El Glaoui was by no means the first Moslem princeling to aspire to the mantle of Haroun al-Raschid or even Saladin, but for a while he alone most nearly achieved the reality. I would say he did this through his quick intelligence, personal charm and ruthless practicality. Savage as he was to his enemies, he could also be generous to those he defeated. He had the gentle but elaborate manners of the Berber nobility, a sense of quiet irony which pleased women, and a clever, self-deprecating manner which immediately made you his admirer. It was as well for Europe that the enchanting T’hami el Glaoui, Thane of this remoter Cawdor, had no greater ambition than to rule, through his French allies, one small part of the Maghrib! He was a Napoleon! An Alexander! And those who now slight him or tell me that he was nothing, that he never existed save as a Frenchman’s shadow, have swallowed the official opinion of the victorious but rather less charismatic Sultan, who now calls himself a king. The truth is only ever what the dominant power declares it to be.
This is what they did to Makhno and Mosley. (Not that I admired them, as men, for anything but their audacity.) We turn these bold outlaws into goblins, driven by a will to Evil, even when we have previously used them for our own gain. Next we belittle and forget their achievements. It was the Pasha of Marrakech, not the Sultan of Morocco, nor the Bey of Algiers, who was a welcome and familiar guest in all the drawing-rooms and, indeed, the boudoirs, of the West End. Winston Churchill called him a fellow-spirit. Charles Boyer became his friend, Noel Coward wrote his famous submarine film in Marrakech and based one of the characters on El Glaoui, who was far more popular than King Farouk or the Aga Khan. He was considerably more cultured. I am the first to insist that I bear him no grudge. (We would both be victims of the same miserable Iago. But, as usual, I was not given the opportunity to explain my situation. People have no humanity, these days. Even the interrogators lack the patience of the old Tsarist professionals.)
In his domain, especially in one gorgeous room, the Pasha allowed the pace of life to remain civilised while ensuring that his guests had every modern comfort, including the latest in gramophone records and three-reeler movies, mostly French. He had a magnificent pianola and all the up-to-date rolls. I heard this from Lieutenant Fromental as we rode through a Moorish paradise, through groves of dark-green date palms whose long shadows fell across little lagoons and streams, against a flawless deep blue sky beneath which red dust blew across wind-eroded terracotta hills topped by the crenellated towers of a dozen petty chieftains, all of them vassals to our host, all of them subject to his will on pain of death. There was a wonderful silence to the place. Here was the reason for the Pasha’s self-confidence, this demonstration of his immense security.
I envied him such feudal power. Yet even then I knew the cost of such power. To possess it one must also fight, second by second, to keep it. Amongst desert tribespeople, just as in modern business, there are always young contenders waiting for that one sign of weakness. Their moral behaviour is separated from the battle rituals of the stag only in the extent of the unthinking damage it does to the surrounding world. Yet still El Glaoui was a Renaissance prince. Had it not been for the French betraying him, he would have founded a dynasty as famous and as colourful as the Borgia. He, too, would have given his people prince and pope in one person.
He had formed the impression that we were American movie people in a borrowed balloon who had accidentally landed in his domain. He took it that we had come from Algeria. It suited neither of us to disillusion him, especially since it explained a movie camera he might, with his suspicion of Italian ambitions, have chosen to see as proof of our spying. Rose had offered some tale which he had accepted. He welcomed us to his court as artists and insisted we become his personal guests while in Marrakech.
His court already consisted of politicians, poets, actors and personalities from around the world. Our hunting party included Mr A. E. G. Weeks, the Sapper, late of the Royal Engineers, who was here with a tender for a set of new defences to quell any potential power bid from the Sahara Berbers, many of whom still refused to accept El Glaoui as their liege lord, and Count Otto Schmaltz, a serving officer of the Free Corps German Army in Exile, paying a courtesy visit from Constantinople to the Pasha. He was a Captain and a Count of the old, easy-going South German school, with only a veneer of his Prussian military education. He had studied at Heidelberg, he told me later that day, and had some good scars to prove it. El Glaoui, who had been riding in attentive silence nearby, remarked easily how ritual scarification was now only practised amongst the more primitive of his nomad tribes. When did the Germans over there hope to stamp the custom out? Which set the ruddy young Count to roaring, his face a fresh-quartered melon, and swearing what a good fellow the Pasha was, even as his host signalled adieu and rode on to join Miss von Bek, who he had been relieved to find was not Italian. She had refused to speak to me since we began our journey towards the mountains. At first I believed she was letting the little Moor pursue her in order to make me jealous, then I began to guess that she was determined, since I had proven nothing more than a clever imitation, to acquire for herself an authentic Arabian prince. At which point I lost emotional interest in her. My wounds were too fresh. I knew only one means of escaping the pain I had experienced at Esmé’s betrayal. I reconciled myself to relying wholly upon my own resources until I had a chance at least to see Mr Mix alone.
Mr Mix, I now knew, had used his experience and acquaintance with me to find employment with the potentate. He had become El Glaoui’s personal film director and official cameraman to the Court. He was always busy with his camera - the very latest Pathé - which he had lashed in a kind of cradle to his body, enabling him to turn the crank even as we moved. It seemed a shame to me that Mix’s film was only intended for the Pasha’s private viewing. Those reels would have been the most popular travelogues in the world, confirming every Western notion of Arabian opulence and decadent extravagance harnessed to omnipotent power against backgrounds of almost unbelievable romance as we reached the palm groves, streams and pools of the Tafi’lalet oasis. The little thatched villages, the timeworn castles and hills, the brightly-dressed women and simple dignified men, recalled some wonderful novel of Scott, Kipling or F. Marion Crawford, where nobility of soul and selfless courage were recognised, where at any moment Karl May’s Kara ben Nemsi might come galloping on his white camel across the packed sand or Alan Quatermain rise from behind a rock to welcome us. We might be greeted by a chivalrous Saracen from Bohemian romance, some mediaeval French gentleman, honoured by the Moor as a hero. I have seen it in film after film. This is what made Lawrence of Arabia such a laughing-stock in nomad circles, I hear, and Mrs Fezi in Talbot Road merely laughs when I mention it. ‘It is all a joke,’ she says in Arabic. She enjoys speaking to someone who understands her. Even the Egyptians, she says, pretend to be baffled sometimes. She refuses to be shamed, she says, by those Jew-loving bastards, though she grants piously that we should all be tolerant and help one another, even benighted Christians like myself. Because I like her I repeat the prayer with her. It is a comfort to us both. I do not regret my time in the desert. It is not how one worships God but how one obeys Him, I say. But she will not speak the Lord’s Prayer I wrote out for her. I do not blame her. She is a peasant, while I am heir to the blood of kings.