• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 13969 0

experience and became for him almost a companion of his own age, sharing a complicity which somehow seemed so innocent, so beyond reproach, that even his sense of guilt was almost lulled, and he began to drink in through her a new resolution and self-confidence. He told himself with equal resolution that he also must respect her reservations and not fall in love, but this kind of dis-sociation is impossible for the young. He could not distinguish between his own various emotional needs, between passion-love and the sort of romance fed on narcissism. His desire strangled him. He could not qualify it. And here his English education hampered him at every step. He could not even feel happy without feeling guilty. But all this he did not know very clearly: he only half-guessed that he had discovered more than a lover, more than an accomplice. Leila was not only more experienced; to his utter chagrin he found that she was even better read, in his own language, than he was, and better instructed. But, as a model companion and lover, she never let him feel it. There are so many resources open to a woman of experience. She took refuge always in a tender-ness which expressed itself in teasing. She chided his ignorance and provoked his curiosity. And she was amused by the effect of her passion on him — those kisses which fell burning like spittle upon a hot iron. Through her eyes he began to see Egypt once more

— but extended through a new dimension. To have a grasp of the language was nothing, he now realized; for Leila exposed the hollowness of the knowledge when pitted against understand ing. An inveterate note-taker by habit, he found his little pocket diary now swollen with the data which emerged from their long rides together, but it was always data which concerned the country, for he did not dare to put down a single word about his feelings or so much as record even Leila’s name. In this manner:

‘ Sunday. Riding through a poor fly-blown village my companion points to marks like cuneiform scratched on the walls of houses and asks if I can read them. Like a fool I say no, but perhaps they are Amharic? Laughter. Explanation is that a venerable pedlar who travels through here every six months carries a special henna from Medina, much esteemed here by virtue of its connection with the holy city. People are mostly too poor to pay, so he extends credit, but lest he or they forget, marks his tally on the clay wall with a sherd.

‘ Monday. Ali says that shooting stars are stones thrown by the angels in heaven to drive off evil djinns when they try to eavesdrop on the conversations in Paradise and learn the secrets of the future. All Arabs terrified of the desert, even Bedouin. Strange.

‘ Also: the pause in conversation which we call “Angels Passing”

is greeted another way. After a moment of silence one says: “Wahed Dhu” or “One is God” and then the whole company repeats fervently in response “La Illah Illa Allah” or “No God but one God” before normal conversation is resumed. These little habits are extremely taking.

‘ Also: my host uses a curious phrase when he speaks of retiring from business. He calls it “making his soul” .

‘ Also: have never before tasted the Yemen coffee with a speck of ambergris to each cup. It is delicious.

‘ Also: Mohammed Shebab offered me on meeting a touch of jasmine-scent from a phial with a glass stopper — as we would offer a cigarette in Europe.

‘ Also: they love birds. In a tumbledown cemetery I saw graves with little drinking-wells cut in the marble for them which my companion told me were filled on Friday visits by women of the village.

‘ Also: Ali, the Negro factor, an immense eunuch, told me that they feared above all blue eyes and red hair as evil signs. Odd that the examining angels in the Koran as their most repulsive features have blue eyes’

So the young Mountolive noted and pondered upon the

strange ways of the people among whom he had come to live, painstakingly as befitted a student of manners so remote from his own; yet also in a kind of ecstasy to find a sort of poetic correspondence