The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [16]
At the fort we doubled back and entered the huddled slums which lie behind Tatwig Street, our blond headlights picking out the ant-hill cafés and crowded squares with an unaccustomed radiance; from somewhere behind the immediate skyline of smashed and unlimbered houses came the piercing shrieks and ululations of a burial procession, whose professional mourners made the night hideous with their plaints for the dead. We aban-doned the car in a narrow street by the mosque and Nessim entered the shadowy doorway of some great tenement house, half of which consisted of shuttered and barred offices with blurred nameplates. A solitary boab (the concierge of Egypt) sat on his perch wrapped in clouts, for all the world like some discarded material object (an old motor tyre, say) — smoking a short-stemmed hubble-bubble. Nessim spoke to him sharply, and al-most before the man could reply passed through the back of the building into a sort of dark backyard flanked by a series of dilapi-dated houses built of earth-brick and scaly plaster. He stopped only to light his cigarette-lighter, and by its feeble light we began to quest
along the doors. At the fourth door he clicked the machine shut and knocked with his fist. Receiving no answer he pushed it open. A dark corridor led to a small shadowy room lit by the feeble light of rush-lamps. This was apparently our destination. The scene upon which we intruded was ferociously original, if for no other reason than that the light, pushing up from the mud floor, touched out the eyebrows and lips and cheek-bones of the participants while it left great patches of shadow on their faces —
so that they looked as if they had been half-eaten by the rats which one could hear scrambling among the rafters of this wretched tenement. It was a house of child prostitutes, and there in the dim-ness, clad in ludicrous biblical night-shirts, with rouged lips, arch bead fringes and cheap rings, stood a dozen fuzzy-haired girls who could not have been much above ten years of age; the peculiar innocence of childhood which shone out from under the fancy-dress was in startling contrast to the barbaric adult figure of the French sailor who stood in the centre of the room on flexed calves, his ravaged and tormented face thrust out from the neck towards Justine who stood with her half-profile turned towards us. What he had just shouted had expired on the silence but the force with which the words had been uttered was still visible in the jut of the chin and the black corded muscles which held his head upon his shoulders. As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision. She held a bottle raised in one hand, and it was clear that she had never thrown one before, for she held it the wrong way.
On a rotting sofa in one corner of the room, magnetically lit by the warm shadow reflected from the walls, lay one of the children horribly shrunk up in its nightshirt in an attitude which suggested death. The wall above the sofa was covered in the blue imprints of juvenile hands — the talisman which in this part of the world guards a house against the evil eye. It was the only decoration in the room; indeed the commonest decoration of the whole Arab quarter of the city.
We stood there, Nessim and I, for a good half-second, aston-ished by the scene which had a sort of horrifying beauty — like some hideous coloured engraving for a Victorian penny bible, say, whose subject matter had somehow become distorted