The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [148]
stitches of black, green, maroon and white. Long tassels hung down from the seams, playing in the wind.
The Sheik and his sons, like a gallery of playing cards, awaited them with the conventional greetings to which Narouz at least knew every response. The Sheik himself conducted them to a tent saying ‘This house is your house; do as you please. We are your servants.’ And behind him pressed the water-carriers to bathe their hands and feet and faces — the latter now somewhat dry and blistered by the journey. They rested for at least an hour, for the heat of the day was at full, in that brown darkness. Narouz lay snoring upon the cushions with arms and legs outspread while Nessim dozed fitfully, awakening from time to time to watch him
— the effortless progress of sleep which physical surrender to action always brings. He brooded upon his brother’s ugliness —
the magnificent set of white teeth showing through the pink rent in his upper lip. From time to time, too, as they rested, the head-men of the tribe called noiselessly, taking off their shoes at the entrance of the tent, to enter and kiss Nessim’s hand. Each uttered the single word of welcome ‘ Mahubbah’ in a whisper. It was late in the afternoon when Narouz woke and calling for water doused his body down, asking at the same time for a change of clothes which were at once brought to him by the Sheik’s eldest son. He strode out into the heat of the sand saying: ‘Now for the colt. It may take a couple of hours? You won’t mind? We’ll be back a bit late, eh?’ Cushions had been set for them in the shade and here Nessim was glad to recline and watch his brother moving quickly across the dazzle of sand towards a group of colts which had been driven up for him to examine.
They played gracefully and innocently, the tossing of their heads and manes seeming to him ‘like the surf of the June sea’ as the proverb has it. Narouz stopped keenly as he neared them, watch-ing. Then he shouted something and a man raced out to him with a bridle and bit. ‘The white one’ he cried hoarsely and the Sheik’s sons shouted a response which Nessim did not catch. Narouz turned again, and softly with a queer ducking discretion, slipped in among the young creatures and almost before one could think was astride a white colt after having bridled it with a single almost inv isible gesture.
The mythical creature stood quite still, its eyes wide and lustrous as if fully to comprehend this tremendous new intelligence of a rider upon its back, then a slow shudder rippled through its flesh — the tides of the panic which always greets such a collision of human and animal worlds. Horse and rider stood as if posing for a statue, buried in thought.
Now the animal suddenly gave a low whistling cry of fear, shook itself and completed a dozen curious arching jumps, stiffly as a mechanical toy, coming down savagely on its forelegs each time with the downthrust. This did not dislodge Narouz who only leaned forward and growled something in its ear that drove it frantic for it now set off at a ragged plunging tossing canter, turn-ing and curvetting and duc king. They made a slow irregular circle round the tents until at last they came back to where the crowd of Arabs stood at the doorway of the main tent, watching silent ly. And now the poor creature, as if aware that some great portion of its real life — its childhood perhaps — was irrevocably over, gave another low whistling groan and broke suddenly into the long tire-less flying gallop of its breed, aimed like a shooting-star to pierce the very sky, and whirled away across the dunes with its rider secured to it by the powerful