All this he had elaborated as we stood together on the roof of his kasbah’s tallest tower, looking across the ragged peaks of the High Atlas, listening to the rushing of the Oued Mellah, and staring out across the surrounding semi-desert towards the true Sahara we had so recently left behind. I had never seen such vividly coloured mountains as these. The rock itself was radiant with dark greens and yellows, with luminous cerise and mauve, with deep reds and blues, slabs of stone sometimes merging with the undulating meadows of wild flowers all pulsing beneath the heat of a royal-blue sky. I remember thinking how different this landscape was from everything I had yet seen, how the desert contained a world of contrasts and variation as distinct as anything in Europe. As the sun dropped down over the crags and their shadows lengthened until it seemed they must engulf the castle itself, El Glaoui had spoken of his love of this land. This, he said, not Marrakech, was his true capital; he thought of the place as home, for which he experienced the deepest sentiment. If he had his way, he told me, he would spend far more time here. I had been introduced to half-a-dozen cousins and brothers-in-law (though not the resident Vulture himself, who was tactfully absent) and could remember none of them. They were not an especially remarkable family save for the direct branch. It was then he had asked me to work for him, to build him an air fleet. I told him I would give the matter great consideration. That night two Circassian houris of the most subtle and astonishing skills were sent to me. My lusts remained unavailable to me, but I appreciated my host’s thoughtfulness. At the time I believed this was something of a guilty gesture on his part, given his interest in Miss von Bek, but I would later learn that ‘guilt’ was not a word in any of the Pasha’s vocabularies.
He had asked me my opinion of Lieutenant Fromentaclass="underline" I said diplomatically that he seemed a pleasant enough young man.
‘He is here to spy on me,’ El Glaoui had murmured with a small smile. ‘He is a secret communist, I think.’
Privately I felt this an overly strong response to Fromental’s Christian humanism, but I held my tongue. I had no will to self-destruction. I am, I have often said, no martyr.
Perhaps it is a little late, even for a new messiah? Sometimes I say to Barnum the Jew, you people might have the right idea. Can things get any worse? Where is this messiah you tell us hasn’t arrived yet? He cannot answer. He will be waiting for his messiah when the rest of us are two feet under, but no doubt he will be standing on my shoulders.
‘I blame the whole thing on the death of the family,’ says Barnum. He is particularly upset because of his girl, who Mrs Cornelius warned him about when she was six.
‘The death of the family,’ I said, ‘is probably our only hope.’ But then I think I knew something about what ‘family first’ means. For my own part I continued to put my faith in the great political ideals we developed throughout the 19th century. Nietzsche is not entirely to be trusted on this. It is to those 19th-century values we should return, not seek some ideal anarchy. ‘Who would wish to live in your Utopia?’ I asked him. Your mother! Anyone else? Some families should be dispersed at birth! I met H. G. Wells in Marrakech. He still had some notion of gigantic crèches as the answer but I suggested it would be simpler to remove, as it were, the father factor. Let the father always be anonymous. This amused him. ‘There are a lot of chaps I know, including me, who’d drink to that,’ he said. ‘Now I know what we have in common!’ Illustre Abraham; procriateur fanatique du Mythe sacrificateur. Herbert Wells had no time any longer for practical science and his social notions were often unsound, but as an inspiration to my generation he had enormous influence. Stalin counted him a close personal friend. Only Mr Mix, I recall, never took to him. But I had grown used to the man’s odd changes of mood. He had developed a chip on his shoulder, I think. Generally he refused to exchange more than a few sentences with me but occasionally would be as amiable, as solicitous, as in old times. I began to suspect he was the slave of some wretched drug.
He would frequently disappear with his camera and his ill-matched crew of Berber donkey-boys and Jewish street-arabs up into the mountains, or would go back to Talouet. In that brooding family fortress of the Clan Glaoua high above the Salt River, the chiefs still gathered in times of crisis to decide the fortunes of the tribes who remained in the Atlas and gave the Glaoua fealty, who had not, in the Berber’s droll saying, exchanged their rifle for a mule.
The Berbers referred to themselves by their clans much as the Scots did and, from my own reading of Rob Roy, their social system and leisure pursuits were almost identical, save that the Moroccans did not at that time have an implacable industrialising ruling power bent on driving them forever into submission, to make them bend before the firm yet not unkind hand of progress. Mr Mix had become something of an enthusiast of these clansmen (‘Berber’ being simply a corruption of the Greek ‘barbarian’) and spent an inordinate amount of time with notebooks recording their dialects and folk practices. I wondered if he did not have some misguided notion that this mysterious people were his ancestors. I suggested it: he denied it. Employed as El Hadji T’hami’s personal film-maker, he said, it was his business to record the glory and variety of the Pasha’s realm. Having no interest in the fine distinctions of one tribe’s scarifications compared to another’s, I realised how these customs must give him a better sense of his own past.
I had also begun to understand that Mr Mix’s discretion came chiefly from his not wishing to embarrass me in front of the other white men. This was typical of my friend’s sensitivity and I let him know that I thoroughly appreciated what he was doing. When we were alone, he resumed the old, easier manner of our comradeship. Yet even here he seemed to nurse some sort of resentment. More than once he suggested that I get on the first train to Casablanca and go from there to Italy where, he said, I really belonged. They needed me there, he said. At first I took this for a warming concern for my well-being. But then I began to realise that in certain respects he was trying to get me away from Marrakech. No doubt he feared that my authority as a spokesman for Hollywood was rather greater than his own. Yet he continued about his film-making unhindered by me, while the Pasha seemed perfectly content to use him for recording special occasions and for help with the foreign press when they required interviews or newsreel footage. Effectively, Mr Mix had been elevated to the position of press attaché to the Pasha, as well as Court Recorder. I was still unsure, in those early days at Court, exactly how Mr Mix had come by his appointments while now yearning for the railroads of home. As to my own fortunes, I joked to Lieutenant Fromental, I was now both Court Engineer, Jester and Royal Plane-maker.
Marrakech is the most exquisite of all Moorish settlements. She is a timeless city, the colour of her red marigolds and green palmeries, of bloody milk and a sky as flat, as tranquil and as blue as any perfectly painted Hollywood firmament. Her days are full of the smells of beasts, mint, saffron and musk, of henna and fresh-picked oranges, of mounded carrots and leeks and a dozen different mysteriously gnarled husks, of tea and sweet sherbet and boiling couscous, of roasting sheep and goat-stew, of honey and coffee and the dyer’s wells, of heavy tobacco smoke and the thick, tempting whiffs of kif, of sour milk and sweet flesh, of heated mud in the summer and sour dampness in the winter, when the clogging open drains are flushed away and even the Frenchman’s sewers cannot take the sudden flood. Marrakech is one of the magic cities of the Earth, a busy, modern Maghribi metropolis, where automobiles and camels argue on equal terms for right of way through her narrow lanes. Marrakech, at any season, is superbly beautiful. In the spring she is at her finest, with great snow-capped mountains visible on every side, and her mile upon mile of palm groves making a lush deep emerald setting for a city nestling like a glowing ruby at the heart.