The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [209]
* * *
This now explained something to me which had hitherto puzzled me; namely that after his death Da Capo’s huge library was moved over to Smyrna, book by book. Balthazar did the packing and posting.
NOTE IN THE TEXT
* Page 298
From Eugène Marais’s The Soul of The White Ant.
MOUNTOLIVE
A
CLAUDE
τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ ἄγαθοῦ διάμονος
NOTE
All the characters and situations described in this
book (a sibling to Justine and Balthazar and the third volume of a quartet) are purely imaginary.
I have exercised a novelist’s right in taking a few
necessary liberties with modern Middle Eastern
history and the staff-structure of the Diplomatic
Service.
The dream dissipated, were one to recover one’s commonsense mood, the thing would be of but
mediocre import — ’tis the story of mental wrong- doing. Everyone knows very well and it offends
no one. But alas! one sometimes carries the thing a little further. What, one dares wonder, what
would not be the idea’s realization if its mere
abstract shape thus exalted has just so profoundly moved one? The accursed reverie is vivified and
its existence is a crime.
D. A. F. DE SADE: Justine
Il faut que le roman raconte.
STENDHAL
I
s a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and
A found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting had the fish-drive become.
He had in fact quite forgotten about his once-crisp tennis flannels and college blazer and the fact that the wash of bilge rising through the floor-boards had toe-capped his white plimsolls with a black stain. In Egypt one seemed to forget oneself contin-ually like this. He blessed the chance letter of introduction which had brought him to the Hosnani lands, to the rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria. Yes.
The punt which now carried him, thrust by slow thrust across the turbid water, was turning slowly eastward to take up its position in the great semicircle of boats which was being gradually closed in upon a target-area marked out by the black reed spines of fish-pans. And as they closed in, stroke by stroke, the Egyptian night fell — the sudden reduction of all objects to bas-reliefs upon a screen of gold and violet. The land had become dense as tapestry in the lilac afterglow, quivering here and there with water mirages from the rising damps, expanding and contracting horizons, until one thought of the world as being mirrored in a soap-bubble trembling on the edge of disappearance. Voices too across the water sounded now loud, now soft and clear. His own cough fled across the lake in sudden wing-beats. Dusk, yet it was still hot; his shirt stuck to his back. The spokes of darkness which reached out to them only outlined the shapes of the reed-fringed islands, which punctuated the water like great pin-cushions, like paws, like hassocks.
Slowly, at the pace of prayer or meditation, the great arc of boats was forming and closing in, but with the land and the
water liquefying at this rate he kept having the illusion that they were travelling across the sky rather than across the alluvial waters of Mareotis. And out of sight he could hear the splatter of geese, and in one corner water and sky split apart as a flight rose, trailing its webs across the estuary like seaplanes, honking crassly. Mountolive sighed and stared down into the brown water, chin on his hands. He was unused to feeling so happy. Youth is the age of despairs.
Behind him he could hear the hare-lipped younger brother Narouz grunting at every thrust of the pole while the lurch of the boat echoed in his loins. The mud, thick as molasses, dripped back into the water with a slow flob flob, and the pole sucked lusciously. It was very beautiful, but it all stank so: yet to his surprise he found he rather enjoyed the rotting smells of the estuary. Draughts of wind from the far sea-line ebbed around them from time to time, refreshing the mind. Choirs of gnats whizzed up there like silver rain in the eye of the dying sun. The cobweb of changing light fired his mind.