'When I think of all the disasters the Europeans have brought to our country, I can't blame them,' I said. 'And don't forget,' I added, 'I warned you more than once. You're the one that insisted.'
'And still insist,' she said, lightly. 'You shall see. I will tame them.'
Turning to Ibraheem, I said, 'But I imagine they hate the government more!'
Ibraheem answered in a low voice, 'They hate paying the taxes and I think they're…'
Then he said no more, asked permission to leave and went back towards the well.
'So they'll be welcoming me with open arms from the outset!' I said to myself. I have been told above all to collect the outstanding taxes. I am to send to Cairo immediately on my arrival two thousand camel-loads of dates, five hundred camel-loads of olive oil, and a late fee in cash of five thousand rials. Mr Harvey chose well!
The rest of the caravan was making its way towards us, some of the men wringing out the clothes they had washed. One of them came over to me at a trot and said, 'The guide has changed his mind. He's decided that we should rest here now and resume the journey at night. He says the desert is safer than this pool, which attracts wolves and hyenas in the dark.'
Slapping a gnat on my cheek, I said, 'And what are these hosts of gnats going to be like at night?'
They put up the only tent and Catherine went in to sleep. She's fortunate. Sleep comes to her quickly, whenever she wants. Unlike me, she doesn't have to do battle with it each time. The men — Bedouin, traders and soldiers — slept too, and the camels settled down to rest in preparation for the night journey. The desert, comatose, stretched to the horizon — a calm sea of spreading sands, without movement or sound, it, the camels and the humans recovering their strength after the storm. How deep the calm! Brigadier General Saeed told me, 'Believe me, in some ways, I envy you for going into the desert, paradise of prophets and poets. To it flee all those who would leave the world behind them to find themselves and in it the withered soul puts out new leaves and the spirit blooms!' What a good and simple man you are, Saeed! As though all that a man has lived through and has accumulated in his bosom could evaporate simply by virtue of his moving from soil to sand! You're like Catherine, who sings songs of love to the desert and says that it's changing her. This really amazes me, for she's no Sufi, like Saeed, and I don't believe that the things of the spirit concern her. And how can she claim with such confidence that we shall defeat the world? What weapon could I, for example, have brandished in the world's face when all the rest had put their weapons away? The good ones, like Brigadier General Saeed, were content merely to stick their weapons in their scabbards. The others, though, stuck them in the country's chest. I beheld with my own eyes the stab in the back that broke Urabi, and then I beheld the greater betrayal that followed, right next to my own house, to be precise, in the square that had witnessed the glory and the joy, with Urabi on his horse waving his sword and berating the Khedive, who had humiliated them for so long — 'God created us to be free men, not chattels or property to be inherited. I swear by God, than whom there is no other, that we will never again, from this day on, be handed down from one master to the next, or treated as slaves' — and the people came together in droves from the streets and the alleyways, strangers embracing strangers, tears of joy in their eyes. A day of rejoicing in the Protected City! And in the very same place, just one year later, I saw the gilded carriages, drawn by horses in splendid harness, descending one after the other into the broad square, carrying the great men of the country, the bashas, the beys and the members of parliament who had delivered fiery speeches against the British in the days of the revolution — I saw the very same men in all their grandeur, with their embroidered coats and gilded medals, alighting from their carriages to join the Khedive on his dais, from which he reviewed the army of occupation with, on his right, Admiral Seymour, the cannon of whose fleet had demolished Alexandria, and, on his left, General Wolseley, who, with the help of traitors, had annihilated our army at Tell el Kebir. A few days later, I read that the same bashas and beys had collected a huge sum of money and used it to buy expensive gifts to present to Seymour and Wolseley, and I wept for my country and myself. And Catherine asks me what my crisis is?
But what in fact is my crisis? All that is an old dispensation and has passed into oblivion, so what is the problem now?
I got up and walked, turning my back on the tent and the uninhabited oasis. Nothing but sand and distant brown hills like carvings of crouching beasts. I saw the men sleeping scattered over the sand, each taking refuge in whatever shade he could find — under a palm or other tree or in the shade of a kneeling camel, some covering their faces with large kerchiefs. They too had been able to find peace and sleep in this heat. I alone then was incapable of sleeping. I have spent days and years concocting short-lived peace treaties with myself. No sooner do I tell myself that I did what I had to do than something inside me mocks me, and I run to drink and women just as I did as an adolescent and a young man. Where now, though, is the innocence of my early years, when things were easy and straightforward and peace of mind came without effort or complication? And what is the point of thinking about such things anyway? All the same, there's no escape from the faces that crowd the emptiness and impose themselves suddenly and importunately. My father peers down. I see him in his shop in el Muski, with the confident, beaming face of his glory days; then he comes at me with the face of an old, broken man, after his defeat. My brother Suleiman, whom we haven't seen for so long, appears and I try to make out his features. And I see the face of Dusky Ni'ma, the one and only, for whom I search in all other women. The face of Tal'at, friend and companion of my youth, rises to the surface, but with his appearance all the other faces disappear and the roar of the cannon reverberates in my ears. I deliberately push him away and return to Ni'ma. Why didn't I appreciate her worth when she was mine to do with as I liked? My ruse doesn't work. It is Tal'at who pushes her aside and lays siege to me.
I decided to go back. My legs would not bear me for long in the burning sun, so I returned to the tent in the hope that sleep would come. To no avail. No sleep came to my eyelids and I could not even close my eyes. No escape from the face of Tal'at. I left the tent and sat on the ground in its shade.
Those hours and days with Tal'at remain engraved on my memory no matter how hard I try to erase them. I see us running together on the shore. We're running from one fort to the next with our little patrol of troopers, waiting for the artillery bombardment to stop, then we join the throng of people rushing blindly towards the sea and the site of the latest battle. All our clothes are bloodied. There's no time to think about anything, not even what's going on before our eyes. We have to hurry. Splinters from the British shells, coming from many points at sea, fly over our heads. We scream at the top of our lungs as we force our way through the throngs milling in the streets of Alexandria so that we can open a way for the horses pulling the carts. Sometimes we dismount and force a way through with our bodies, then get back on the carts, which are piled with soldiers from the forts, who are tied on top of them in mounds so that they don't fall off on to the road. Among them too are the ordinary people who volunteered at the forts and have been injured. We have nothing with which to respond to the pleas and moans of the wounded and nothing with which to stem the blood dripping from the carts and forming a trail along the route from the fort to the door of the hospital at el Raml. At the hospital we leave them to the people there to sort into dead and living and hurry back again along the beach, searching for a senior official or high-ranking officer to direct us towards something useful we could do. We were just two young lieutenants whom they'd transferred to Alexandria after the massacre in which a number of foreigners had been killed and which the British took as their excuse for war. But we can't find a single superior officer to ask.