I went to the window in the drawing-room, eased the heavy curtain back a fraction, and looked out on the brown grass of the cricket pitch at the Club. The early sun slanted over it in a bright golden wave. A man with a hose paddled about the edge swamping the boundary in pools of grey-blue water. Kites fell about the sky like footballs and the flame trees by the back entrance were just beginning to explode into rusty crimson light.
The minute Egyptian spring was finished, the Khamseen had whirled itself out over the dunes to the south; the dog days had arrived on the dot, when the heat would lie over the city for six months like a plate. From now on one would need the Stella really cold.
I wanted to be out of this too-known country, where the seasons were invariable, where duty and pleasure and sleep rang out as clearly as a monastery bell, but where I could never again be an indistinguishable part of the foliage. I was no longer part of the timetable, had lost all the habits. I wanted to leave it as quickly and violently as I could, and I thought for a moment of just going out to the airport and chancing it. But the chance didn’t really exist. And then I remembered the Provost’s deputy at the Cathedraclass="underline" Mr. Hawthorn was going on a tour of his Christian dominions in a long wheel-based Land Rover. Anything — anything would do.
I left the apartment, making as quick a passage as I could from the darkness to the light.
11
The Cathedral of All Saints’ stood up on the left as I walked over Kasr el Nil bridge, dun-coloured, with its bulbous central tower like some atrocious chocolate shape; a boast of some Scottish bishop fifty years before, an empty fortress now, relegated to an imaginery holding operation against the alien faith. For many years the City Corporation had planned to build a bridge over the river at the point where the Cathedral fronted on to the corniche, but the cost of demolishing the gigantic pile had disheartened them. It was now the fourth pyramid within the city’s boundaries, only thirty years old, but already eroding, chipping away at the edges, taking on the mysterious patina of the other three: an abode of men who had been gods, who like their Pharaonic predecessors had disappeared without trace.
Mr. Hawthorn was at a meeting, I was told by his secretary, a defiant middle-aged English lady, when I called at his office on one side of the Cathedral forecourt. “An Ecumenical Committee.” Perhaps I’d care to call back? The lady moved from one outer room to the other, very fast, carrying envelopes and brochures to and fro with terrible concern. I was barely able to keep up with her.
“I’ll call back,” I shouted, as she settled in one room and began cranking an old duplicating machine.
“Do. In half an hour Mr. Hawthorn should be free. Before he goes to the Jumble Sale at twelve.” She stopped cranking. She looked at me, pondering my credit worthiness.
“Oh, there’s a sale, is there?”
“Yes. In the hall opposite. You may like to buy something while you’re here in Cairo. It’s in aid of the new extension at Tobruk.”
“I’ll take a look in, certainly.”
The lady warmed. “Here!” She drew off an early sheet from the machine and handed it to me. “It’s our Libyan plan. It may be of interest”
“Indeed — it was just what I wanted to talk to Mr. Hawthorn about” I looked at the page of rough yellow foolscap:
“The Churchwardens again take this opportunity of announcing the opening of a fund to provide an extension to the present severely limited office and domestic accommodationat the parsonage in Tobruk.…”
The gods were not quite dead yet; the remnants of the last dynasty were counter-attacking; a message was on the way, an outpost would be relieved; once more the infidel would be repelled. There was even talk at this very moment of a united army gathering in the north, implacable legions blessed by nearly all the disparate Princes. God had been mocked and had retreated; but now there were plans at last: this was the second front.
The lady in the long cardigan cranked the machine again, the inky paper peeling off ominously, orders for the day; a General Mobilisation: “The dogs of war … The Cannon’s Mouth … Citoyens, aux Armes …”
I went into the Cathedral to pass the time, through the minute side door into the dusty golden-moted cavern beyond. One’s eyes were lost at once following the Odeon curves and pillars into the shadows above; mid-’thirties, high renaissance ferroconcrete. A silver grille in front of the Lady Chapel at the top of the Cathedral, a distance that seemed hundreds of yards away over an empty no man’s land of wooden trenches, the chairs running from north to south in yellow, untrammelled pine, disused communication lines between the opaque glass of the high windows on either side, last occupied by the Eighth Army.
On the walls, at distant intervals, like brief footnotes to a lost history book, were plaques and memorials from other long since ruined churches within the diocese; headstones and memento moris rescued from Port Said, Suez, Zagazig and even further afield.
Colonel Campbell Scott Moncrieff
killed in an attempt to
prevent a dervish rising
Tigr Blue Nile Province
April 29 1908
Major Esme Stuart Erskine Harrison DSO
11th Hussars
who died on the polo ground
Gezira Nov. 1 1902
“In the midst of life we are in death.”
“Lt. Col. R. W. T. Gordon, 93rd Sutherland Highlanders. Died at Port Said from a fever contracted during the Suak-in expedition …” “Robert Septimus Grenfell, Lt., 12th Lancers. Killed in charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, aged 23 …” “Lt. Col. Baker, who died in Egypt, November 17, 1887. He highly distinguished himself at the battle of Tachkessen while in command of a small Turkish force … a service which was brilliantly and successfully carried out … sincere friends and admirers — a token of their respect … qualities of the highest order which he possessed as a soldier and commander.”
“Justice is the foundation of Empires.”
In the dust-inflamed Cathedral with its soft and pulpy curves, its neutral colouring, the men became a film, a coloured epic; lancers and swordsmen in red or blue tunics. They were the only thing that moved in the yellow spaces, the shafts of empty light. There was nothing of any god here; no mercy, pity or resurrection; nothing remotely Christian. The building was simply a memory of violent life, the plaques an album of adventure turned to stone. Battles and games — sunrise, noon and night; exultation falling, nipped by a mosquito finding the one flaw in the net after an exhausting day’s march from the coast towards some empty quarter; fantasy dying, killed by some small, frightened men with greasy hair rising from behind a thorn bush in the Blue Nile Province while your back was turned; a dismal winter rectory in Worcestershire thrown into real mourning, nanny weeping on the servants’ stairs, through just a piece of bad luck as the pony swerved in the last chukka at the end of a warm afternoon at Gezira: it was the rumour at nightfall, the sound of drums, the parley on the hill top, the pipe of a false peace and a lot of liberal politicians at home, umpires blowing shrill and distant whistles, calling foul.
It was just a lot of bad luck really; they always sold you short — just as you’d got the boot in and had cracked a first skull. When the maxim platoon had a proper alignment and trajectory, and it was going nicely, the black gentlemen scurrying over the hill, you had a telegram from some competition wallah in Whitehall and picked up a dose of blackwater fever on your way back to H.Q. You never made that first class cabin on the Port Said boat; another telegram to the War Office took your place instead, while you lay up in the little cemetery beyond the French Club, looking over the canal, watching the boats go home forever. Justice is the foundation of Empires.