The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [346]
tarmac, its heat now slaked by a light rain. Time to throttle down….
He entered the penumbra of the storm slowly, marvelling at the light, at the horizon drawn back like a bow. Odd gleams of sunshine scattered rubies upon the battleships in the basin (squatting under their guns like horned toads). It was the ancient city again; he felt its pervading melancholy under the rain as he crossed it on his way to the Summer Residence. The brilliant unfamiliar lighting of the thunder-storm re-created it, giving it a spectral, story-book air — broken pavements made of tinfoil, snail-shells, cracked horn, mica; earth-brick buildings turned to the colour of ox-blood; the lovers wandering in Mohammed Ali Square, disoriented by the unfamiliar rain, disconsolate as un-tuned instruments; the clicking of violet trams along the sea-front among the tatting of palm-fronds. The desuetude of an ancient city whose streets were plastered with the wet blown dust of the surrounding desert. He felt it all anew, letting it extend panor-amically in his consciousness — the moan of a liner edging out towards the sunset bar, or the trains which flowed like a torrent of diamonds towards the interior, their wheels chattering among the shingle ravines and the powder of temples long since abandoned and silted up….
Mountolive saw it all now with a world-weariness which he at last recognized as the stripe which maturity lays upon the shoulders of an adult — the stigma of the experiences which age one. The wind spouted in the harbour. The corridors of wet rigging swayed and shook like the foliage of some great tree. Now the tears were trickling down the windscreen under the diligent and noiseless wipers…. A little period in this strange contused dark-ness, fitfully lit by lightning, and then the wind would come — the magistral north wind, punching and squeezing the sea into its own characteristic plumage of white crests, knocking open the firmament until the faces of men and women once more reflected the open winter sky. He was in plenty of time.
He drove to the Summer Residence to make sure that the staff had been warned of his arrival; he intended to stay the night and return to Cairo on the morrow. He let himself into the front door with his own key, having pressed the bell, and stood listening for the shuffle of Ali. And as he heard the old man’s step
approaching, the north wind arrived with a roar, stiffening the windows in their frames, and the rain stopped abruptly as if it had been turned off.
He had still an hour or so before the rendezvous: comfortable time in which to have a bath and change his clothes. To his own surprise, he felt perfectly at ease now, no longer tormented by doubts or elated by a sense of relief. He had put himself un-reservedly in the hands of chance. He ate a sandwich and drank two strong whiskies before setting out and letting the great car slide softly down the Grande Corniche towards the Auberge Bleue which lay towards the outskirts of the town, fringed by patches of dune and odd clusters of palm. The sky was clear again now and the whitecaps were racing ashore to bang themselves in showers of spray upon the metal piers of Chatby. At the horizon