The Arabian Nightmare Read online

  So Vane’s travels began, crossing and recrossing the Danube and the Carpathians in quest of them. His first apprenticeship was to a Turk in Thessalonika; there he learnt all the Turk could teach, including his language. Then he continued eastwards in search of other masters, in Constantinople, Erzincan, Tabriz and Khiva. There was, he discovered, an invisible network of masters, who passed him from hand to hand.

  As his studies progressed, he travelled as much by night as by day. The landscapes of his travels began to commingle—fantastic sugar-loaf mountains, underground cities, Tartar pyramids of skulls and smoking lakes. Finally in Bokhara he had word of a great master who taught and practised in Cairo. Melancholically he turned back west towards Cairo, relishing the journey and its perils and dreading the moment when he should be brought face to face with what he told himself he sought—a master. As he journeyed back through the lands of the White Sheep Turks and the Black Sheep Turks, he became aware even then that the Islamic world was stumbling towards crisis, as two great empires, the Ottoman and Mamluke sultanates, found themselves increasingly at cross-purposes in the no-man’s-land of Anatolia. In Cairo an atmosphere of apprehensive restlessness was already in evidence.

  The Father of Cats, unlike the sleep teachers Vane had previously encountered, practised in the open under the patronage of the Sultan and some of his prominent emirs, though he was not popular in the city as a whole. When times were hard, as now, he was the victim of sermons from the ulema and the Dervish shaykhs, but he and his disciples survived and prospered. It was here in the House of Sleep that Vane’s serious apprenticeship really started.

  The whole place smelt of cat’s piss, for those cats which were not being experimented upon roamed the house at will. Those which had been picked for experiments were kept in wicker cages in the cellar. The slaves who fed them wore thick leather gloves, for at this time the Father was using cats to assess the effects of sleep deprivation, and their enforced insomnia made them unpredictable and sometimes savage. The slaves would not talk to Vane; they looked on him with the same awe as they did their master. So in the early days these tormented creatures were Vane’s only friends.

  The work was hard at first. The day was spent most often in the study of the interpretations and commentaries given in the Dreambook of Joseph the Hebrew and in the works of Artemidorus and Ibn Sirin, but the night was when Vane’s studies were most intensely pursued. The Father taught him how to recall his dreams, pulling them out from the night as if they were fishes. He taught him how to carry the remembered dream in his head with no diminishment of detail. Then he taught him how to dream lucidly and in full consciousness. As soon as this had been achieved, the Father took to appearing in his dreams and instructing him all through the night.

  The first time this happened Vane heard rhythmic whispering in the darkness. ‘Dreams are like the sea; they sweep in to cover the brain in little waves and then withdraw, but the waves ripple out from something that is always there, the World of Images, the Alam al-Mithal. Instead of waiting for the waves to cover you in a fixed daily rhythm, you may, if you wish, swim out to explore their deeps.’

  As the Father spoke, Vane saw with peculiar clarity, as if he was actually standing on the edges of it, a strange sea, a deep-green sea but viscous, and its waves were tipped with white tendrils that waved slowly and appealingly towards the shore. The old man was standing beside him, genial, crackling with good humour. He rolled up his gallabiya and waded in, remarking as he did so, ‘The sea of dreams is more than a metaphor. It is an image in the Alam al-Mithal.’

  That first time Vane did not dare follow him in.

  In the mornings instruction would continue over a breakfast of hunks of bread which were dipped in bowls of honey, and images which had been raised in the night were thrashed over in the daytime. Inside the head is a candle, the inner candle of vision. The candle casts its invisible rays out through the eyes, enabling us to see the world around us, but these rays can be directed to other purposes. For instance, one can put a man in a trance or visit pestilence on people and animals. At night these rays cannot pass through the eye sockets into the outer world, for the whole head is clouded by vapours rising from the stomach. So it is that the Alam al-Mithal secures its illumination. Only the instructed man can be its master.

  Vane’s instruction continued with the art of detecting drug-induced or poisoned sleep, the art of resting and sleeping within dreams and the art of duplicating the real world exactly in one’s head, stage by stage, through a painful disciplining of the visual memory. Then the Father took him further into the pit and Vane learnt that the sleeping mind may descend through many levels. The most superficial was called the Zone of the Dog, a perplexing state barely distinguishable from wakefulness; the Zone of the Elephant was altogether more full-blooded and fantastic; then there was the Zone of the Lizard, which was less colourful and more conceptual; and so on and on. In each zone the space seemed smaller and the colours fewer. Somewhere in the heart of it all, his teacher told him, was a centre, infinitely small and dark, which could be approached only with great dread, the Zone of the Pebble (but even before that Vane learned to fear the Zone of the Ape).

  It was months before the Father allowed Vane to assist him practically. Then he commenced to understand why the Father had been so ready to accept him as a disciple. It was not just that Vane’s muscular physique gave him the strength to survive the rigours of the teaching or that it was useful for dealing with some of the less satisfied of the Father’s customers. Though the Sleep Discipline relied first and above all on mental force, the assistance of drugs was also, on occasion, necessary. Sometimes the Father of Cats had disappeared for months on end, collecting and purchasing such drugs. Vane was now appointed by the Father to accompany him on those trips. The range of drugs and chemicals needed was wide indeed, but the commodity which drew the Father on into the furthest parts of Upper Egypt was mumia, and Vane now came to realize that the skill which the Father valued in Vane before all else was his experience as a tomb robber. (Mumia is a morbid compound of bitumen, natron and preserved flesh, black as pitch. The Father, speaking of mumia, said ‘The flesh is not a dead husk animated by some spirit. It is life itself.’) The hunt was dangerous—there were fights with the bedouin and other tomb robbers, the Mamluke governors had to be avoided and sometimes, when they were on the very edge of success, some mechanism within the tomb itself, millennially ancient, would set in motion an ambush against them. Vane enjoyed these adventures, and as the stocks of mumia in the House of Sleep rose, so did the spirits of the Father also rise.

  The Father relaxed the discipline of the House. He went so far as to lead Vane into a lotus land of subservient odalisques in the dream zone of the Cobra. In waking life the filling of the great urns in the upper storey of the House was celebrated more solemnly. The Father gave a mumia feast.

  Embalmed fragments, sugared or dissolved in wine, were offered to the Father’s young men. The Father told them that, in consuming their ancestors and deriving nourishment from them, they were celebrating the mysteries of death and the resurrection, sleep and reawakening. Appalled, they listened to him and, frightened, they chewed gingerly on the unattractive little morsels.

  ‘What effect will it have?’ asked Vane, greatly daring.

  ‘Mumia preserves the form of life in death, just as the dream preserves a form of wakefulness in sleep. Therefore mumia intensifies the dream. It does this by leading the dream to reproduce itself, so that each dream carries within its womb another dream. It is the interior image of infinity. You are eating eternity.’

  He smiled patronizingly. They continued to chew. Once the last fragments had been consumed, however, there was an explosion of talk and a release of tension, and men began to dance and clown. The ritual feast transformed itself into a genuine celebration. Towards the end of the party, drugged and drunken disciples riotously careered through every room in the House of Sleep, displaying a candle at each window and hanging a rug ove
r every sill. Then, when the job was done, Vane and the others staggered out, laughing and shouting, to admire the effect. There were two windows from which no rug hung and in which no candle shone. They regarded the latticed windows soberly and went inside. Vane had not yet learnt about the other inhabitants of the House.

  8

  Climatic Conditions

  Or do I indeed mean climactic conditions? No, not yet I fear...

  It would not be easy for Vane and the Father of Cats to find Balian. He was somewhere among the hundreds of thousands of Cairo’s poor and maimed who whispered and drifted through the city like dead leaves. They were all half alive and barely rational. But all sorts of things with no rational voice moved across Cairo with them, winds, animals, spirits, moods.

  There was the khamsin, the wind of fifty days which blew from the south-east heavy with dust, and the hot tongue too of the simoom coming up from Nubia and licking round the streets, but there was also the northerly shamal, worshipped by the blacks and other polytheists as the lifegiver. Clouds of flies moved to invisible commands and packs of wild dogs formed, dissolved and reformed. Then there were the flocks that were brought into Cairo, sheep and goats mostly; vast herds of goats were to be found amid the Tartar Ruins, shepherded by Arabs and picking a living from the garbage. In the rainless summers more garbage lay putrefying in the city than either the goats or the nightsoil men could deal with, and then djinn were released in their poisonous vapours to fly upon the breezes amid the crowds, bringing pestilence with the khamsin and the dog winds. Every summer some citizens went mad in the winds, so it was wisest to sally forth into the dusty lanes with a kerchief over one’s face.

  Hardly to be distinguished from the djinn were the moods, most often turbulent and melancholy, which swept over the town as rapidly and unaccountably as a thunderstorm. Dust devils too were dangerous, seeking, as they flicked about his ankles, to draw the unwary traveller off into unfamiliar paths. It was for this reason that all rejoiced when the rains came, for the rains held the spirits down and the spiders, daughters of the rain, came out and the air, purified of old passions, smelt new again.

  By degrees, as Balian wandered about in a steadily weakening condition, he found himself no longer competent to distinguish always between the Cairo of nocturnal fantasy and the real city. The voices of people ‘that he heard in the street it did not seem to him that he heard in the street at all but in his head. The voices boomed or whispered in the ventricles of his brain, some close to his ears, others distant but still from within. It was difficult to catch the sense of what they were saying. Only occasionally did a voice, usually a word, explode within the skull, jerking him alert.

  And colours. Once, dazed, he spent a whole afternoon staring at the wall of a garden in shadow. Was it brown or grey or blue or slightly orange? What was the colour of the wall, and what was the colour of the shadow? It unsettled him and at the end of the afternoon he decided that he dared ask no more such questions for fear of seeing the colours of his landscape seep away—leaves were green and the sky was blue.

  People he looked on with still less confidence for, insubstantial, they became one another. The Mamluke emir he saw exercising in the Black Hippodrome became a cobbler at the other end of the city later in the day. The negro muezzin at the mosque of Ibn Tulun was the same negro Balian saw washing down the steps of a bathhouse in the Armenian Quarter. There were pairs of dwarves everywhere. He dizzily surmised that Cairo was inhabited by perhaps five hundred people who raced up and down the city, exchanging hats, cloaks and beards, always ready to meet him in new guises, to accompany and watch him.

  He thought that it ought to be possible then, by going through the wrong door or saying the right word, to pull Cairo apart. The palaces, houses, mosques and gardens might evaporate in sizzling steam and its demons rise screaming in the air. He let the dust trickle through his fingers. Close to, things seemed real enough. There was no door and no demons, only a dirty and diseased foreigner grumbling in the dust.

  The fountain flowed on and its waters gurgled as they ran.

  It was midday on Friday, the time for the main prayer of the Muslim community in the Sultan Hasan mosque. The Dawadar stood near the front of the congregation, in line with many of his fellow officers. They were open to the sky and the sun’s rays raged in the closed courtyard. Around them rose the smell of wet and sweaty linen. The Dawadar surreptitiously sniffed a pomander that dangled from his sleeve. The service was almost over. The khutba had been pronounced in the name of the Sultan. Then the Imam had preached from the minbar on the Seven in the Cave. Now, descended from the minbar, the Imam was leading them in the final rakats of the prayer, leading the congregation into the mysterious suras. Thousands of bodies rose and fell in unison, heads touched the matting and then bobbed up again.

  ‘Truly, we did not create the world as a sport and a delusion.’

  Suddenly there was a giggle, at first almost lost in the massed intonation of the sura, but it would not stop, high-pitched and getting louder, despite audible attempts on the part of others to suppress the giggler. It was coming from somewhere near the back. Then someone else was giggling.

  The Dawadar turned round to glare and so did the Imam, but the contagion was spreading. Some indeed were no longer able to muffle it but had broken into open laughter. Others were red-cheeked, shaking silently with the effort of controlling it. The laughter was getting wilder. Looking round again, the Dawadar understood and felt a faint twinge of nerves mingled with a dreadful yet delicious sense of anticipation. What he saw scattered here and there amid the congregation were the conical red and yellow caps of the Laughing Dervishes. With even greater impudence than they could usually muster, they were proposing to stage one of their celebrations here in the chief mosque in Cairo during the Friday prayer.

  The prayer had broken up entirely. Some hung, grimly shaking, to the columns at the edge of the cloister; most lay upon the ground and sobbed with laughter, their faces contorted with an almost hideous hilarity.

  A gust of it caught the Dawadar too and even as he wondered, ‘What on earth am I laughing at?’ he started giggling and then cackling hysterically. He kept trying to stand up, but the laughing demon that was within him kept throwing him to the floor again. For a moment he felt himself sober, his tearful face pressed to the flagstones, degraded. He found time to ask himself, ‘What are we laughing at, unless it is the idea of laughing at nothing?’ before a new wave took hold of him and his neighbours. If he had not been possessed himself, the sights and sounds around him would have been truly terrifying, but as it was he rode the wind with the others. Only the dervishes stood erect, laughing at, and in control of, their own joke.

  In the end it was the body that gave way under the pressure. One’s ribs and stomach ached so much. The laughter deepened and slowed and then died out in various parts of the courtyard, only slowly, for there were repeated swells of giggling as one scarcely sober man looked at another. But it had almost fallen into silence and the ecstasy passed, with its prostrate victims revelling in their newly regained tranquil seriousness, when the revelation came.

  A middle-aged man, not a Dervish, raised his head from the ground and, speaking in a painfully husky voice, said, ‘I have had my vision. I am chosen to tell you, citizens of Cairo, that the Messiah of the Fifth Seal, the last and final Messiah, is in your city today. He knows the Arabian Nightmare and he has been purified by infinite suffering. Wait for him, for he will lead you into the Citadel.’

  He had hardly finished speaking before he was seized by hostile Mamlukes. The Dervishes had apparently been filtering out of the mosque while the man was speaking. Once again they had demonstrated their power.

  The Dawadar rose to go. He felt terribly weak. He felt as though someone else had been using his body to perform heavy manual labour. As the Dawadar stumbled on, heading home, it entered his head as an amusing thought that he might be the man with the Arabian Nightmare. He smiled, embarrassed with himself, and let
the conceit drop.

  The second outrage happened three days later, around sunset. He was taking a siesta at home when there was a hammering and a shouting at his door and the porter let in a pair of excited Mamluke troopers.

  ‘Peace be upon you and your house.’ They made formal obeisance.

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘Your excellency must come with us.’

  ‘Well, what is it? Come with you where?’

  ‘To the lake here, the Ezbekiyya Lake. There is a man on it. Your excellency must give orders for his arrest.’

  ‘But why?’

  But here the troopers took him by the sleeves and hurried him down the path to the lake nearby. The side of the lake they came out on was quite crowded. The pool was fronted on this side by the pleasure palaces of some of the great emirs and many of the servants had come to the water’s edge to watch the fun. The Dawadar, shading his eyes against the sun, peered across the waters to where the boat which was clearly the centre of attention seemed to drift aimlessly. Then he started back with surprise and swore. There were two men in the boat. A small ferrety-looking man was resting on the oars; the other was sitting up playing a lute and singing at the top of his voice:

  ‘The big bamboo is thick and strong,

  The big bamboo...’

  He was obviously drunk. Singing drunks were common enough on the pleasure pools of Cairo. What shocked the Dawadar and amused the others was the man’s appearance—the white hairs, pinched cheeks, wispy hairs on the chin, the black robes, the ornamental baldric and the black turban and horned crown. The drunk was surely the Sultan? Or his double? An impostor. Other officers besides the Dawadar had been summoned, and some troopers were putting a boat out on the lake to cat-calls from the jeering throng of servants and riff raff. Observing this, the figure in the boat put his lute aside and stood up rather unsteadily to address them, ‘This is the proclamation of the splendid, the victorious, the glorious and beloved of God. Sayf al-Din Qaitbay Ibn Abdallahal-Nasiri, al-Mansuri, al-Azizi, al-Qaimai, Sultan of Cairo and Damascus, Lord of Nubia, the Yemen, Cilicia and Barka, Guardian of the Two Holy Shrines, Provider of the Veil of the Tomb, Protector of the Caliph, Commander of the Jihad, Master of the Arabs, the Turks and the Persians, Sustainer of the Poor, may God prolong his reign and confound his enemies, as follows. We denounce and execrate the impostor who sleeps in the Citadel and we promise all our loyal subjects...’