The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [80]
gold chains round their intricate dark necks and bracelets on their javelin-arms. They were as desirable as a flock of women. Their voices were high and fresh. What a contrast they offered to the slingers, case-hardened veterans of the line, conscious only of winters which froze their sandals to their feet or summers whose sweat dried the leather underfoot until it became as hard as dry marble. A gold bounty and not passion had entrained them in this adventure which they bore with the stoicism of all wage-earners. Life had become a sexless strap sink ing deeper and ever deeper into the flesh. The sun had parched and cured them and the dust had rendered them voiceless. The brave plumed helmets with which they had been issued were too hot to wear at midday. Africa, which they had somehow visualized as an extension of Europe —
an extension of terms, of references to a definitive past — had already asserted itself as something different: a forbidding darkness where the croaking ravens matched the dry exclamations of spirit-less men, and rationed laughter fashioned from breath simply the chittering of baboons.
Sometimes they captured someone — a solitary frightened man out hunting hares — and were amazed to see that he was human like themselves. They stripped his rags and stared at human geni-tals with an elaborate uncomprehending interest. Sometimes they despoiled a township or a rich man’s estate in the foothills, to dine on pickled dolphin in jars (drunken soldiers feasting in a barn among the oxen, unsteadily wearing garlands of wild nettles and drinking from captured cups of gold or horn). All this was before they even reached the desert….
Where the paths had crossed they had sacrificed to Heracles (and in the same breath murdered the two guides, just to be on the safe side); but from that moment everything had begun to go wrong. Secretly they knew they would never reach the city and invest it. And God! Never let that winter bivouac in the hills be repeated. The fingers and noses lost by frostbite! The raids! In his memory’s memory he could still hear the squeaking munching noise of the sentry’s footsteps all winter in the snow. In this terri-tory the enemy wore fox-skins on their heads in a ravenous peak and long hide tunics which covered their legs. They were silent, belonging uniquely as the vegetation did to these sharp ravines and breath-stopping paths of the great watershed.
With a column on the march memory becomes an industry, manufacturing dreams which common ills unite in a community of ideas based on privation. He knew that the quiet man there was thinking of the rose found in her bed on the day of the Games. Another could not forget the man with the torn ear. The wry scholar pressed into service felt as dulled by battle as a chamberpot at a symposium. And the very fat man who retained the curious personal odour of a baby: the joker, whose sallies kept the van-guard in a roar? He was thinking of a new depilatory from Egypt, of a bed trade-marked Heracles for softness, of white doves with clipped wings fluttering round a banqueting table. All his life he had been greeted at the brothel door by shouts of laughter and a hail of slippers. There were others who dreamed of less common pleasures — hair dusty with white lead, or else schoolboys in naked ranks marching two abreast at dawn to the school of the Harpmaster, through falling snow as thick as meal. At vulgar country Dionysia they carried amid roars the giant leather phallus, but once initiated took the proffered salt and the phallus in tremb-ling silence. Their dreams proliferated in him, and hearing them he opened memory to his consciousness royally, prodigally, as one might open a major artery.
It was strange to move to Justine’s side in that brindled autumn moonlight across such an unwholesome tide of memories: