I would, I said to her, very much like to journey some day to that new Renaissance court. She said she was sure I would be more than welcome. Only the best were attracted to Mussolini, recognising in him the same self-confidence, talents and audacity which had made them great in their chosen work. I imagined this marvellous court on a larger scale than Imperial Rome, with tall, airy white marble columns and gleaming floors, like pools, stretching into shadow. There we should all meet, intellectuals, artists, scientists and adventurers from every corner of the world, representing the nations and religions of the Earth, to exchange knowledge and ideas, to discuss in fluent discourse the means by which we should truly civilise the world.
That the experiment came to nothing, I said to the older Cornelius boy, was not the fault of the visionaries who began it. It was the fault of the blind reactionaries who conspired to stop it. There are few people in modern Italy who would not rather go back to the days of Il Duce, when they could be proud of their heritage, certain of their cause. The same could be said for Hitler, but the stories are not completely parallel. I am the first to agree: in some respects the Fuhrer went too far. But were the French completely free from blame? What does ‘fascist’ mean, anyway? It means nothing but ‘law’ and ‘discipline’. Are chaos and licence, such as we have today, to be preferred? A Rolling Stone gathers no responsibility, I told him. It would be wonderful if we could all caper about in Hyde Park and howl like some Sudanese zealot and be given a million pounds for it! He could not reply.
Not merely stupefied by a spoon-feeding State, I said, but inarticulate as well. Rhetoric, I discovered, is no longer on the Holland Park syllabus. There is scarcely a school in London that retains it! We are losing the realities and the meaning of the past. Without them we shall never create the future we desire. Why must they always simplify? I told them - I embrace complexity. It is my meat and drink. But they had nothing for me. Shortly afterwards I opened my shop.
‘The desert,’ I told her, ‘teaches us the arts of compromise. Without them, we could not survive.’
‘But you would not compromise on principle, al Sakhr?’
‘The desert makes a principle of compromise.’ I smiled. ‘What can you control there, in the end? The rainfall? The wind?’
She was silent for a few moments after that, standing against the wickerwork, one hand on a rope, the other on the basket’s rail, wearing only her shoes to give her enough height to peer down over the flatness of what looked, from there, like a vast slab of concrete scattered with rubble. I saw it suddenly as the foundation of a gigantic temple and in that vision the scale of Atlantis was revealed to me! Only when I looked upon the monumental buildings of the new dictators would this vision be recreated! They knew the spiritual value of such architecture. This is what they shared with the cathedral-builders. What is wrong with offering hard-working people a little glimpse of perfection?
My aviatrix had lost her calendar and had only her maps and compasses. She knew that it was probably still July and it was certainly 1927. As to our distance travelled, we should soon come upon some good-sized settlement where we would, with proper caution, regain our bearings.
Some evenings, in the twilight, we would dance the Argentinian tango to the tune from the portable gramophone.
We had both grown a little weary and complained of a certain clamminess, doubtless caused by the steam. We longed for cool water, to bathe in and to drink. The heat was into the 120s. I spoke of the hamman and its luxuries; the baths the Moor gave to the Turk. There were certain establishments in Oman, I said, where men and women were encouraged to bathe together. This excited her and it seemed churlish to disappoint her imagination. I described the sensual delights of the steam baths, the nature of their attendants and their pleasures. It gave me a uniquely delicious frisson which had nothing in it of lust. The sensation grew stronger in me as she discovered fresh levels of sexual ecstasy and experiment. Only when we had begun to suffer the effects of the heat and of remaining aloft for so long did I think to ask her if they had put a time-limit on her expedition. I still barely understood the scientific purpose of her flight.
‘My dear sheikh, it becomes whatever I wish it to be. The balloon is a relatively small expense. All I have to do to justify the voyage to the Italian government is make a few notes, a few marks on the map and take a reel or two of film until I have enough for a lecture tour! Another first for Italy! A jolly cheap one, too.’ She had already had some success, she said, with a one-woman dhow voyage from Aden to Bombay. She had signed a contract with a Milan publisher who wanted her book about it. ‘It’s a peculiar way of making a living, but it enables me to travel with some security and to be almost guaranteed an adventure! The publicity I receive ensures my safety. It’s only bad luck that brought me down at Zazara. Anywhere else would have had a newspaper and a wire.’
Thought of that near-disaster brought a frown to her wonderful eyes which deepened as she cocked her head to listen. She sucked her index finger and raised it into the air. She rose suddenly, plucking her compass from its box and checking our position. I grew a little concerned. ‘What’s wrong, Miss von Bek?’ I wrapped my jerd about me and got to my feet. The basket shuddered. There was something unfamiliar about our movement.
‘The wind’s changing,’ she said. ‘We’re beginning to turn south.’ Hurriedly she got out her maps and spread them on the carpet. ‘This could be awkward.’
I saw immediately what she meant. If we were flying between Ghat (which lay some 600 miles inland from Tripoli) and Touat (some 600 miles from Casablanca) and the wind had indeed shifted south then Kolya’s bitter prediction might be about to come true. In fact we would be fortunate to land in Timbuktu, the forbidden city on the far side of the Sahara.
I had grown used to seeing the sun always setting directly ahead of us, of sailing always into the last of the day’s light, but now I saw the sun swelling orange above the horizon off to our right. Below raced a succession of slatey drumlins, too puny to be called hills, while ahead lay the waterless dunes of the deep Southern Sahara.
I became poignantly aware of Kolya’s wisdom and knew a wave of utter self-contempt. ‘Orl roads lead ter Rome, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘so yer might as well pick a comfy one.’ Unfortunately it seemed to me then that I had chosen the riskiest road of all.