The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [273]
‘Our Egypt, our beloved country’ drawing out the words like toffee, almost crooning them. It was clear that he had nothing
prepared to say — it was not a speech, it was an invocation uttered extempore such as one has sometimes heard — the brilliant spontaneous flight of drunkards, ballad singers, or those profes-sional mourners who follow burial processions with their shrieks of death-divining poe try. The power and the tension flooded out of him into the room; all of us were electrified, even myself whose Arabic was so bad! The tone, the range and the bottled ferocity and tenderness his words conveyed hit us, sent us sprawling, like music. It didn’t seem to matter whether we understood them or nor. It does not even now. Indeed, it would have been impossible to paraphrase the matter. ‘The Nile … the green river flow ing in our hearts hears its children. They will return to her. Descendants of the Pharaohs, children of Ra, offspring of St Mark. They will find the birthplace of light.’ And so on. At times the speaker closed his eyes, letting the torrent of words pour on unhindered. Once he set his head back, smiling like a dog, still with eyes closed, until the light shone upon his back teeth. That voice! It went on autono-mously, rising to a roar, sinking to a whisper, trembling and crooning and wailing. Suddenly snapping out words like chainshot, or rolling them softly about like honey. We were absolutely captured — the whole lot of us. But it was something comical to see Nessim’s concern and wonder. He had expected nothing like this apparently for he was trembling like a leaf and quite white. Occasionally he was swept away himself by the flood of rhetoric and I saw him dash away a tear from his eye almost impatient ly. It went on like this for about three-quarters of an hour and sudde nly, ine xplicably, the current was cut off, the speaker was snuffed out. Narouz stood there gasping like a fish before us —
as if thrown up by the tides of inner music on to a foreign shore. It was as abrupt as a metal shutter coming down — a silence impossible to repair again. His hands knotted again. He gave a startled groan and rushed out of the place with his funny scram-bling motion. A tremendous silence fell — the silence which follows some great performance by an actor or orchestra — the germinal silence in which you can hear the very seeds in the human psyche stirring, trying to move towards the light of self-recognition. I was deeply moved and utterly exhausted. Fecundated!
At last Nessim rose and made an indefinite gesture. He too was exhausted and walked like an old man; took my hand and led me up into the church again, where a wild hullabaloo of cymbals and bells had broken out. We walked through the great puffs of incense which now seemed to blow up at us from the centre of the earth — the angel and demon-haunted spaces below the world of men. In the moonlight he kept repeating: ‘I never knew, I never guessed this of Narouz. He is a preacher. I asked him only to talk of our history — but he made it …’ He was at a loss for words. Nobody had apparently suspected the existence of this spell-binder in their midst — the man with the whip! ‘He could lead a great religious movement’ I thought to myself. Nessim walked wearily and thoughtfully by my side among the palms.
‘He is a preacher, really’ he said with amazement. ‘That is why he goes to see Taor.’ He explained that Narouz often rode into the desert to visit a famous woman saint (alleged by the way to have three breasts) who lives in a tiny cave near Wadi Natrun; she is famous for her wonder-working cures, but won’t emerge from obscurity. ‘When he is away’ said Nessim, ‘he has either gone to the island to fish with his new gun or to see Taor. Always one or the other.’
When we got back to the tent the new preacher was lying wrapped in his blanket sobbing in a harsh voice like a wounded she-camel. He stopped