Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

He appeared to be paralysed.

There came a stir and a whisper, and I saw Nessim looking somewhat anxiously at him, as if he might need help. But Narouz stood stiff as a javelin, staring right through us as if at some terrifying scene taking place behind the white walls at our backs.

The suspense was making us all uncomfortable. Then he made a queer motion with his mouth, as if his tongue were swollen, or as if he was surreptitiously swallowing a soft palate, and a hoarse cry escaped him. ‘ Meded! Meded! ’ It was the invocation for divine strength you sometimes hear desert preachers utter before they fall into a trance — the dervishes. His face worked. And then came a change — all of a sudden it was as if an electric current had begun to pour into his body, into his muscles, his loins. He relaxed his grip on himself and slowly, pantingly began to speak, roiling those amazing eyes as if the power of speech itself was half-involuntary and causing him physical pain to support.

… It was a terrifying performance, and for a moment or two I could not understand anything, he was articulating so badly.

Then all of a sudden he broke through the veil and his voice gathered power, vibrating in the candlelight like a musical instrument.

‘Our Egypt, our beloved country’ drawing out the words like toffee, almost crooning them. It was clear that he had nothing prepared to say — it was not a speech, it was an invocation uttered extempore such as one has sometimes heard — the brilliant spontaneous flight of drunkards, ballad singers, or those professional mourners who follow burial processions with their shrieks of death-divining poetry. The power and the tension flooded out of him into the room; all of us were electrified, even myself whose Arabic was so bad! The tone, the range and the bottled ferocity and tenderness his words conveyed hit us, sent us sprawling, like music. It didn’t seem to matter whether we understood them or nor. It does not even now. Indeed, it would have been impossible to paraphrase the matter. ‘The Nile … the green river flowing in our hearts hears its children. They will return to her. Descendants of the Pharaohs, children of Ra, offspring of St Mark. They will find the birthplace of light.’ And so on. At times the speaker closed his eyes, letting the torrent of words pour on unhindered. Once he set his head back, smiling like a dog, still with eyes closed, until the light shone upon his back teeth. That voice! It went on autonomously, rising to a roar, sinking to a whisper, trembling and crooning and wailing. Suddenly snapping out words like chainshot, or rolling them softly about like honey. We were absolutely captured — the whole lot of us. But it was something comical to see Nessim’s concern and wonder. He had expected nothing like this apparently for he was trembling like a leaf and quite white.

Occasionally he was swept away himself by the flood of rhetoric and I saw him dash away a tear from his eye almost impatiently.

It went on like this for about three-quarters of an hour and suddenly, inexplicably, the current was cut off, the speaker was snuffed out. Narouz stood there gasping like a fish before us — as if thrown up by the tides of inner music on to a foreign shore.

It was as abrupt as a metal shutter coming down — a silence impossible to repair again. His hands knotted again. He gave a startled groan and rushed out of the place with his funny scrambling motion. A tremendous silence fell — the silence which follows some great performance by an actor or orchestra — the germinal silence in which you can hear the very seeds in the human psyche stirring, trying to move towards the light of self-recognition. I was deeply moved and utterly exhausted.

Fecundated!

At last Nessim rose and made an indefinite gesture. He too was exhausted and walked like an old man; took my hand and led me up into the church again, where a wild hullabaloo of cymbals and bells had broken out. We walked through the great puffs of incense which now seemed to blow up at us from the centre of the earth — the angel and demon-haunted spaces below the world of men. In the moonlight he kept repeating: ‘I never knew, I never guessed this of Narouz. He is a preacher. I asked him only to talk of our history — but he made it …’ He was at a loss for words. Nobody had apparently suspected the existence of this spell-binder in their midst — the man with the whip! ‘He could lead a great religious movement’ I thought to myself. Nessim walked wearily and thoughtfully by my side among the palms.

‘He is a preacher , really’ he said with amazement. ‘That is why he goes to see Taor.’ He explained that Narouz often rode into the desert to visit a famous woman saint (alleged by the way to have three breasts) who lives in a tiny cave near Wadi Natrun; she is famous for her wonder-working cures, but won’t emerge from obscurity. ‘When he is away’ said Nessim, ‘he has either gone to the island to fish with his new gun or to see Taor. Always one or the other.’ When we got back to the tent the new preacher was lying wrapped in his blanket sobbing in a harsh voice like a wounded she-camel. He stopped when we entered, though he went on shaking for a while. Embarrassed, we said nothing and turned in that night in a heavy silence. A momentous experience indeed!

I couldn’t sleep for quite a while, going over it all in my mind. The next morning we were up at dawn (bloody cold for May — the tent stiff with frost) and in the saddle by the earliest light. Narouz had completely come to himself. He twirled his whip and played tricks on the factors in a high good humour.

Nessim was rather thoughtful and withdrawn, I thought. The long ride galled our minds and it was a relief to see the crested palms grow up again. We rested and spent the night again at Karm Abu Girg. The mother was not available at first and we were told to see her in the evening. Here an odd scene took place for which Nessim appeared as little prepared as I. As the three of us advanced through the rose-garden towards her little summerhouse, she came to the door with a lantern in her hand and said:

‘Well, my sons, how did it go?’ At this Narouz fell upon his knees, reached out his arms to her. Nessim and I were covered with confusion. She came forward and put her arms round this snorting and sobbing peasant, at the same time motioning us to leave. I must say I was relieved when Nessim sneaked off into the rosegarden and was glad to follow him. ‘This is a new Narouz’ he kept repeating softly, with genuine mystification. ‘I did not know of these powers.’ Later Narouz came back to the house in the highest of spirits and we all played cards and drank arak. He showed me, with immense pride, a gun he had had made for him in Munich. It fires a heavy javelin under water and is worked by compressed air.

He told me a good deal of this new method of fishing under water.

It sounded a thrilling game and I was invited to visit his fishing island with him one week-end to have a pot. The preacher had vanished altogether by now; the simple-minded second son had returned.

Ouf! I am trying to get all the salient detail down as it may be of use to you later when I am gone. Sorry if it is a bore. On the way back to the town I talked at length to Nessim and got all the facts clear in my head. It did seem to me that from the policy point of view the Coptic group might be of the greatest use to us; and I was certain that this interpretation of things would be swallowed if properly explained to Maskelyne. High hopes!

So I rode back happily to Cairo to rearrange the chessboard accordingly. I went to see Maskelyne and tell him the good news.

To my surprise he turned absolutely white with rage, the corners of his nose pinched in, his ears moving back about an inch like a greyhound. His voice and eyes remained the same. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you have tried to supplement a secret intelligence paper by consulting the subject of it? It goes against every elementary rule of intelligence. And how can you believe a word of so obvious a cover story? I have never heard of such a thing. You deliberately suspend a War Office paper, throw my fact-finding organization into disrepute, pretend we don’t know our jobs, etc….’ You can gather the rest of the tirade. I began to get angry. He repeated dryly: ‘I have been doing this for fifteen years. I tell you it smells of arms, of subversion. You won’t believe my I.A. and I think yours is ridiculous. Why not pass the paper to the Egyptians and let them find out for themselves?’ Of course I could not afford to do this, and he knew it. He next said that he had asked the War Office to protest in London and was writing to Errol to ask for ‘redress’. All this, of course, was to be expected.