The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He grunted and snapped the glass shut. He would have to fend for himself today. He climbed down from his perch and taking the old leather game-bag made his way to the kitchens to fill it with food. Here he found coffee simmering and some pans set to heat upon the charcoal fire, but no trace of the cooks. Grumbling, he helped himself to a snag of bread which he munched while he assembed some food for lunch. Then an idea struck him. In the courtyard, his shrill angry whistle would normally have brought the gun-dogs growling and fawning about his boots from wherever they had taken refuge from the cold; but today the empty echo of his own whistle was all that the wind threw back to him. Had Ali perhaps taken them out on some excursion of his own? It did not seem likely. He whistled again more loudly and waited, his feet set squarely apart in his jackboots, his hands upon his hips. There was no answer. He went round to the stables and found his horse. Everything was perfectly normal here. He saddled and bridled it and led it round to the hitching post. Then he went upstairs for his whip. As he coiled it, another thought struck him. He turned into the living-room and took a revolver from the writing-desk, checking it to see that the chambers were primed. He stuck this in his belt.

Then he set out, riding softly and circumspectly towards the east, for he proposed first of all to make an exploratory circuit of the land before plunging into the dense green plantations where he wished to spend the day. It was crisp weather, rapidly clearing, the marsh-mist full of evanescent shapes and contours but rising fast. Horse and rider moved with smooth deftness along the familiar ways. He reached the desert fringe in half an hour, having seen nothing untoward though he looked about him carefully under his bushy brows. On the soft ground the horse’s hooves made little noise. In the eastern corner of the plantation, he halted for a good ten minutes, combing the landscape once more with his telescope. And once more there was nothing of particular importance. He neglected none of the smaller signs which might indicate a foreign visitation, tracks in the desert, footmarks on the soft embankment by the ferry. The sun was rising slowly but the land slept in its thinning mist. At one place he dismounted to check the depth-pumps, listening to their sullen heart-beats with pleasure, greasing a lever here and there. Then he remounted and turned his horse’s head towards the denser groves of the plantations with their cherished Tripoli olives and acacia, their humus-giving belts of juniper, the wind-breaks of rattling Indian corn. He was still on the alert, however, and rode in short swift spurts, reining in every now and again to listen for a full minute. Nothing but the distant gabble of birds, the slither of flamingo-wings on the lake-water, the melodious horns of teal or the splendour (as of a tuba in full pomp) of honking geese. All familiar, all known. He was still puzzled but not ill at ease.

He made his way at last to the great nubk tree standing up starkly in its clearing, its great trophied branches dripping with condensing mist. Here, long ago, he had stood and prayed with Mountolive under the holy branches, still heavy with their curious human fruitage; everywhere blossomed the ex votos of the faithful in strips of coloured cloth, calico, beads. They were tied to every branch and twig and leaf so that it looked like some giant Christmas tree. Here he dismounted to take some cuttings which he wrapped and stowed carefully. Then he straightened up for he had heard the sounds of movement in the green glades around him. Difficult to identify, to isolate — slither of a body among the leaves, or perhaps a pack-saddle catching in a branch as horse and rider moved swiftly out of ambush? He listened and gave a small spicy chuckle, as if at some remembered private joke. He was sorry for anyone coming to molest him in such a place — every glade and ride of which he knew by memory. Here he was on his own ground — the master.

He ran back to his horse with his curious bandy-legged stride, but noiselessly. He mounted and rode slowly out of the shadow of the great branches in order to give his long whip a wide margin for wrist-play and to cover the only two entrances to the plantation. His adversaries, if such there were, would have to come upon him down one of two paths. He had his back to the tree and its great stockade of thorns. He gave a small clicking laugh of pleasure as he sat there attentively, his head on one side like a listening gun-dog; he moved the coils of his whip softly and voluptuously along the ground, drawing circles with them, curling them in the grass like a snake…. It would probably turn out to be a false alarm — Ali coming to apologize for his neglect that morning? At any rate, his master’s posture of readiness would frighten him, for he had seen the whip in action before…. The noise again. A water-rat plopped into the channel and swam quickly away. Among the bushes on two sides of the ride he could see indistinct movements. He sat, as immobile as an equestrian statue, his pistol grasped lightly in the left hand, his whip lying slightly behind him, his arm curved in the position of a fisherman about to make a long cast. So he waited, smiling. His patience was endless.

* * * * *

The sound of distant shooting upon the lake was a commonplace among the vocabulary of lake-sounds; it belonged to the music of the gulls, visitants from the seashore, and the other water-birds which thronged the reed-haunted lagoons. When the big shoots were on the ripple of thirty guns in action at one and the same time flowed tidelessly out into the air of Mareotis like a cadenza. Habit taught one gradually to differentiate between the various sounds and to recognize them — and Nessim too had spent his childhood here with a gun. He could tell the difference between the deep tang of a punt gun aimed at highflying geese and the flat biff of a twelve-bore. The two men were standing by their horses at the ferry when it came, a small puckering of the air merely, falling upon the ear-drum in a patter: raindrops sliding from an oar, the drip of a tap in an old house, were hardly less in volume. But it was certainly shooting. Balthazar turned his head and gazed out over the lake. ‘That sounded pistolish’ he said; Nessim smiled and shook his head. ‘Small calibre rifle, I should say. A poacher after sitting duck?’ But there were more shots than could be accommodated at one time in the magazine of either weapon. They mounted, a little puzzled that the horses had been sent for them but that Ali had disappeared. He had tied the animals to the hitching-post of the ferry, commending them to the care of the ferryman, and vanished in the mist.

They rode briskly down the embankments side by side. The sun was up now and the whole surface of the lake was rising into the sky like the floor of a theatre, pouring upwards with the mist; here and there reality was withered by mirages, landscapes hanging in the sky upside down or else four or five superimposed on each other with the effect of a multiple exposure. The first indication of anything amiss was a figure dressed in white robes which fled into the mist — an unheard-of action in that peaceful country. Who would fly from two horsemen on the Karm Abu Girg road? A vagabond? They stopped in bemused wonder. ‘I thought I heard shouts’ said Nessim at last in a small constrained voice, ‘towards the house.’ As if both were stimulated by the same simultaneous anxiety, they pushed their horses into a brisk gallop, heading them for the house.

A horse, Narouz’ horse, now riderless, stood trembling outside the open gates of the manor house. It had been shot through the lips — a profusely-bleeding graze which gave it a weird bloody smile. It whinnied softly as they came up. Before they had time to dismount there came shouts from the palm-grove and a flying figure burst through the trees waving to them. It was Ali. He pointed down among the plantations and shouted the name of Narouz. The name, so full of omens for Nessim, had a curiously obituary ring already, though he was not as yet dead. ‘By the Holy Tree’ shouted Ali, and both men drove their heels into their horses’ flanks and crashed into the plantation as fast as they could go.

He was lying on the grass underneath the nubk tree with his head and neck supported by it, an angle which cocked his face forward so that he appeared to be studying the pistol-wounds in his own body. His eyes alone were movable, but they could only reach up to the knee of his rescuers; and the pain had winced them from the normal periwinkle blue to the dull blue of plumbago. His whip had got coiled round his body in some manner, probably when he fell from the saddle. Balthazar dismounted and walked slowly and deliberately over to him, making the little clucking noise he always made with his tongue; it sounded sympathetic, but it was in fact a reproof to his own curiosity, to the elation with which one part of his professional mind responded to human tragedy. It always seemed to him that he had no right to be so interested. Tsck, tsck. Nessim was very pale and very calm but he did not approach the fallen figure of his brother. Yet it had for him a dreadful magnetism — it was as if Balthazar were laying some tremendously powerful explosive which might go off and kill them both. He was merely helping by holding the horse. Narouz said in a small peevish voice — the voice of a feverish child which can count on its illness for the indulgence it seeks — something unexpected. ‘I want to see Clea.’ It ran smoothly off his tongue, as if he had been rehearsing the one phrase in his mind for centuries. He licked his lips and repeated it more slowly. It seemed from Balthazar’s angle of vision that a smile settled upon his lips, but he recognized that the contraction was a grimace of pain. He hunted swiftly for the old pair of surgical scissors which he had brought to use upon the soft wire duck-seals and slit the vest of Narouz stiffly from North to South. At this Nessim drew nearer and together they looked down upon the shaggy and powerful body on which the blue and bloodless bullet-holes had sunk like knots in an oak. But they were many, very many. Balthazar made his characteristic little gesture of uncertainty which parodied a Chinaman shaking hands with