The Arabian Nightmare Read online

  To Helen

  Dreams come from the night.

  Where do they go?

  Everywhere.

  What do you dream with?

  With the mouth.

  Where is the dream?

  In the night.

  A seven-year-old child interviewed in The Child’s Conception of the World, by Jean Piaget, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1929

  1

  The Way into Cairo

  For a long time I used to go to bed early. Though the art of reading is not widespread in these parts, I confess myself to be a devotee of the practice and, in particular, of reading in bed. It is peculiarly pleasant, I have found, to lie with the book propped up against the knees and, feeling the lids grow heavy, to drift off to sleep, to drift off in such a way that in the morning it seems unclear where the burden of the book ended and my own dreams began. A narrative of the manners and customs of some exotic people is particularly suitable for such a purpose.

  For a long time too I have meditated writing a guidebook to these parts, or a romance, a guidebook cast in the form of a romance, or a romance cast in the form of a guidebook, in any case a narrative designed to be read in bed. The writing of a book in which the heroes and villains of the adventure should tour the territory I wished to describe would be a feat difficult but not impossible of achievement.

  I no longer go to bed early, and when I do unaccountable fears keep me awake, but, as I lie in the cold and the dark, the form my narrative must take becomes clearer.

  The city of Alexandria is relatively well known to Western travellers and readers. Cairo is different, and in the Cairo I know, more than in any other place, the stranger needs a guide, for, though the city’s principal monuments are obvious to the eye, its diversions are transitory and less easy to find, and though the inhabitants may welcome the foreigner with a smile, beware, for they are all charlatans and liars. They will cheat you if they can. I can help you there.

  Moreover, I shall show how a city appears not only by day but also by night, and I have wished to show how it features in the dreams and aspirations of its inhabitants. Else this guide were but a dead thing.

  It should be hot now, but I find it very cold...

  18 JUNE 1486

  ‘Cairo.’ The dragoman pointed ahead with obvious pride, though the city had been visible for over an hour now. For over an hour too the way had been lined by bedouin and turkoman tents and the occasional huckster’s stall. In a few moments they would be passing through the suburbs of Bulaq and entering through the al-Kantara Gate. Its heavy slitted and castellated masonry was a fraud or, at most, a symbol of defence, for it defended nothing. Its decayed walls were almost engulfed by shanty dwellings and shops which leaned on them for support. Behind them soared a forest of minarets, domes and square towers.

  ‘Cairo—that is, Babylon, the Great Whore, the many-gated city, from out of which the armies of Mohamedanism ride out to bring pestilence and the sword to Christian lands. It is there that the Black Pope of the Saracens keeps his court and knots his net to encompass the destruction of Christendom, and from there that he directs his army of assassins, heretics and poisoners to our destruction. Jerusalem, Acre, Famagusta—how many cities have fallen to his armies and how many shall before you will bestir yourselves? How many have not been taken into captivity in Egypt and, like the Children of Israel, labour for Pharaoh? It is an evil city, in the Devil’s power and powerful with the Devil’s might, for many are gone down into Egypt and not come back. Soldiers of Christ, we call upon you...’

  Balian pondered the crusading sermon he had heard Fra Girolamo give in Ferrara three years back. Cairo looked peaceful and inviting and quite unlike the Scarlet City of so many tracts and sermons. It basked tranquilly in the yellow sun of late afternoon.

  The dragoman had galloped ahead to negotiate at the guard-post before the gate. Later in the evening the entry toll would be evenly divided among the party. The dragoman had been taken on by the group in Alexandria not so much as a guide, for the way from Alexandria to Cairo was hardly in doubt, but to negotiate on behalf of the group for food, lodgings and the infernally frequent tolls on the road. Few among the group had more than the slightest smattering of Arabic. They had come together by chance, drawn into a party to protect themselves from the depredations of brigands and the arbitrariness of Mamluke officials (very much the same thing). Fear had kept them together on the road for three days, but a wide variety of purposes drew them to Cairo. There was a contingent of about a dozen Venetian merchants, temporary residents of Alexandria and evidently familiar with the route. There was also a painter sent by the Senate of the Serene Republic, as a compliment to the Sultan, to spend the summer painting the Sultan’s concubines. There was a German engineer looking for a job, preferably to do with irrigation or harbour works. There was another Englishman who gave his name as Michael Vane but vouchsafed no other information. A couple of Armenian merchants, a delegation of Anatolian Turks, a Syrian priest and about a score of French and Italians who were pilgrims like himself filled out the group.

  Balian, speculating whether Vane was on pilgrimage too as they passed through the gate, was so preoccupied that he almost failed to note the Mamlukes at the gate, only about thirty but better equipped and better disciplined than those they had seen so far. As they passed into the city they entered a world of stench and darkness. Balian liked it. It reminded him of his native Norwich. They rode slowly through the almost visible clouds of odour, compounded of urine, spices and rotting straw. Shopkeepers sat on stone platforms in front of their stocks, silent on the whole, regarding the infidel caravan moodily. Above the shopfronts the upper storeys of the houses swung out on great stone corbels, and from these upper storeys in turn projected wooden balconies and lattice-frame boxes, so that the sun, so brilliant outside the gates, was now nearly eclipsed. Below the ground squelched nastily under the hooves of their mules; above swung Turkish lanterns, dripping bags of muslin and great bronze talismans. Everywhere, threaded or nailed on to or between buildings, one saw the Hand of Fatima (a baleful eye staring from her palm), a magic square or the Seal of Solomon. From above again, inside the buildings, behind the wooden lattices, came the shrieks of women mocking the Europeans, while in the street itself Arab children jostled the convoy and made incomprehensible signs with their hands. The Europeans picked their way through all this with great care. They came as supplicants and existed on sufferance.

  The atmosphere in the group relaxed perceptibly as they entered the caravanserai. It was already three-quarters full of foreigners. Flagons of wine were ostentatiously in evidence in the courtyards, and in one of the upper arcades two Franciscans had erected an open-air chapel. Mules were noisily unpacked; merchandise was registered with agents of the Muhtasib; the best places in the arcades were fought for. Balian found himself a place with the Venetians in a corner of one of the lower arcades, unrolled his blanket and slid off to sleep.

  When he awoke it was deep night, but the scene in the courtyard was as lively as ever. Most of the Venetians were below, arguing furiously with the Muhtasib. The Muhtasib stood immovable, flanked by two huge Turks who carried lanterns on great staves. Black slaves staggered under trunks of merchandise that were being fought over. A party of men was unsuccessfully trying to persuade a camel to leave by the same gate that it had come in by. A sheep was being roasted in the centre of the compound. One Franciscan lay face-down, spreadeagled in front of the altar. The other was talking to some of Balian’s fellow pilgrims. As Balian stood up, they saw him and beckoned him to join them. He came down, feeling as he did so his head swim with the heavy night heat and the vestigial rhythm of so many days and nights travelling.

  ‘Bad news.’ The words c
ame to him in both French and Italian as he approached the party. He chose to listen to the Frenchman.

  ‘The friar has been telling us. There will be no visas tomorrow. The Dawadar’s office is closed, and it is impossible to be received in audience by any of the Sultan’s officers. There is a three-day holiday to celebrate the circumcision of the Sultan’s grandson, which will take place on Friday. And there is more: the fee for the visa has been increased, and the road to Mount Sinai is now very unsafe.’

  Then the friar spoke. ‘Of late even the Holy Monastery of St Catherine has been threatened not only by bedouins but also by the Sultan’s soldiers. They say that the pilgrims are not bringing any money with them.’

  Balian concealed his pleasure. A delay and an enforced sojourn in Cairo would not, in fact, suit him badly. He revelled in a sense of double identity, for he did not come to Egypt solely as a pilgrim. Since taking the vow, over a year ago in England, to go to St Catherine’s in the Sinai Desert and thence to the Holy Land, he had received a commission at the French court. He was to use his pilgrim guise to travel through the Mamluke lands as a spy, observing the numbers of the Mamluke soldiery, the strength of their fortifications and other features of interest. The Mamluke government in Cairo was thought to be afraid of the Ottoman Turks in the north and preparing for war in Syria. It was said that a great conspiracy was on foot in Cairo, or was this fantasy? Rumours from the east perplexed the Christian kings. The vagueness of the task he was entrusted with extended the scope of his speculations.

  ‘I shall cut through the contradiction and confusion to discover the truth.’

  Daydreams of hunts through underground sewers, hidden gateways, poisoned candle fumes and mysterious signals with scented handkerchiefs filled his mind; in his mind’s eye he stood at the centre of a web of intrigue, plot and counter-plot. Reluctantly he drifted back to reality. The friar was explaining that tomorrow the circumcision festivities would begin. Tomorrow, at the hippodrome, the élite of the Mamluke regiments would parade before the Sultan and the populace of Cairo, and there would be demonstrations of skill both in massed manoeuvres and in individual combats, clearly a useful opportunity for foreign observers to assess the fighting qualities of these slave regiments at their best and a yardstick for Balian to use in future judgements.

  The others in the party, cursing and spitting, were not taking it so calmly. The friar had taken advantage of their frustration to preach an impromptu sermon on the obstacles, seen and unseen, that they would face as pilgrims in the months to come. He interrupted this general theme of the earthly journey to a heavenly goal several times to warn them of the obscene dangers of circumcision and tattooing. Balian listened for a while, held fascinated by the friar’s exposition of the Church’s attitude to self-mutilation, and then turned away wearily and reclimbed the spiral staircase to his sleeping place. The Venetians too, having won their case with the Muhtasib, were settling down for the night.

  He awoke again only late in the day, after the sun had beaten its way into the shadows of the arcade. He lay back for a while, struggling unsuccessfully to remember a dream of foreboding, and he listened to the sounds. From all over the city came the cries of the muezzins, rising and falling in disharmonious counterpoint, calling the zuhr prayer. Some of the Venetians were noisily playing tarocchi. Otherwise the caravanserai was largely empty. Further down the arcade Vane was squatting crosslegged on a mat and staring impassively at the yard below.

  Dismayed by how much of the day had already gone, Balian hurried out of the caravanserai, vaguely intending to breakfast at a tavern. It was not until he was outside the gate that he paused, remembering that he was unlikely to find wine outside the walls of the compound.

  He halted, undecided, pinpointed by a broad beam of sunlight that thrust its way through the trees and columns into the great square. The entrance of the caravanserai from which he had emerged faced the mosque of Ezbek. The spreading patterns of the branches of the trees and the stalactitic decoration of the squinches and spandrels of the great colonnade of the mosque gave the square, even shafted by bright sunlight, the appearance of a mysterious, crystalline underworld through which pigeons and butterflies drifted uncertainly. Scores of Cairo’s poor pressed towards the fountains and basins in the colonnade and, rolling back their sleeves and throwing back their hair, stooped and hunched over the running water to perform the ritual ablutions. Many of the stalls had already closed, as their tenants moved off to the mosque for the noon prayer.

  A mangy bear padded by, apparently unattended, and Bali-an’s eye slid sideways, following it, until his vision came to rest on a shop that had remained open. In the entrance, deep in shadow, sat a few Turks and the Venetian painter, who was examining a book. His name was Giancristoforo Doria, Balian remembered. Giancristoforo looked up from the book and beckoned encouragingly, and Balian walked over to join him. The shop was selling a hot, black brew in small porcelain bowls. The Venetian bought him one, soundlessly gesturing to the proprietor, and equally soundlessly passed Balian some dried bread. They watched the last few filter into the mosque. Suddenly Giancristoforo spoke. ‘Kahwah,’ gesturing at the bitter liquid. ‘Their holy men and hermits drink it to stay awake at their devotions, but ordinary people drink it too. It tastes better than the water if you can get used to it.’

  Giancristoforo was used to it, for he had been in Turkey a few years previously with another painter on a similar mission. The food, the clothes and the religion bored him in Turkey and in Egypt, and his mission alternately bored and appalled him.

  ‘I hate the Saracen lands, the land of illusion and illusionism, the kingdom of the greasy palm and shifty eye. Their guests are offered an infinite variety of pleasures, but it all must be paid for in the end. One must know one’s Arab and be on one’s guard if one wants to avoid trouble. They are all out to fleece you.’

  ‘I have been abroad before—France, Italy, Germany.’

  ‘Ah, but this place is different and terrible deceits are practised upon the unwary. Let me give you an example. Do you remember the day of our disembarkation?’ (Balian remembered it—the old men sitting on the beach, their rosaries revolving in their fingers, the dusty wind rising, the palms bent almost double under its force.) ‘Well, that afternoon I went walking along the sands alone westwards towards the swamps of Mareotis. After some hours of walking I encountered a man and a boy sitting by the edge of the sea. They stopped me and importuned me for money. They clutched at their stomachs and hollowed out their cheeks. Beggars are the curse of these lands, and I refused and was about to walk on when the man stopped me again, pulling at my sleeves, and said that he was so desperate for money that, there and then, he would kill his own son if only I would give him two dinars. I laughed in his face, of course, but no, he was serious. He forced me down on the sand beside them and brought out from his bundle of cloth a pot of ashes, a large coil of rope and a flute. The ashes he smeared on his face and that of the boy. The rope he put before him and he sat behind it with his flute. As he began to play the sky was starting to cloud. The man kept looking at me all the time with an oddly suggestive grin, and he stroked the rope as he played. Suddenly, to my astonishment, the rope quivered and began to rise, at first rather uncertainly, into the air until the greater part stood vertical over its coil and its top was lost in the clouds. Then the man spoke to the boy, threatening him, I supposed, for the boy threw himself at my feet and appealed for my protection. So it seemed, but I did not understand what was happening and did nothing. Then the man chased the boy round and round the coil of the rope until suddenly the boy seized the rope and started shinning up it as fast as he could. The man fished out a knife from his bundle. He stuck it between his teeth and followed the boy up until he too was lost in the clouds. I was alone on the beach again and sat there astounded, looking out to sea. A long time passed. Then I slowly became aware that my doublet was getting wet. I looked up, expecting rain. Indeed it was raining, but the drops that were falling on my doublet wer
e drops of blood. Then there were other things—first a hand, then a leg, one by one all the severed pieces of the boy’s body hit the sand. Finally I saw the father come climbing down the rope, bearing the boy’s head in his hand. When he had descended, the rope flopped limply around him.

  ‘I felt a mysterious sense of relief on seeing the Arab again and, when he asked for two dinars, I paid it to him without demur. He gathered his things and the fragments of his son’s corpse together in a bundle and, when this was done, saluted me and walked off with his bundle towards Alexandria. Dumbstruck I watched him walk away. The following day, however, I saw both the man and his son sitting outside a pastry shop in Alexandria, stuffing themselves with food. It was all a fraud. He had only put me under an enchantment so that I thought I saw him go up the rope to kill his son. The fascination...’

  Here Balian interrupted and said, pointing at his cup of coffee, ‘What did you expect? This stuff costs half a dinar a cup. Should you expect him to murder his own son for only two dinars?’

  ‘That no, perhaps not... but I was made a fool of. If I ever saw that illusionist again, I could not answer for the consequences.’

  ‘But you are a painter, and isn’t painting too a form of illusionism?’

  Giancristoforo was on the edge of anger. ‘No, by God! Other artists may perhaps be so damned by their works, but I have never laboured to deceive. All my colours are unnatural, golds and scarlets mostly, and I make no use of perspective, for perspective deceives the eye, and to deceive the eye is to deceive the mind, and that is immoral, like the telling of idle tales. Good art must be founded upon good morals. I can tell you, I have many reservations about my present mission. The Sultan is an infidel and a barbarian. He is like any other Turk but in fancier dress. All Turks look the same. His concubines all look alike. It’s difficult to get the bitches to sit still when I don’t speak their language, and they are afraid that I am painting images in which to trap their souls.