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By Root 14035 0

I could not tell. Yes, I had: seeing the old crumbled arch of El Bab I smiled, remembering a now pre-historic kiss upon my fingers. I remembered the slight flinch of the dark eyes as she uttered the sad brave truth: ‘One learns nothing from those who return our love.’ Words which burnt like surgical spirit on an open wound, but which cleansed, as all truth does. And busy with these memories as I was, I saw with another part of my mind the whole of Alexandria unrolling once more on either side of me — its captivating detail, its insolence of colouring, its crushing poverty and beauty. The little shops, protected from the sun by bits of ragged awning in whose darkness was piled up every kind of merchandise from live quail to honeycombs and lucky mirrors. The fruit-stalls with their brilliant stock made doubly brilliant by being displayed upon brighter papers; the warm gold of oranges lying on brilliant slips of magenta and crimson-lake. The smoky glitter of the coppersmiths’ caves. Gaily tasselled camel-saddlery. Pottery and blue jade beads against the Evil Eye. All this given a sharp prismatic brilliance by the crowds milling back and forth, the blare of the café radios, the hawkers’

long sobbing cries, the imprecations of street-arabs, and the demented ululations of distant mourners setting forth at a jog-trot behind the corpse of some notable sheik. And here, strolling in the foreground of the painting with the insolence of full pos-session, came plum-blue Ethiopians in snowy turbans, bronze Sudanese with puffy charcoal lips, pewter-skinned Lebanese and

Bedouin with the profiles of kestrels, woven like brilliant threads upon the monotonous blackness of the veiled women, the dark Moslem dream of the hidden Paradise which may only be glimpsed through the key-hole of the human eye. And lurching down these narrow streets with their packs scraping the mud walls plunged the sumpter camels with cargoes of green clover, putting down their huge soft pads with infinite delicacy. I suddenly remembered Scobie giving me a lesson on the priority of salutation: ‘You must realize that it’s a question of form. They’re regular Britishers for politeness, my boy. No good throwing your Salaam Aleikum around just anyhow. It must be given first by a camel-rider to a man on a horse, by a horseman to a man on a donkey, by a donkey-rider to a man on foot, by a man on foot to a man seated, by a small party to a large one, by the younger to the older…. It’s only in the great schools at home they teach such things. But here every nipper has it at his fingers’ ends. Now repeat the order of battle after me!’ It was easier to repeat the phrase than to re-member the order at this remove in time. Smiling at the thought, I strove to re-establish those forgotten priorities from memory, while I gazed about me. The whole toybox of Egyptian life was still there, every figure in place — street-sprinkler, scribe, mour-ner, harlot, clerk, priest — untouched, it seemed, by time or by war. A sudden melancholy invaded me as I watched them, for they had now become a part of the past. My sympathy had dis-covered a new element inside itself — detachment. (Scobie used to say, in an expansive moment: ‘Cheer up, me boyo, it takes a lifetime to grow. People haven’t the patience any more. My mother waited nine months for me!’ A singular thought.) Jolting past the Goharri Mosque I remembered finding one-eyed Hamid there one afternoon rubbing a slice of lemon on a pilaster before sucking it. This, he had said, was an infallible specific against the stone. He used to live somewhere in this quarter with its humble cafés full of native splendours like rose-scented drinking water and whole sheep turning on spits, stuffed with pigeons, rice, nuts. All the paunch-beguiling meals which delighted the ventripotent pashas of the city!

Somewhere up here, skirting the edge of the Arab quarter the tram gives a leap and grinds round abruptly. You can for one moment look down through the frieze of shattered buildings into

the corner of the harbour reserved for craft of shallow