Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet

Mountolive sat down with the air of someone making a grudging concession to the law of gravity and ordered a meal in his excellent Arabic, though he still kept his dark glasses and tarbush on. It was clear now that he could pass easily for a Moslem. The cafe owner was a great bald Tartar-faced Turk who served his visitor at once and without comment. He also set up a tumbler beside Mountolive’s plate and without uttering a word filled it to the brim with the colourless arak made from the mastic-tree which is called mastika. Mountolive choked and spluttered a bit over it, but he was highly delighted — for it was the first drink of the Levant he had ever tasted and he had forgotten its existence for years now.

Forgetting also how strong it was, and overcome with nostalgia, he ordered himself a second glass to help him finish the excellent hot pilaff and the pigeon (so hot from the spit that he could hardly bear to pick it up with his fingers). But he was in the seventh heaven of delight now. He was on the way to recovering, to restoring the blurred image of an Egypt which the meeting with Leila had damaged or somehow stolen from him.

The street outside was full of the shivering of tambourines and the voices of children raised in a chanting sort of litany; they were going about the shops in groups, repeating the same little verse over and over again. After three repetitions he managed to disentangle the words. Of course!

Lord of the shaken tree Of Man’s extremity Keep thou our small leaves firm On branches free from harm For we thy little children be!

‘Well I’m damned’ he said, swallowing a fiery mouthful of arak and smiling as the meaning of the little processions became clear.

There was a venerable old sheik sitting opposite by the window and smoking a long-shanked narguileh. He waved towards the din with his graceful old hand and cried: ‘Allah! The noise of the children!’ Mountolive smiled back at him and said: ‘Inform me if I err, sir, but it is for El Sird they cry, is it not?’ The old man’s face lit up and he nodded, smiling his saintly smile. ‘You have guessed it truly, sir.’ Mountolive was pleased with himself and filled ever more deeply with nostalgia for those half-forgotten years. ‘Tonight then’ he said ‘it must be mid-Shaaban and the Tree of Extremity is to be shaken. Is that not so?’ Once more a delighted nod. ‘Who knows’ said the old sheik ‘but that both our names may be written on the falling leaves?’ He puffed softly and contentedly, like a toy train. ‘Allah’s will be done.’ The belief is that on the eve of mid-Shaaban the Lote Tree of Paradise is shaken, and the falling leaves of the tree bear the names of all who will die in the coming year. This is called the Tree of Extremity in some texts. Mountolive was so pleased by the identification of the little song that he called for a final glass of arak which he drank standing up as he paid his reckoning. The old sheik abandoned his pipe and came slowly towards him through the smoke. He said: ‘Effendi mine, I understand your purpose here. What you seek will be revealed to you by me.’ He placed two brown fingers on Mountolive’s wrist, speaking modestly and softly, as one who had secrets to impart. His face had all the candour and purity of some desert saint. Mountolive was delighted by him. ‘Honoured sheik’ he said ‘divulge your sense, then, to an unworthy Syrian visitor.’ The old man bowed twice, looked circumspectly round the place, and then said: ‘Be good enough to follow me, honoured sir.’ He kept his two fingers on Mountolive’s wrist as a blind man might. They stepped into the street together; Mountolive’s romantic heart was beating wildly — was he now to be vouchsafed some mystical vision of religious truth? He had so often heard stories of the bazaars and the religious men who lurked there, waiting to fulfil secret missions on behalf of that unseen world, the numinous, carefully guarded world of the hermetic doctors. They walked in a soft cloud of unknowing with the silent sheik swaying and recovering himself at every few paces and smiling a maudlin smile of beatitude. They passed together at this slow pace through the dark streets — now turned by the night to long shadowy tunnels or shapeless caverns, still dimly echoing to muffled bagpipe music or skirmishing voices muted by thick walls and barred windows.

Mountolive’s heightened sense of wonder responded to the beauty and mystery of this luminous township of shadows carved here and there into recognizable features by a single naphtha lamp or an electric bulb hanging from a frail stalk, rocking in the wind. They turned at last down a long street spanned with coloured banners and thence into a courtyard which was completely dark where the earth smelt vaguely of the stale of camels and jasmine. A house loomed up, set within thick walls; one caught a glimpse of its silhouette on the sky. They entered a sort of rambling barrack of a place passing through a tall door which was standing ajar, and plunged into a darkness still more absolute.

Stood breathing for half a second in silence. Mountolive felt rather than saw the worm-eaten staircases which climbed the walls to the abandoned upper floors, heard the chirrup and scramble of the rats in the deserted galleries, together with something else — a sound vaguely reminiscent of human beings, but in what context he could not quite remember. They shuffled slowly down a long corridor upon woodwork so rotten that it rocked and swayed under their feet, and here, in a doorway of some sort, the old sheik said kindly: ‘That our simple satisfactions should not be less than those of your homeland, effendi mine, I have brought you here.’ He added in a whisper, ‘Attend me here a moment, if you will.’ Mountolive felt the fingers leave his wrist and the breath of the door closing at his shoulder. He stayed in composed and trustful silence for a moment or two.

Then all at once the darkness was so complete that the light, when it did come, gave him the momentary illusion of something taking place very far away, in the sky. As if someone had opened and closed a furnace-door in Heaven. It was only the spark of a match. But in the soft yellow flap he saw that he was standing in a gaunt high chamber with shattered and defaced walls covered in graffiti and the imprint of dark palms — signs which guard the superstitious against the evil eye. It was empty save for an enormous broken sofa which lay in the centre of the floor, like a sarcophagus. A single window with all the panes of glass broken was slowly printing the bluer darkness of the starry sky upon his sight. He stared at the flapping, foundering light, and again heard the rats chirping and the other curious susurrus composed of whispers and chuckles and the movement of bare feet on boards.

… Suddenly he thought of a girls’ dormitory at a school: and as if invented by the very thought itself, through the open door at the end of the room trooped a crowd of small figures dressed in white soiled robes, like defeated angels. He had stumbled into a house of child prostitutes, he realized with a sudden spasm of disgust and pity. Their little faces were heavily painted, their hair scragged in ribbons and plaits. They wore green beads against the evil eye. Such little creatures as one has seen incised on Greek vases — floating out of tombs and charnel houses with the sad air of malefactors fleeing from justice. It was the foremost of the group who carried the light — a twist of string burning in a saucer of olive oil. She stooped to place this feeble will-o-the-wisp on the floor in the corner and at once the long spiky shadows of these children sprawled on the ceiling like an army of frustrated wills. ‘No, by Allah’ said Mountolive hoarsely, and turned to grope at the closed door. There was a wooden latch with no means of opening it on his side. He put his face to a hole in the panel and called softly ‘O sheik, where are you?’ The little figures had advanced and surrounded him now, murmuring the pitiable obscenities and endearments of their trade in the voices of heartbroken angels; he felt their warm nimble fingers on his shoulders, picking at the sleeves of his coat. ‘O sheik’ he called again, shrinking up, ‘it was not for this.’ But there was a silence beyond the door. He felt the children’s sharp arms twining round his waist like lianas in a tropical jungle, their sharp little fingers prying for the buttons of his coat. He shook them off and turned his pale face to them, making a half-articulate sound of protest.