She is beautiful in the rain, when her trees and shrubs are dark with the weight of water and her walls begin to glisten; she is beautiful in the summer when her rich, raw colours bring a hint of the desert. She was founded in the year William the Conqueror made London his capital. Even when the harsh sandstorms rush into her streets like some relentless harka, and for weeks at a time it is almost impossible to move without feeling blinded and gagged by that steady tide of red dust, even then there is a wildness to her scenery, a certain nobility in the way in which her stately palms and sturdy people take their battering. Unless your imagination has died it is impossible not to love her. More than Paris, she has the ability to seduce and hold the traveller within the comfort of her massive battlements. For Marrakech is, of necessity, a walled city. It is a few years, not decades, since her ramparts stood between her people and relentless savagery. Perhaps it is true that here, not out in the desert, I found Temptation and succumbed. El Glaoui’s charm and Marrakech’s magic combined to divert me. Both provided the illusion of scientific progress. El Glaoui was a generous employer. I was introduced to levels of luxury I had never dreamed of. I had the honour, the position, the goodwill - everything the Pasha’s power could put at my disposal. Everything I had ever desired.
‘I am not myself,’ he told me, ‘of an ascetic disbosition. There is more than one way of fulfilling God’s will. God has given me the means to exblore the nature of bleasure. And sometimes,’ he offered me a man-to-man smile, ‘a little bain.’
Miss von Bek expressed the intention of remaining in Marrakech indefinitely. She was my best introduction to Il Duce. I had no choice. I accepted the Pasha’s offer. I decided to give up six to nine months to start the Pasha’s aeronautics industry and fulfil our mutual dream. I began to dress in combinations of tropical European clothing and local splendour - a silk shirt and trousers and silk khufta with pointed babouches on my feet. This was a comfortable style which suited me very well and made a gentle irony of my more Western official titles: Aeronautics Adviser, Chairman and Chief Engineer to La Compagnie de l’Aviation du Monde Nouvelle à Maroc, my task being nothing less than the setting up of a native Moroccan aviation industry that would not merely supply its own forces but would sell its machines abroad.
‘Here we have ideal conditions for flying and landing aeroblanes. That is the reason why Marrakech should naturally be the aviation manufacturing cabital of the Mediterranean,’ El Glaoui told me with infectious confidence on the first day he welcomed me to my up-to-date offices, which might have graced any major Parisian establishment. I make little effort here to reproduce the elaborate circumlocutions and euphemisms of his French. It was, if anything, more full of embellishments and flatteries, innuendo, subtle threats and veiled boasting than his Arabic; yet this quality also added to his enchanter’s power.
Often he pretended to listen but never heard. His own interests were always paramount. Yet his casual generosity and natural intelligence charmed everyone, especially when he returned to the subjects he understood best - war and religion. Even by Moorish standards he had some of the air of the legendary past, an intellectual man of action, and perhaps he deliberately cultivated his personality in the way he built his famous library, but I do not think so. Given a civilised education and less self-destructive beliefs he would be among us to this day. He was not the only friend of the French to be ruthlessly betrayed. He was even snubbed by Princess Elizabeth when he arrived at her wedding with a small pie. In some ways he was a man of extraordinary simplicity as well as grandeur. The knife with which to cut the pie was sheathed in a scabbard of jewel-encrusted gold. But no. Coconuts from Tonga she would take, buckets of bongu beans she would take. But a priceless - and witty - offering from the great Pasha of Marrakech was spurned. By this time, of course, the pro-Zionist stranglehold on Europe and America was unbreakable. El Glaoui knew the Jews had shamed him. He had trusted them too long with his affairs. But already he was exhausted. He died without friends, humiliated and shunned by his inferiors, while the streets of his noble city rang once more to the clash of tribal arms. But that was in 1956, a year which can only be compared to 1453 in significance to Christendom. It was also, as El Glaoui knew, the Death of Arab Chivalry. 1956 was the year in which Christendom tested her strength and was found wanting; in which Bolshevism tested her strength and conquered; when godless Arabs set up a secular state and the Jews bought Tunisia from the French; when the British abolished third-class accommodation in trains by calling it second-class and let New York command her to give up the sacred trust of Suez. Britain is America’s puppy-dog now. She never knows who her real friends are. She had her visionaries. They foresaw a great independent Arabia; an Arabia ruled by dignified caliphs with firm but unflinching justice. They saw an Arabia where the Knights of the Round Table might form again, to demonstrate their religious ideals through deed and word. The greatest of Arabia’s lords have always taken comfort in the words of Jesus, whom they recognise as a significant prophet. Their quarrel with Christians is that they refuse to see that Mahommed was the most recent and most important of God’s prophets and submit themselves to His will as their souls must surely be calling out to do. What evil, what terrible secret dishonour, can be the Christian’s if he cannot accept the truth of Islam? Yet we could have respected one another. We have, after all, more than one common enemy. Which is not to say I have ever advocated intercourse between the two persuasions on anything but the most superficial level. They should be allowed to remain in their enclave, their Zone of Peace, on condition they no longer shop at Harrods and British Home Stores. Let us all live and let live, I have always said. But they were not the old, gentlemanly type of Muslim, like El Glaoui or those whom Lawrence recruited; they are a coarser breed altogether, made not in the desert’s tempering heat, but in the air-conditioned halls of some artificial Florida. These oil people are not trained to power’s responsibilities. Wagner knew this. One of my conversations with Graf Otto and Lieutenant Fromental concerned the composer’s profound Christianity and his respect for Buddhism and Islam, both of which at their best preached the ideals of Chivalry he so thoroughly celebrated in his last mighty work, Parsifal, with its exhortation to us all to come together in common brotherhood, to make of ourselves the very best we can. This was the old Code of Islam, too. And the old Platonic ideal. Schmaltz was a critic of French North African policy. In destroying the Islamic codes and replacing them with French, the Quai d’Orsay was actually encouraging anarchy.