'You will learn, my dear sir,' he said, with, for the first time, a certain malice. 'Do not forget that your first task will be to collect the taxes. A difficult task, as you are aware. A very difficult task. Your survival instinct will teach you this, and other policies, Major.'
He stopped suddenly and smiled again as he said, 'There is, all the same, something comical about the whole business. These people built themselves a fortress in the desert and built a town inside the fortress to protect themselves from the raids of the Bedouin, and despite this, the blood that the Bedouin would have shed in the open they have taken upon themselves to spill behind their own walls.' He found this quite remarkable. He found it extremely oriental!
The blood rose to my face and I burst out, 'Battles like these, within one group of people, are to be found in both East and West, Mr. Harvey. It's different from invasion from the outside…'
He looked at my face for a while and then said, in an amused tone, 'Major Mahmoud Effendi is still under the influence of ideas from the past. Though, of course, he no longer sympathizes with the mutineers?'
I was incapable of controlling myself and burst out once more, 'I never sympathized with any mutineer. I was performing my duty and nothing more, and I have paid the price twice over in unjust treatment.'
He shook his head. Anyway, I would be aware, naturally, he pointed out, that my work would be the object of close scrutiny.
I thought this would be my last chance, so I said, in a tone of voice I tried to keep perfectly neutral, 'I hope that my work, when scrutinized, will be found satisfactory. But what if I do not succeed?'
He replied curtly, 'You know that you will pay the price.'
Then he caught himself, as though he had read my thoughts, and said, 'In any case, the penalty will not be your return to Cairo.'
Suddenly he changed the subject. I had to know that Saeed Bey objected to my taking my lady wife with me. Out of concern for her safety, of course. He had, however, informed His Excellency that the ministry did not interfere in the private lives of officers. Moreover, the lady was, he believed…
He paused for a moment and appeared to hesitate over his choice of words before continuing, 'The lady is a brave woman.' Then he repeated this, shaking his head. 'Indeed. A brave woman.'
I said nothing and he stood up suddenly. I stood too and he started talking to me in an official tone: 'You will travel with the Kerdasa caravan since it is ready to depart but I will send a number of horses' (and here the ghost of a smile appeared on his lips) 'which I hope will reach their destination alive, with the Matrouh caravan, which leaves in about two weeks.'
'Beaten by the British again!' I said to myself as I left his office. 'How I hate you, Mr Harvey. How I hate you all, along with this ministry. But there's no escape.'
I have to go home now and prepare for the journey. But what is there left to get ready? As soon as I told her that all efforts to excuse me from the posting had failed, Catherine gathered together everything we would need, and collected from the bookshops every book that discusses the oasis or in which mention of it occurs. She has left nothing to chance. Yesterday she told me of her remarkable plan to combat the bites of scorpions and snakes, so I referred her to a Rifa'i sheikh and convinced her that he had greater experience in dealing with poisons. She too, then, is afraid of such things — so what is the secret of her enthusiasm for this journey? I have made every attempt to convince her to stay, but to no effect. She knows the dangers awaiting me there but doesn't care. If I were naive, I'd say the reason was love, and that she didn't want her husband to perish alone. I do believe she loves me, but not that much!
I left the ministry, crossed el Dawaween Street, and proceeded until I reached Abdeen police station. In this station my whole life has been fashioned, and wasted, at a short distance from the only house I have ever known. It never occurred to me as a child, though, that I should end up doing such work.
Anyway, the time for regret is past. What do I have to regret? And what did I hope for when I was a boy? I gave no thought to the future. All I wanted was for things to go on the way they were. A happy childhood and a happier boyhood. My father denied me and my younger brother nothing. He forbade us no pleasure and never forced us to pay attention to our education or have done with it within a suitable period. My brother Suleiman liked to spend most of his time with my father at his shop in el Muski, learning the basics of the trade. For me, there was nothing to sully the bright days of my life. It was the last days of Khedive Ismail, the whole city was in commotion, and I dawdled away my time at the grammar school until I was almost twenty. I knew women and I kept company with slave girls and I spent my nights with friends moving from one cafe and bar to another. At our large house in Abdeen, there was always a feast being held and scarcely a night went by without guests, a party, and the most renowned singers, male and female. Thursday nights were the exception. On Thursday, the servants would remove all the furniture from the large room on the first storey, cover the floor with carpets, perfume the place with incense, and place brass pots filled with rose-scented water in the corners. That was the night of the 'People of the Way', of songs of praise for the Prophet, and of the circles of remembrance of God in favour of which my father, and I along with him, would abandon all other pleasures. I would chant with the chanters and sway with the participants in the dhikr till I was bathed in sweat and my limbs exhausted, and then a calm, deep sleep would come that lasted all night. And in the morning, I would go early with my father and Suleiman to Friday prayer at the mosque of el Hussein. The same night, however, the cycle would begin again, until, one evening, I found myself by chance with my friends at the Matatia Cafe on Ataba Square. There I beheld that turbaned man who spoke Arabic like a Turk, or a Syrian. I had never before heard the like of what he had to say, or perhaps I had but had paid no attention. Nevertheless, the words of Sheikh el Afghani and the enthusiasm of the disciples around him forced me to listen and pay attention, and thus I became addicted, in addition to wine and women, to the gatherings of the sheikh and the reading of the newspapers edited by his disciples — Misr, and el Tigara, and el Lata'if. Whenever the Khedive had one of them closed down, I would transfer to another, new one that would repeat what its sequestrated sister journal had said, all of them attacking the rulers who had plunged Egypt into debt and brought it to bankruptcy, and all of them burning with anger at the domination of the Europeans, who had even become ministers of the country's government and were employed in every ministry. During the same period, I heard that the sheikh and some of his pupils had embraced Freemasonry, whose adherents belonged to every religion and were bound together by their faith in freedom and brotherhood among people of every race. I too therefore hastened to join a Masonic lodge and waited for the day when the whole earth would become one great lodge for a world of free brethren. I also heard of the formation of a secret nationalist party. After reading its manifestos, with their slogan of 'Egypt for the Egyptians', I was caught up by enthusiasm and wanted to join, though I didn't know how to get in touch with the party. I was held back, too, by the first betrayal to change my life, which was when my father's business went bankrupt. To this day, though, I still fail to understand how I could have done all these things with so little reflection.
Each one succeeded the next without causing me any anxiety or self-reproach, as though it were very natural that I should get drunk, attend the Masonic lodge, sleep with women, go to Afghani's gatherings, and turn with my father and the Sufis in the circle of remembrance. I even thought in those days that I ought to pay some attention to my studies, so as to obtain a diploma and enter the College of Law, as most students dreamt of doing. I believed I would have been well suited to that because what most caught my fancy at school were the classes in rhetoric and literature. My father, however, went bankrupt. A Greek merchant seduced him with promises of large profits from the import of olive oil from his country, then inveigled him into debt, and interest on the debt, until in the end the Muski shop was wrested from him. No source of income remained to support the large house full of slave girls and servants. My father made a great effort to have me enrolled in the police, and it was possible at that time for me to become an officer with the education I had acquired and some months of training. Thus my father was able, before his sorrows and illnesses incapacitated him, to set his mind at rest, knowing that my salary would be enough to support my mother and brother and keep the house open, albeit without the feasts and the singing and the circles of remembrance. The visitors disappeared and, along with them, even the Sufis and the singers of religious songs. I returned to the circles only once, after many years, when Brigadier General Saeed invited me to a night of chanting with the Sufi order to which he belonged, but I never repeated the experience. It failed to inspire any of the ecstasy that had swept over me in the long-gone past.