Such moderation however was no longer in keeping with the expansionist ideas of the French to which, of course, the Italians and Spanish must then respond. It was oil. But we were not told that at that time.
Under the influence of Islam, moderation, in any European sense, tends to disappear and one’s perspectives change, as they change in the desert. Rosie von Bek’s lovemaking grew in intensity as it diminished in duration - our pleasure, heightened by ‘the white maiden’, became so tuned to the few moments we could discover together during the day or night that it became like nothing I had experienced before. I lived each twenty-three hours and forty minutes for perhaps twenty minutes of the most exquisite passion. I began to demand more and more secrets of her adventures with El Hadj T’hami, of his harems full of slaves, more than fifty per cent of them French or Spanish, and two of them English or Irish, she was not sure. She described orgies and profound singularities of feeling, of subtle and irresistible cruelties. This further heightened my sensibilities, restored my masculinity, and made me forget the cold touch of God and Her deadly pleasures, deflected the cool breath of Death upon the back of my neck, even though I had every reason to be terrified of discovery. Perhaps I, too, could only feel my power at times of crisis. But it is preposterous to link such pleasures with the humiliation performed upon me by Grishenko and witnessed by Brodmann. I never felt the flagellant’s call to piety. The thought of the Pasha’s punishments brought no delicious quickening of the senses to me, merely appalled dismay.
She introduced me to nothing new. She told me he had made her call him by an Arab word. I asked her to use the word. It was familiar to me. She complained that he spent much time upon the feet. They were used, she supposed, to rather more calluses, even on their youngest girls. Some nights, she said, she had gone completely numb above the knees but was in an agony of unfulfilled sensuality below. It made her, she said, feel sick. The balance was too peculiar. She had not found the pierced girls strange, she said. They were rather beautiful and proud of their ornament, even those with the locks. She described, I said to her, the commonplace diversions of any barbarian king. Did she still find them stimulating?
‘In less boring company,’ she replied. Her flattery was delicious. She proclaimed my superiority over the master whose power I shared, for whom I spoke. She had become convinced of my fame as an actor and I was again of infinite interest to her. Yet she did not commiserate with me over my problems with The Hawk. In her first test-flight I had managed to pull the plane off the makeshift runway barely high enough to miss the single-storey houses of suburban Marrakech and, clearing the majority of the trees in the adjoining palmery, tried to ease her up towards the distant peaks of the Atlas. But the stick was useless. She wheeled and came about, almost under her own volition, dragged by a heavy engine towards the cars and pavilions of the Pasha and his entourage, barely passing over the contracting heads of his drivers and his horsemen and landing nose-first in a clump of soft red earth. The propeller snapped and flew off, one piece upon the heels of the other, towards the scattering onlookers, cut guy ropes and brought the Pasha’s pavilion collapsing to the ground before shearing through the windshield of his Rolls Royce and burying themselves in the upholstery of the passenger seats; my wheels snapped off their axles and spun through groves of young palms, huts and sun-frames. They came to rest in a canal which, blocked, began to overflow, the water pouring along unseasonal courses to make marshy the Pasha’s camp-ground so that the Glaoui and all his favourites, trapped beneath the heavy soaking wool of the Berber tents, floundered now in mud, while the engine, detached from its struts, turned over and over, still pouring black smoke until it burst into flames about a yard from the Pasha’s surviving Mercedes and blew it to pieces just as I flung myself from wreckage flooded with gasoline, and stumbled into the Pasha. We bent against the sudden heat as The Hawk began to blaze and he stared with some incredulity upon the ruins of his favourite cars, his flagships. I understood his dismay. I reached out a friendly hand to him, in equal comradeship, to share this misfortune, as we people of the desert do. But he was unusually cool to me. He drew away, clearing his throat loudly.
Thereafter, I was forced to address my employer through Hadj Idder or some other third party, and it was clear I was at least for a while in disfavour. I believed he was debating the justice of blaming me for the catastrophe. He must eventually remember how I had warned him of the potential consequences of using an unsuitable engine in so finely-tuned a machine as mine and I had also, he would recall as his temper subsided, taken the risk of flying the plane myself and only by a fluke not been killed. I watched the film. Mr Mix had recorded the whole event and was happy to let me watch it, although the Pasha had forbidden anyone but himself and his chosen guests access to the projector. I told him it was very useful. From it the Pasha would learn how the old engine, not my design, had created the problem. Once the new engines came through from Casablanca, then we could begin to fly in earnest. After all, The Hawk had proven herself an elegant machine. It was only the borrowed second-hand engine that had failed. I heard with some dismay through Rosie von Bek that El Glaoui’s only ungrowled reference to me was a joke that I had been nicknamed not ‘The Hawk’ by the Bedouin, but ‘The Parrot’. This was the Pasha at his most childish. Yuhattit, yuqallim, yehudim, as the poem went. It is not as simple as that. So he thought I was better at squawking than flying. For some reason this information goaded me to even more intense sexual demands, much to her glazed relish. But when she had gone, I felt wounded. I had served the Pasha loyally. He had delighted in my catalogue, with its coloured pictures. He had boasted of our factory. No visitor to Marrakech had left the city without at least one prospectus for the new aviation company. I had not shamed him with this minor set-back. It was hardly a failure, but an experiment. We had merely been impatient. I had, I admitted to myself, been unduly optimistic in my eagerness to provide myself with a means of escaping the Pasha’s employ. Thus, in one of my letters to him, I explained how we would be praised by history for our efforts, how our early frustrations would be likened to the struggle of the great prophets or the problems overcome by Wilbur and Orville Wright before their Flyer ever found the skies above Kitty Hawk. I took comfort in the fact that I still had my house and servants. Even a car, albeit a rather battered Peugeot, was still at my disposal. It was clear that my employer had not yet determined how to treat me. I consoled myself that, if he let me go, I had enough cash to live in Rome for some good while without undue anxiety. Only the still unmentioned movie reels kept me here. Rosie, I knew, would go with me. I had spent my time in Marrakech profitably.