in on the gentle Waldetar a suspicion cheerless as the desert.
If they are what I think; what sort of world is it when they must let children suffer?
Thinking, of course, of Manoel, Antonia and Maria: his own.
V
The desert creeps in on a man's land. Not a fellah, but he does own some land. Did own. From a boy, he has repaired the wall, mortared, carried stone heavy as he, lifted, set in place. Still the desert comes. Is the wall a traitor, letting it in? Is the boy possessed by a djinn who makes his hands do the work wrong? Is the desert's attack too powerful for any boy, or wall, or dead father and mother?
No. The desert moves in. It happens, nothing else. No djinn in the boy, no treachery in the wall, no hostility in the desert. Nothing.
Soon, nothing. Soon only the desert. The two goats must choke on sand, nuzzling down to find the white clover. He, never to taste their soured milk again. The melons die beneath the sand. Never more can you give comfort in the summer, cool abdelawi, shaped like the Angel's trumpet! The maize dies and there is no bread. The wife, the children grow sick and short-tempered. The man, he, runs one night out to where the wall was, begins to lift and toss imaginary rocks about, curses Allah, then begs forgiveness from the Prophet, then urinates on the desert, hoping to insult what cannot be insulted.
They find him in the morning a mile from the house, skin blued, shivering in a sleep which is almost death, tears turned to frost on the sand.
And now the house begins to fill with desert, like the lower half of an hourglass which will never be inverted again.
What does a man do? Gebrail shot a quick look back at his fare. Even here, in the Ezbekiyeh Garden at high noon, these horse's hooves sounded hollow. You jolly damn right Inglizi; a man comes to the City and drives for you and every other Frank with land to return to. His family lives all together in a room no bigger than your W.C., out in Arabian Cairo where you never go because it's too dirty, and not 'curious.' Where the street is so narrow hardly a man's shadow can pass; a street, like many not on any guidebook's map. Where the houses pile up in steps; so high that the windows of two buildings may touch across the street; and hide the sun. Where goldsmiths live in filth and tend tiny flames to make adornment far your traveling English ladies.
Five years Gebrail had hated them. Hated the stone buildings and metaled roads, the iron bridges and glass windows of Shepheard's Hotel which it seemed were only different forms of the same dead sand that had taken his home. 'The City,' Gebrail often told his wife, just after admitting he'd come home drunk and just before beginning to yell at his children - the five of them curled blind in the windowless room above the barber like so many puppy- bodies - 'the city is only the desert in disguise.'
The Lord's angel, Gebrail, dictated the Koran to Mohammed the Lord's Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice. If the Koran were nothing, then Islam was nothing. Then Allah was a story, and his Paradise wishful thinking.
'Fine.' The fare leaned over his shoulder, smelling of garlic, like an Italian. 'Wait here.' But dressed like an Inglizi. How horrible the face looked: dead skin peeling off the burned face in white rags. They were in front of Shepheard's Hotel.
Since noon they'd been all over the fashionable part of the city. From Hotel Victoria (where, oddly, his fare had emerged from the servants' entrance) they had driven first to the Quarter Rossetti, then a few stops along the Muski; then uphill to the Rond-Point, where Gebrail waited while the Englishman disappeared for half an hour into the Bazaars' pungent labyrinth. Visiting, perhaps. Now he'd seen the girl before, surely. The girl in the Quarter Rossetti: Coptic, probably. Eyes made impossibly huge with mascara, nose slightly hooked and bowed, two vertical dimples on either side of the mouth, crocheted shawl covering hair and back, high cheekbones, warm-brown skin.
Of course she'd been a fare. He remembered the face. She was mistress to some clerk or other in the British Consulate. Gebrail had picked the boy up for her in front of the Hotel Victoria, across the street. Another time they'd gone to her rooms. It helped Gebrail to remember faces. Brought in more baksheesh if you bade them good-day any second time. How could you say they were people: they were money. What did he care about the love affairs of the English? Charity - selfless or erotic - was as much a lie as the Koran. Did not exist.
One merchant in the Muski too he had seen. A jewel merchant who had lent money to the Mahdists and was afraid his sympathies would become known now that the movement was crushed. What did the Englishman want there? He had brought no jewels away from the shop; though he'd remained inside for nearly an hour. Gebrail shrugged. They were both fools. The only Mahdi is the desert.
Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi of '83, was believed by some to be sleeping not dead in a cavern near Baghdad. And on the Last Day, when the prophet Christ re-establishes el-Islam as the religion of the world he will return to life to slay Dejal the antichrist at a church gate somewhere in Palestine. The Angel Asrafil will trumpet a blast to kill everything on earth, and another to awaken the dead.
But the desert's angel had hidden all the trumpets beneath the sand. The desert was prophecy enough of the Last Day.
Gebrail lounged exhausted against the seat of his pinto-colored phaeton. He watched the hindquarters of the poor horse. A poor horse's ass. He nearly laughed. Was this a revelation then from God? Haze hung over the city.
Tonight, he would get drunk with an acquaintance who sold sycamore figs, whose name Gebrail didn't know. The fig-hawker believed in the Last Day; saw it, in fact, close at hand.
'Rumors,' he said darkly, smiling at the girl with the rotting teeth, who worked the Arabian cafes looking for love-needy Franks with her baby on one shoulder. 'Political rumors.'
'Politics is a lie.'
'Far up the Bahr-el-Abyad, in the heathen jungle, is a place called Fashoda. The Franks - Inglizi, Feransawi - will fight a great battle there, which will spread in all directions to engulf the world.'
'And Asrafil will sound the call to arms,' snorted Gebrail. 'He cannot. He is a lie, his trumpet is a lie. The only truth -'
