipe it out.’

We found the next fort, by the grace of God, but not the last. The word ‘fort’ presents a massive picture to the mind, but to the Libyan Desert a fort is hardly more than just another hump of sand. A fort is nothing. We had no course to follow — only a pencil mark to find; and the size of a thing is great or small in relation to its background. The sky has stars — the desert only distance. The sea has islands — the desert only more desert; build a fort or a house upon it and you have achieved nothing. You can’t build anything big enough to make any difference.

Night falls like a dropped shutter in Libya in March. A plane without petrol falls too, or anyway spirals down into near oblivion.

‘We won’t bother about the last fort,’ I said to Blix. ‘I’d rather be jailed in Benghazi than stranded down there.’

‘You’re the pilot,’ said Blix. ‘Doctor Turvy and I are only passengers.’