The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [323]
rage there was also guilt; he felt unclean, as if he had debauched himself in this unexpected battle with one of his own kin. He drove slowly back to the city, feeling the luxurious tears of a new ex-haustion, a new self-pity, rolling down his cheeks. How strange it was that he had somehow, inexplicably, fore-seen this irreparable break with his brother — from the first discreet phrases of Serapamoun he had divined it and feared it. It raised once more the spectre of duties and responsibilities to causes which he himself had initiated and must now serve. Ideally, then, he should be prepared in such a crisis to disown Narouz, to depose Narouz, even if necessary to … him! (He slammed on the brakes of the car, brought it to a standstill, and sat muttering. He had censored the thought in his mind, for the hundredth time. But the nature of the undertaking should be clear enough to any-one in a similar situation. He had never understood Narouz, he thought wistfully. But then, you do not have to understand some-one in order to love them. His hold had not really been deep, founded in understanding: it had been conferred by the family conventions to which both belonged. And now the tie had suddenly snapped.) He struck the wheel of the car with aching palms and cried ‘I shall never harm him.’
He threw in the clutch, repeating ‘Never’ over and over again in his mind. Yet he knew this decision to be another weakness, for in it his love traduced his own ideal of duty. But here his alter ego came to his rescue with soothing formulations such as: ‘It is really not so serious. We shall, of course, have to disband the movement temporarily. Later I shall ask Serapamoun to start something similar. We can isolate and expel this … fanatic’
He had never fully realized before how much he loved this hated brother whose mind had now become distended by dreams whose religious poetry conferred upon their Egypt a new, an ideal future. ‘We must seek to embody the frame of the eternal in nature here upon earth, in our hearts, in this very Egypt of ours.’ That is what Narouz had said, among so many other things which filled the fragmentary transcription which Serapamoun had ordered to be made. ‘We must wrestle here on earth against the secular injustice, and in our hearts against the injustice of a divinity which respects only man’s struggle to possess his own soul.’ Were these simply the ravings of Taor, or were they part of a shared dream of
which the ignorant fanatic had spoken? Other phrases, barbed with the magnificence of poetry, came into his mind. ‘To rule is to be ruled; but ruler and ruled must have a divine consciousness of their role, of their inheritance in the Divine. The mud of Egypt rises to choke our lungs, the lungs with which we cry to living God.’
He had a sudden picture of that contorted face, the little gasping vo ice in which Narouz had, that first day of his possession, invoked the divine spirit to visit him with a declared truth.
‘ Meded! Meded! ’ He shuddered. And then it slowly came upon him that in a paradoxical sort of way Narouz was right in his desire to inflame the sleeping will — for he saw the world, not so much as a political chessboard but as a pulse beating within a greater will which only the poetry of the psalms could invoke and body forth. To awaken not merely the impulses of the forebrain with its limited formulations, but the sleeping beauty underneath —
the poetic consciousness