The Arabian Nightmare E-Book

Robert Irwin

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

'A masterpiece of historical fantasy and fetid imagination.' -Time Out Highly acclaimed cult novelist, historian and literary critic.

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Praise

The Arabian Nightmare was first published on November 30th 1983 by Dedalus as part of its first list. It is now regarded as a masterpiece and one of the great works of 20th century fiction.

“Robert Irwin wittily juggles oriental thought with western theology and comes out laughing.”

Anne Barnes in The Times

“Brilliant paranoid fantasy set in the Cairo of Qaitbey, where a Christian spy contracts the affliction of the title. As his madness deepens, reality and illusion spiral inwards like an opium-drugged walk through the medina of the mind.”

The Rough Guide to Egypt

“somewhere between a Borges ‘Labyrinth’ and a late Bunuel movie.”

Giovanni Dadomo in Time Out

“The Arabian Nightmare is an engaging and distinctive blend of the seductive and the disturbing, its atmosphere constantly shifting from sumptuously learned orientalising to grotesque erotic adventure and dry anarchic humour. As a feat of erudite philosophic fantasy it bears comparison with Eco’s The Name of the Rose.”

Peter Miller in City Limits

“It is like Vathek rewritten by Castaneda.”

Heathcote Williams

“Irwin has a sure touch that his example of the tale-within-a-tale, which occupies most of the latter part of the novel and eventually folds into it like a literary moebius strip is one of the finest virtuoso performance in fantasy fiction … an enormously impressive work. It is certainly one of the best fantasy novels of the last twenty years, and in time to come will surely be ‘rediscovered’ and elevated to classic status. No one with a serious interest in the genre should miss out on it.’

Brian Stableford in The Fantasy Review

“If Borges and Dick had got together to update The Arabian Nights as a horror novel … I liked it a lot.”

David Langford in White Dwarf

“It is difficult to overpraise or over-recommend this bizarre and challenging book … It’s a philosophical fantasy, a literary Chinese puzzle, a romance that combines dreams and theology, philosophy and sex. Intelligent, thought provoking and funny, like a darkly magical The Name of the Rose. Don’t miss it.”

The Good Book Guide

“The Arabian Nightmare is a kind of sleepwalker’s Baedeker. By turns erotic, witty and macabre. Robert Irwin’s tall story is a marvellous read.”

Dominic Le Poer Power in The Fiction Magazine

“The Arabian Nightmare is the definitive rendering of its central conceit. Its protagonist Balian falls into a nightmare which causes infinite suffering and cannot be recollected upon wakening… . Irwin’s novel is a late and extremely sophisticated dark fantasy rendering of the nightmare of the story that fails to lead its readers back into the world …”

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

“… the novel is itself something of an initiation, conducted with verbal panache, lightly worn scholarship and lively invention.”

Peter Vansittart in The London Magazine

“a novel to be experienced rather than read, an exhilarating philosophical rollercoaster ride.”

Alex Stewart in City Limits

“The Arabian Nightmare is a thoroughly modern fantasy cast in a classical mould … Irwin brings to this task a remarkable freshness of outlook; he enlivens his consideration of the nature of dreams with ideas drawn from modern psychology, and he fills out his marvellous descriptions of 15th-century Cairo and its dream analogue with details drawn from the illuminating perspective of modern historical studies.”

St James Guide to Fantasy Writers

“Irwin combines his erudition on the Middle East with conventions of Western fantasy to explore the boundaries between dream and story.”

The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

“… like an intricate Chinese box, delights with each unexpected combination and hidden drawer.”

Kirkus Reviews

“Deft and lovely and harder to describe than to experience … the smooth steely grip of Irwin’s real story-telling genius The Arabian Nightmare is a joy to read. If Dickens had lived to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the full tale when told might have had something in common with the visionary urban dreamscape Robert Irwin has so joyfully unfolded in this book.”

John Clute in The Washington Post

“As with all great ‘Oriental’ tall-tale-tellers from Sir John de Mandeville to Borges, it’s impossible to tell where the real erudition ends and the imaginary begins (part of the fun of course). The Nightmare itself is a conceit worthy of Borges.”

John Crowley in The New York Times

“This is easily one of the most intelligent adult fantasy novels I have ever read. Brilliantly written, this is one of those rare books that you’ll remember at odd moments years after you have read it.”

Science Fiction Chronicle

“Irwin’s endless chamber of mirrored horrors is one of the very best.”

Roz Kaveney in Best Books: Experts Choose Their Favourites

“Irwin writes with great charm and suave wit, and almost compels us to believe that in nightmare – though nightmare it is – there is such wonder and such plenitude as would make a fool of any man who preferred jejune reality. There is no greater achievement at which the literary fantasists might aim.”

Horror: Hundred Best Books – editors Stephen Jones& Kim Newman

“At one stage in this labyrinthine narrative, a character complains ‘things just keep coming round in circles’. The form of this clever tale owes something to The Thousand and One Nights. The subject matter is exotic and Eastern, the episodes linked tangentially and mingling one into another. Into the thread of the stories, Irwin injects discussions on sexuality and religion. However, since dreams, as we are shown, are themselves a deception, then the philosophical points must necessarily be falsehoods. The invention is exhuberant, but the author manages to keep control to stop everything lurching into shapeless indulgence. The result is a unique and challenging fantasy.”

The Observer

“I’ve never read anything remotely like this book. It has affinities with Borges, as well as Kafka plus the original Arabian Nights. The writing is meticulous, elegant and mesmerising. Anyone who relishes the darkly exotic and unusual should read it.”

Elizabeth Hawsley in The Historical Novel Society Review

Epigraph

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

Contents

Praise

Title

Epigraph

1The Way into Cairo

2Another Way into Cairo

3Roda Island

4The Citadel

5A Panoramic View of the City

6From the Dawadar’s Garden to the Arqana

7Inside the House of the Father of Cats

8Climatic Conditions

9How to Leave Cairo

10Cairo’s Freaks

11The Government of Cairo

12An Impression of a City Garden

13From the Zuweyla Gate to Mount Muqattam

14A Tour of the Streets Ending in an Underground Chapel

15An Interlude – the Tale of the Talking Ape

16The Interlude Concluded

17The Interlude Concluded Continued

18The Conclusion of the Continuation of the Interlude’s Conclusion

19The Treasures of Cairo

20The Administration of Justice

21Eating Well in Cairo

About the Author

Copyright

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 came 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 Balian’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 were 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.

‘I am not trying to trap their souls. I don’t believe that Turkish whores have such things. The soul of an infidel sultan may be damned, and yet he has one, but women have no souls. That is why painting their portraits is so difficult, for there is no inner essence to be caught, only a body to be sketched out. So while the body of a man is the Temple of God on Earth, a woman’s body is in turn only a deformed reflection of the man’s. Believe it. When I painted Bajazet’s harem I hated it (hated them, rather) and their rolls of white flesh, reptilian eyes and shivery enticements. I know that I shall hate these Egyptian ones too; they’ll be too round and blubbery to model satisfactorily in line and shape. You understand, of course, that I have nothing against women as women? Then there is the problem of the bad light inside the houses and the problem of trying to find the right dyes and oils in the market and there is the heat. Everyone is half asleep while I am trying to do my work.’

He tailed off despondently. Balian had been listening with a straight face. Was the man mad? Or simply a homosexual with an amusingly inappropriate job to perform? Balian’s head swam. The heat was rising. The man called Vane emerged from the caravanserai and moved off rapidly down a dark alleyway that led through the markets towards the Citadel. Giancristoforo pointed towards him languidly.

‘That man knows a lot about dyes and oils, and he knows Arabic. One can learn a lot from him, but perhaps it’s better not to. He is an alchemist, and he has close friends at the Mamluke court. Both things make him dangerous. One of these days, I suspect, he will apostatize, which will be a pity, for he knows a lot about things that we should be prepared against.’

Giancristoforo squinted up at the sky as if pondering his next remark. He never made it, for in an instant two Turks with scimitars raised before them emerged from the darkness at the back of the coffee house, smoothly and silently pinioned his arms and, together with a third Turk who joined them in the square, set off with their captive in the direction Vane had already gone, towards the Citadel.

Balian was too shaken to move at first and then properly cautious. He made no attempt to follow them but, picking up the book left behind by Giancristoforo, walked with studied casualness back to the caravanserai. He told the Venetian traders what had happened, and their leader, the consul from Alexandria, said that a protest would be lodged with the Dawadar on Monday when the offices reopened. But what had happened? Clearly the Turks were officials or soldiers. That could be seen from their selective and smoothly efficient way of acting. Had spies been shadowing Giancristoforo from Alexandria? Was it his remarks about Turkish whores? Or about Vane, the Mamluke’s friend? Had he offended against some obscure canon of Arab etiquette? Or had he simply passed the shopkeeper a bad coin at a time when the Mamluke police happened to be passing by?

‘We could all disappear like that, every one of us here, and Christendom neither would nor could lift a finger to save us,’ a Frenchman remarked thoughtfully.

Later that afternoon, when the Europeans set out to attend the day’s festivities, they were still nervous and moved off together under the leadership of the consul, Alvise Trevisano. The hippodrome where the games took place lay at the foot of the Citadel, and it was there that the young Mamluke slaves and their eunuch trainers customarily drilled. Despite his eagerness to see them at manoeuvres, Balian felt too shaken to leave the security of the caravanserai immediately. So he did not accompany the others that afternoon. Instead he climbed up to the roof, taking with him Giancristoforo’s book. For some reason he had not mentioned this book to the others.

The book was unimpressive, a score or so of folio pages loosely threaded together. Balian noted with surprise that the title was on the back of the book in a spider’s scrawl of Arabic. He opened it. The writing inside was in Arabic too, in the same sort of irregular spider’s dance, but in tiny writing between the lines of Arabic someone had attempted a translation into Italian. Frowning with concentration Balian read.

‘He said, ‘Beware of the Ape!’

He said also, ‘Some people say that every skull contains within itself its own sea of dreams and that there are millions upon millions of these tiny oceans. They adduce as proof the fact that if you put your ear against the ear of a friend and listen closely, you may hear the sea beating against the wall of the skull. But how can the finite contain the infinite?’

He said also, ‘When we sleep we are learning to come to terms with death.’

He said also, ‘One honours the spirits of the dream by sleeping with them, even when they are in disguise.’

He said also, ‘Why can we not dream that we are two people? This was a great problem for the Ikhwan al-Safa.’

He said also, ‘Large areas of the brain are empty. They have never been crossed by man.’

He said also, ‘Sleep is man’s most natural state. Long years Adam lay dreaming in the Garden before Eve was drawn from his body and she woke him.’

He said also,’ One should take care to forget unimportant dreams. One throws the sprats back into the sea of the Alam al-Mithal.’ He said also, ‘He who is a coward in his dreams will be one also in his waking life.’

Balian put the book down baffled and irritated. He could not see its purpose. Who had attempted a translation? Giancristoforo? But Giancristoforo claimed to know no Arabic. He drifted on to consider the circumstances of Giancristoforo’s arrest. The thought passed through his mind that Giancristoforo had been arrested by mistake for Balian the spy, but he rapidly dismissed it. He moved on to dimmer, dozier thoughts and from these into a siesta. He awoke in a pool of sweat. The party had returned from the hippodrome and the call to the sunset prayer was being given. He sat for a while, feeling bored; his fear had turned to restlessness.

As he came down into the courtyard, he found that another excursion was being proposed, a visit to the Village of Women. The pilgrims were the most enthusiastic, he noted wryly. It had taken the ship five weeks to reach Alexandria, and it had taken them another three days to reach Cairo, nearly six weeks without a woman. Moreover, it could not be a sin to sleep with a Muslim!

The Village of Women lay, in fact, within the walls of the city, in the Ezbekiyya quarter, close by the caravanserai. The quarter in which they were lodged was also the quarter of the entertainers and criminals. Again it was a Venetian who took the lead in conducting them round the brothel area. They picked their way by torchlight up and down the narrow paths that threaded across the quarter.

It was a sombre voyage of exploration that he thought more likely to turn the soul towards self-mortification than to gratify the senses. The houses were lower than in the merchants’ quarters, being only one or two storeys high. The walls were mostly painted in garish blues and oranges. Frescoes of dancing naked couples, cobras, vine leaves, djinn, heraldic blazons. Very bizarre, a pantheon of Christian and Eastern saints also made their appearance on the walls: St Josaphat casting away money, St Catherine sprawled and broken on the wheel and, everywhere, St Thais and St Pelagia, the patron saints of Egyptian prostitution. Where on the interior ground floor one would have seen rope, camelot, cinnamon or cotton for sale in the merchants’ quarters, here another sort of merchandise was on display: flesh – flesh hideously tattooed with apotropaic emblems, flesh lined and hanging in limp folds, flesh pocked with the marks of pestilence. It sat there on display in the torchlight of the interiors. The women sat there indifferent, making no attempt to tempt some custom. Again Balian was reminded of Giancristoforo’s discourse that morning. Yet, curiously, the party of Europeans was getting smaller as, one by one, they slipped away to find satisfaction in the arms of age, ugliness and disease.

Very soon Balian found himself walking alone, sick with revulsion, oppressed by the poverty and squalor. Suddenly he was jerked out of his misery by a hand that shot between his legs. He found himself drawn up against a woman who was almost as tall as he was and dressed in the Turkish style – headscarf, tight velvet waistcoat and striped skirt. Her face was as uncompromising as her direct manner of attracting custom, high cheekbones and the brightness of the eyes emphasized by the swooping lines of kohl around them. A Circassian Turkess? She was remarkably young for the area, in her early thirties, and did not appear to be deformed in any way. She set him free and made suggestive signs with her hands, pointing insistently to her house. In fact, it was hardly a house, for only the corners and the floor were of stone. It was rather a kiosk, a ramshackle construction of fretworked wood. She drew him in and up, behind a blanket that hung from the roof, on to a raised stone platform covered with mats and rugs. Still staring haughtily at him, she threw herself back on these and, pulling up her long skirt, drew up her legs. Roused by her imperious manner and the exotic surroundings, he moved in easily.

It was therefore with some surprise, when it was all over, that he heard the woman say, ‘Well, I did not think much of that!’

‘You speak English!’

‘I learnt the language from your friend.’

‘He taught you very well – but who is my friend?’

She looked pleased. ‘Vane, of course. You came to Cairo with him.’

‘Vane isn’t my friend. We have never spoken to one another. I don’t even know what he does here in Cairo.’

‘Oh, I assumed that he’d brought you back from England to work with him. Forgive my error. But I expect that you will become acquainted with him in time. Most people know Vane; they know his reputation at least.’

‘But you were expecting me, lying in wait for me?’

She began to search for something in a little wooden box that she had beside her. ‘Oh, yes, foreigners are watched all the time.’

‘What did you mean by “I did not think much of that”?’

‘I was just expecting more, that’s all.’

‘What more, in God’s name, did you want?’

She produced a thread from the box and ran it through from one nostril to the other. Balian, thoroughly intimidated, watched her cleaning her nostrils. It was some time before she replied.

‘People like you suck up the energy of others, sitting, listening and asking questions without ever saying anything for themselves. As to your sexual performance, I had assumed, foolishly I suppose, that all Englishmen were like Vane, or, if not that, then that you might have been taught by him. He has a great reputation here in Cairo as a lover. I could teach you some things, I suppose. Imsaak in particular.’ She looked at him speculatively. There was an odd glint in her eye.

‘What is imsaak?’

‘Imsaak is the art of delaying the climax with as many twists, turns and contortions as possible. It is in this that the real art lies … You look exhausted. God knows how you got to Cairo; I wonder if you will be able to raise the energy to leave. Your penis stands erect, but your eyelids flutter. Your body moves, but the serpent within you sleeps.’

She clutched her hands dramatically to her bosom before continuing. ‘You have a serpent coiled and sleeping at the base of your spine. It must be sung to and lured to rise until its head is between your eyes and you see the world through its eyes, a body of pure sexual energy. In Christendom copulation is very like sleep, but in Egypt and in Sind it is a science. I could also teach you karezza and the rites of sexual exhaustion, but at the moment you are throwing your semen away as if it were water. First we must rouse the serpent.’

‘How do you rouse the serpent?’

She raised her finger to her lips. The eyes moved from side to side as if searching the room for spies. ‘It cannot be spoken of. It can only be demonstrated. The act of drawing the serpent up the spine is like climbing a rope. He who has understood how to do it and climbed the rope pulls it up after him. I shall initiate you. It will cost you money, but it will be worth it for you to wake from a sleep which is half a death.’

Balian replied as reasonably as he could. ‘Our faith teaches us that initiation is not to be found between the legs of a woman, nor pearls in a gutter. If you have knowledge you cannot speak about, then do not speak about it. I have been travelling a long time. Of course I am tired, yet I doubt, lady, if perverted intercourse with you is the remedy. Have you no family? How could someone like you descend to the level of the whore?’

Her long thin tongue travelled slowly round her lips as she considered. It was obvious to Balian that she was mad.

‘More of these tiring questions. Oh yes, I have a family. If you are lucky, you will never meet them. But I am no whore. I am a princess. Indeed, my prince approaches, and you should leave quickly. Go now. Shoo! You must hurry, for the streets become dangerous so late. Remember the way back, and be careful not to sleep alone in this city. Now pay me. Two dinars please.’

Balian paid her.

‘My name is Zuleyka. We shall meet again.’

He turned and rushed out into the street.

2

Another Way into Cairo

If my audience would like to hear of more wonders like the rope trick they shall, but the rope trick itself can never be explained. By the way, as this is a tale designed to be told at night, it seems appropriate that it should have within it a strong sensual element so as to stimulate what I have heard they call in the West wet dreams, but we shall return to these matters later perhaps …

‘Cairo.’ The guide pointed ahead, a skinny bronzed hand shooting out of his robes. The city grew larger and larger. Balian, who was riding beside the guide, lowered his hood, unable to stare directly into the sun until they came in under the shadow of the walls. Then they passed in through the gate, and now Balian was puzzling at the many unexpected features of the city he saw on every side – the rugs spread out to display the little brass idols of Mahound, Apollyon and Tergavent, the twisted candy-columned doorways, the storks that nested in towers and minarets and drifted across the sky from one to another, the broad staircases that shot up steeply from the main highway closely lined with statues of elephants and men. Children stood on the roofs waving at them.

But where are all the women? thought Balian. Oh yes. Of course, their husbands have hidden them away. I was expected.

Some streets were boarded off, against what it was not clear.

‘There have been few Christians who have crossed over to Egypt this year.’

A vivid memory came to mind of the sea this summer, its green surface coated thick with dust. Cobwebs hung from waves which had risen but not broken, and when the occasional wave did fall, sending dirt and discoloured foam splashing upwards, a swarm of buzzing insects rose with it too. The whole horizon had been obscured by the dust that hung in the air.

The children waved but did not say anything. The sound of hooves was muffled on sand. It was very quiet. They rode further into the entrails of the city. The guide and he dismounted. It was difficult to see the guide’s face; he might have been veiled. The guide showed him a book and Balian read in it:

He said, ‘There are some who hold that talking about it, even thinking about it, is enough to attract it and stimulate its attacks. For this reason we do not name it. But even this may not be enough. Therefore I advised that no one should read this book unless he is already aware of what it is, and let those who know forget if they can.

Balian put the book down on the ground and rose to confront the indistinct figure before him. ‘Who are you?’

The reply came easily enough. ‘I am here to satisfy your doubts. I mean to satisfy you that you are not me.’