The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [352]
‘Well I’m damned’ he said, swallowing a fiery mouthful of arak and smiling as the meaning of the little processions became clear. There was a venerable old sheik sitting opposite by the window and smoking a long-shanked narguileh. He waved towards the din with his graceful old hand and cried: ‘Allah! The noise of the children!’ Mountolive smiled back at him and said: ‘Inform me
if I err, sir, but it is for El Sird they cry, is it not?’ The old man’s face lit up and he nodded, smiling his saintly smile. ‘You have guessed it truly, sir.’ Mountolive was pleased with himself and filled ever more deeply with nostalgia for those half-forgotten years. ‘Tonight then’ he said ‘it must be mid-Shaaban and the Tree of Extremity is to be shaken. Is that not so?’
Once more a delighted nod. ‘Who knows’ said the old sheik ‘but that both our names may be written on the falling leaves?’ He puffed softly and contentedly, like a toy train. ‘Allah’s will be done.’
The belief is that on the eve of mid-Shaaban the Lote Tree of Paradise is shaken, and the falling leaves of the tree bear the names of all who will die in the coming year. This is called the Tree of Extremity in some texts. Mountolive was so pleased by the identification of the little song that he called for a final glass of arak which he drank standing up as he paid his reckoning. The old sheik abandoned his pipe and came slowly towards him through the smoke. He said: ‘Effendi mine, I understand your purpose here. What you seek will be revealed to you by me.’ He placed two brown fingers on Mountolive’s wrist, speaking modestly and softly, as one who had secrets to impart. His face had all the candour and purity of some desert saint. Mountolive was de-lighted by him. ‘Honoured sheik’ he said ‘divulge your sense, then, to an unworthy Syrian visitor.’ The old man bowed twice, looked circumspectly round the place, and then said: ‘Be good enough to follow me, honoured sir.’ He kept his two fingers on Mountolive’s wrist as a blind man might. They stepped into the street together; Mountolive’s romantic heart was beating wildly
— was he now to be vouchsafed some mystical vision of religious truth? He had so often heard stories of the bazaars and the religious men who lurked there, waiting to fulfil secret missions on behalf of that unseen world, the numinous, carefully guarded world of the hermetic doctors. They walked in a soft cloud of unknowing with the silent sheik swaying and recovering himself at every few paces and smiling a maudlin smile of beatitude. They passed together at this slow pace through the dark streets — now turned by the night to long shadowy tunnels or shapeless caverns, still dimly echoing to muffled bagpipe music or skirmishing voices muted by thick walls and barred windows.
Mountolive’s heightened sense of wonder responded to the beauty and mystery of this luminous township of shadows carved here and there into recognizable features by a single naphtha lamp or an electric bulb hanging from a frail stalk, rocking in the wind. They turned at last down a long street spanned with coloured banners and thence into a courtyard which was com-pletely dark where the earth smelt vaguely of the stale of camels and jasmine. A house loomed up, set within thick walls; one caught a glimpse of its silhouette on the sky. They entered a sort of rambling barrack of a place passing through a tall door which was standing ajar, and plunged into a darkness still more absolute. Stood breathing for half a second in silence. Mountolive felt rather than saw the worm-eaten staircases which climbed the walls to the abandoned upper floors, heard the chirrup and scramble of the rats in the deserted galleries, together with something else —
a sound vaguely reminiscent of human beings, but in what context he could not quite remember. They shuffled slowly down a long corridor upon woodwork so rotten that it rocked and swayed under their feet, and here, in a doorway of some sort, the old sheik said kindly: ‘That our simple satisfactions should not be less than those of your