The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [73]
seem that he had been making a pilgrimage on foot to the little shrine of St Menas situated to the west when he had stumbled upon the oasis. At any rate there seemed nothing fortuitous about his decision to adopt it. He fitted it to perfection, and for a small salary stayed there all the year round as watchman and gardener. He was an able-bodied little old man, active as a spider, and fear-fully jealous of the green things which owed their life to his industry and care. It was he who coaxed the melon-bed into life and at last persuaded a vine to start climbing beside the lintel of the central doorway. His laughter was an inarticulate clucking, and he had a shy habit of hiding his face in the tattered sleeve of his old beadle’s soutane. His Greek loquacity, dammed up behind his disability, had overflowed into his eyes where it sparkled and danced at the slightest remark or question. What more could anyone ask of life, he seemed to say, than this oasis by the sea?
What more indeed? It was the question that Nessim asked him-self repeatedly as the car whimpered towards the desert with hawk-featured Selim motionless at the wheel. Some miles before the Arab fort the road fetches away inland from the coast and to reach the oasis one must swerve aside off the tarmac along an outcrop of stiff flaky dune — like beaten white of egg, glittering and mica-shafted. Here and there where the swaying car threatens to sink its driving-wheels in the dune they always find purchase again on the bed of friable sandstone which forms the backbone to the whole promontory. It was exhilarating to feather this sea of white crispness like a cutter travelling before a following wind. It had been in Nessim’s mind for some time past — the suggestion had originally been Pursewarden’s — to repay the devo-tion of old Panayotis with the only kind of gift the old man would understand and find acceptable: and he carried now in his polished brief-case a dispensation from the Patriarch of Alexandria per-mitting him to build and endow a small chapel to St Arsenius in his house. The choice of saint had been, as it always should be, fortuitous. Clea had found an eighteenth-century ikon of him, in pleasing taste, lying among the lumber of a Muski stall in Cairo. She had given it to Justine as a birthday present.
These then were the treasures they unpacked before the restless bargaining eye of the old man. It took them some time to make him understand for he followed Arabic indifferently and Nessim
knew no Greek. But looking up at last from the written dispensa-tion he clasped both hands and threw up his chin with a smile; he seemed about to founder under the emotions which beset him. Everything was understood. Now he knew why Nessim had spent such hours considering the empty end-stable and sketching on paper. He shook his hands warmly and made inarticulate clucking-noises. Nessim’s heart went out to him with a kind of malicious envy to see how wholehearted his pleasure was at this act of thoughtfulness. From deep inside the camera obscura of the thoughts which filled his mind he studied the old beadle carefully, as if by intense scrutiny to surprise the single-heartedness which brought the old man happiness, peace of mind.
Here at least, thought Nessim, building something with my own hands will keep me stable and unreflective — and he studied the horny old hands of the Greek with admiring envy as he thought of the time they had killed for him, of the thinking they had saved him. He read into them years of healthy bodily activity which im-prisoned thought, neutralized reflection. And yet … who could say? Those long years of school-teaching: the years