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By Root 14222 0

fragments, the pictures turned back to front, the carpets reversed. All the china and glass in the house — save for the ceremonial black coffee set which was kept for funerals — was now broken up, trampled on, shivered to atoms. It was all swept into a great mound on the balcony. Everything that might suggest the order and continuity of earthly life, domestic, personal or social, must be discarded now and obliterated. The systematic destruction of the memory of death itself in plates, pictures, ornaments or clothes…. The dom-estic furnishings of the house were-completely wrecked now, and everything that remained had been covered in black drapes. Meanwhile, down below a great coloured tent had been pitched, a marquee, in which visiting mourners would come and sit through the whole of the ‘Night of Loneliness’ drink ing coffee in silence from the black cups and listening to the deep thrilling moaning up above which swelled up from time to time into a new outbreak of screaming or the noise of a woman fainting, or rolling on the ground in a seizure. Nothing must be spared to make this great man’s funeral successful.

Other mourners too had now begun to appear, both personal and professional, so to speak; those who had a personal stake in the funeral of a friend came to spend the night in the coloured marquee under the brilliant light. But there were others, the professional mourners of the surrounding villages for whom

death was something like a public competition in the poetry of mourning; they came on foot, in carts, on camel-back. And as each entered the gate of the house she set up a long shivering cry, like an orgasm, that stirred the griefs of the other mourners anew, so that they responded from every corner of the house — the low sobbing notes gradually swelling into a blood-curdling and sus-tained tongue-trill that pierced the nerves. These professional mourners brought with them all the wild poetry of their caste, of memories loaded with years of death-practice. They were often young and beautiful. They were singers. They carried with them the ritual drums and tambourines to which they danced and which they used to punctuate their own grief and stimulate the flagging griefs of those who had already been in action. ‘Praise the inmate of the House’ they cried proudly as with superb and calculated slowness they began their slow dance about the body, turning and twisting in an ecstasy of pity as they recited eulogies couched in the finest poetic Arabic upon Narouz. They praised his character, his rectitude, his beauty, his riches. And these long perfectly turned strophes were punctuated by the sobs and groans of the audience, both above and below; so vul-nerable to poetry, even the old men seated on the stiff-backed chairs in the tent below found their throats tightening until a dry sob broke from their lips and they hung their heads, whispering

‘ Ma-a-lesh. ’

Among them, Mohammed Shebab, the old schoolmaster and friend of the Hosnanis, had pride of place. He was dressed in his best and even wore a pair of ancient pearl spats with a new scarlet tarbush. The memory of forgotten evenings which he had spent on the balcony of the old house listening to music with Nessim and Narouz, gossiping to Leila, smote him now with pain which was not feigned. And since the people of the Delta often use a wake as an excuse to discharge private griefs in communal mourning, he too found himself thinking of his dead sister and sobbing, and he turned to the servant, pressing money into his hand as he said: ‘Ask Alam the singer to sing the recitative of the Image of Women once more, please. I wish to mourn it through again.’ And as the great poem began, he leaned back luxuriously swollen with the refreshment of a sorrow which would achieve catharsis thus in poetry. There were others too who asked for

their favourite laments to be sung, offering the singers the re-quisite payment. In this way the whole grief of the countryside was refunded once again into living, purged of bitterness, re-conquered by the living through the dead image