3
Dinah was having trouble with the concept of time. At first, though clearly puzzled by the blue cross being a different shape from any of the other nouns, she naturally attempted to identify the symbol with the egg-timer. Morris had anticipated this, and produced a square counter divided into blue and red along the diagonal.
Blue/red diagonal square: egg-timer.
He had also prepared a couple of other blue-diagonal squares, one for the clepsydra he intended to make out of a coffee-tin, and one for the kitchen timers he had sent for. He thought that Dinah’s first move would probably be to try and use the blue cross as a general noun to cover all transparent objects—glass always fascinated her. That wouldn’t be too hard to correct by producing the other gadgets—but then she would try to use the cross as a symbol for “gadget”.
Morris was watching her build one of her untidy towers of play-blocks, and thinking of carefully timed processes which did not involve gadgets, when the curtain was pulled aside. Dinah fled to her nest.
“Hi,” said the Prince. He looked grave. There was someone in the corridor behind him.
“Come in,” said Morris, not rising.
The newcomer turned out to be the large young marshman whom Morris had seen a few days ago in the canoe, and last night at the feast. The Prince produced what was obviously a very carefully rehearsed sentence.
“Friend of my father, it is Gaur.”
“Gaur is welcome,” said Morris, rising.
The Prince made an encouraging little nod to his companion.
“Salam Alaikum,” said Gaur, stumbling over the ancient desert greeting of the Arabs.
“Alaikum as Salam,” said Morris, then added in the language of the marshmen their own salute: “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow.”
Gaur hesitated an instant, no doubt because Morris had used the special vocative for addressing a warrior of the ninth clan, but there was no place in the language for somebody who, like Morris, did not belong to the hierarchy of the reeds. In the end he settled on a strange, archaic form which Morris had only come across before in a ballad in which two men met by night and could not identify each other’s status.
“Half my cheeses are thine,” he eventually replied, guardedly.
“Be welcome,” said Morris. “Dost thou eat tobacco?”
Gaur unsmilingly handed Morris the Batman comics and accepted a cheroot to chew, but before he had settled to it Morris saw him flinch and stare across the room. Dinah was doing her trench warfare trick again. Gaur muttered an invocation and made a curious sideways gesture with spread palms, as though he were glancing some missile to the side.
“What what?” said the Prince, like an early Wodehouse character.
“Gaur thinks that Dinah is a demon,” said Morris slowly.
“What means demon?”
Morris explained in Arabic.
“The marshes are full of witches and demons,” he added.
“Oh, I know it. You speak Gaur Dinah goods. Dinah is good. Speak you teach me English. I teach Gaur Arab.”
Something had happened, Morris saw, to produce this erratic flow of language. Normally the Prince would have paused for a minute between each sentence, and then ejaculated it unhappily; but today he thought it no shame to be wrong. Morris explained to Gaur, but Dinah for some reason refused to emerge from her nest to demonstrate that she was a mere animal (and was she?), while Gaur reluctantly returned the cheroot to its box; his smooth young face remained impassive, but his free hand now clutched the little amulet that had hung round his neck since he was a child. At the explanation about the English lessons he merely nodded.
At this point a pompous little slave arrived to say that bin Zair really was going to pay his unlooked-for visit to the zoo, and trusted that Morris had recovered sufficiently from the feast to be able to meet him there; very likely this was the self-same official who had hitherto thwarted Morris over the zoo-cleaners, for he managed to fill his little message with indignities. Morris never minded about that sort of thing, but suddenly the Prince snapped, in Arabic, “Thy soles shall be flayed off thy feet before this dusk,” and the slave whimpered away. Certainly the Prince was full of sudden confidence.
“We learn . . . we shall learn . . . more English with animals?” he asked.
“Fine,” said Morris.
He clicked at Dinah. Gaur flinched as she came leaping to the door but his big hand did not move to his knife or to the heavy new revolver at his hip—such weapons are no use against demons—the only hope is to clutch your amulet. To calm him Morris carried Dinah. She clung close all the way to the lifts.
The syndicate of architects who had designed the palace had made their name running up swish hotels in Beirut. The Sultan’s fantasies had dictated certain elements, such as the absurd external elevation, the grottoed audience chamber, several internal vistas and coups de theatre—and, of course, the zoo. But between these fixed points the architects had doodled in the light of their past successes, producing a series of plush but garish suites and lobbies. There were even meaningless side-rooms, dark and secret, which in a less teetotal environment would have been cosy little bars for lonely travellers.
But upon this characterless background the inhabitants and transients had imposed their own pungent culture. Morris had never yet met a goat trying to graze the amber pile of a corridor, but he would not have been surprised if he had. Stacks of coke-tins tended to collect in corners behind pierced mock-alabaster screens; tribesmen, wrapped in their tattered cloaks, snored and stank in random gathering-places, or played their stone-age version of peggoty in noisy groups round the indoor fountains; their tobacco, which they smoked in spent cartridge tubes passed round from hand to hand, smelt of gunpowder and dung-fires; somewhere far off someone always seemed to be boiling sour mutton-fat, but this odour was occasionally swamped by the presence of a young Arab who had been experimenting with cheap scent from Dar. They were a people who moved with great silence, while the plush decor muffled their fidgets. All the sounds in the palace seemed to come from mouths—arguments about the virtues of a strain of camels, reminiscences about old murders and raids, prayers, whisperings, greetings, snores and tubercular hawkings, and the mysterious reedy code of the eunuchs’ flutes. It was a world where action was hushed but every sound had a meaning, and for that reason it suited Morris. He had even come to like the smells.
The lifts were working today. Dinah escaped from his arms for long enough to press every button on the control panel, so it took them some time to ascend the four floors to the zoo. While the slow box sighed from floor to floor Morris studied Gaur, who would not meet his glance; he was a magnificent specimen, even allowing for his having lived on milk from birth and never having drunk the wriggling waters of the marshes. His skin was so black that in the dull light of the lift the shadows on it had a bluish tinge; his face, like Dyal’s, had in it only a few suggestions of Arab blood but was not at all negro—flattish, thin-lipped, high cheekboned, and narrow-eyed. He wore a white turban beneath which, Morris knew, the straight black hair would be surprisingly sparse, although it had never been cut. He would never grow a beard. (Kwan had once told Morris that he had at first felt friendly at the sight of another hairless face, and thought it very curious that Morris needed to shave to achieve the effect.)