The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [177]
heroes like Abu Zeid and Antar, lovers like Yuna and Aziz. He walked slow ly, with an unpremeditated carelessness, stopping for a while to hear the storytellers, or to buy a lucky talisman from the famous blind preacher Hussein who stood like an oak tree, mag-nificent in the elf-light, reciting the ninety-nine holy names. From the outer perimeter of darkness came the crisp click of sportsmen at singlestick, dimly sound ing against the hoarse rumble of the approaching procession with its sudden bursts of wild music
— kettle-drums and timbrels like volleys of musketry — and the lon g be lly-thrilling rolls of the camel-drums which drowned and refreshed the quavering deep-throated flute-music. ‘They are com-ing. They are coming.’ A confused shouting rose and the children darted here and there like mice among the stalls. From the throat of a narrow alley, spilled like a widening circle of fire upon the darkness, burst a long tilting gallery of human beings headed by the leaping acrobats and dwarfs of Alexandria, and followed at a dancing measure by the long grotesque cavalcade of gonfalons, rising and falling in a tide of mystical fight, treading the peristaltic measures of the wild music — nibbled out everywhere by the tattling flutes and the pang of drums or the long shivering orgasm of tambou-
rines struck by the dervishes in their habits as they moved towards the site of the festival. ‘All- ah, All- ah’ burst from every throat. Narouz took a stick of sugar-cane from a stall and nibbled it as he watched the wave moving forward to engulf him. Here came the Rifiya dervishes, who could in their trances walk upon embers or drink molten glass or eat live scorpions — or dance the turning measure of the universe out, until reality ran down like an over-wound spring and they fell gasping to the earth, dazed like birds. The banners and torches, the great openwork braziers full of burn-ing wood, the great paper lanterns inscribed with texts, they made staggering loops and patterns of light upon the darkness of the Alexandrian night, rising and falling, and now the pitches were swollen with spectators, worrying at the procession like mastiffs, screaming and pulling; and still the flood poured on with its own wild music (perhaps the very music that the dying Antony in Cavafy’s poem heard) until it engulfed the darkness of the great meidan, spreading around it the fitful contours of robes and faces and objects without context but whose colours sprang up and darkened the edges of the sky with colour. Human beings were setting fire to each other.
Somewhere in that black hinterland of smashed and tumbled masonry, of abandoned and disembowelled houses, was a small garden with a tomb in it marking the site which was the sum and meaning of this riot. And here, before a glimmering taper would be read a Christian prayer for a Christian saint, while all around rode the dark press and flood of Alexandria. The dozen faiths and religions shared a celebration which time had sanctified, which was made common to all and dedicated to a season and a landscape, completely obliterating its canon referents in lore and code. To a religious country all religions were one and while the faithful uttered prayers for a chosen saint, the populace enjoyed the fair which had grown up around the celebration, a rocking carnival of light and music.
And through it all (sudden reminders of the city itself and the full-grown wants and powers of a great entrepôt) came the whistle of steam-engines from the dark goods-yards or a sniff of sound from the siren of a liner, negotiating the tortuous fairways of the harbour as it set off for