The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [359]
We waited thus for a long time in great indecision; but mean-while from the east the dawn had begun to overtake the sky, the city and desert. Human voices, weighted like lead, came softly out, stirring cur ios ity and compassion. Children’s voices — and in the west a sputum-coloured meniscus on the horizon. We yawned, it was cold. Shivering, we turned to one another, feeling sudde nly orphaned in this benighted world between light and darkness. But gradually it grew up from the eastern marches, this familiar dawn, the first overflow of citron and rose which would set the dead waters of Mareotis a-glitter; and fine as a hair, yet so ind istinct that one had to stop breathing to verify it, I heard (or thought I heard) the first call to prayer from some as yet invisible minaret.
Were there, then, still gods left to invoke? And even as the question entered my mind I saw, shooting from the harbour-mouth, the three small fishing-boats — sails of rust, liver and blue plum. They heeled upon a freshet and stooped across our bows like hawks. We could hear the rataplan of water lapping the ir prows. The small figures, balanced like riders, hailed us in Arabic to tell us that the boom was up, that we might enter harbour.
This we now did with circumspection, covered by the appar-ently deserted batteries. Our little craft trotted down the main channel between the long lines of ships like a vaporetto on the Grand Canal. I gazed around me. It was all the same, yet at the same time unbelievably different. Yes, the main theatre (of the heart’s affections, of memory, of love?) was the same; yet the differences of detail, of decor stuck out obstinately. The liners now grotesquely dazzle-painted in cubist smears of white, khaki and North-Sea greys. Self-conscious guns, nesting awkwardly as cranes in incongruous nests of tarpaulin and webbing. The greasy balloons hanging in the sky as if from gibbets. I compared them to the ancient clouds of silver pigeons which had already begun to climb in wisps and puffs among the palms, diving upwards into the white light to meet the sun. A troubling counterpoint of the known and the unknown. The boats, for example, drawn up along the slip at the Yacht Club, with the remembered dew thick as sweat upon their masts and cordage. Flags and coloured awnings alike hanging stiffly, as if starched. (How many times had we not put out from there, at this same hour, in Clea’s small boat, loaded with bread and oranges and wicker-clothed wine?) How many old sailing-days spent upon this crumbling coast, landmarks of affec-tion now forgotten? I was amazed to see with what affectionate emotion one’s eye could travel along a line of inanimate objects tied to a mossy wharf, regaling itself with memories which it was not conscious of having stored. Even the French warships (though now disgraced, their breech-blocks confiscated, their crews in nominal internment aboard) were exactly where I had last seen them in that vanished life, lying belly-down upon the dawn murk like malevolent tomb-stones: and still, as always, backed by the paper-thin mirages of the city, whose fig-shaped minarets changed colour with every lift of the sun.
Slowly we passed down the long green aisle among the tall ships, as if taking part in some ceremonial review. The surprises among so much that was familiar, were few but choice: an iron-clad lying dumbly on its side, a corvette whose upper works had been smeared and flattened by a direct hit — gun-barrels split like carrots, mountings twisted upon themselves in a contortion of scorched agony. Such a large package of grey steel to be squashed at a single blow, like a paper bag. Human remains were being
hosed along the scuppers by small figures with a tremendous patience and quite impassive ly. This was surprising as it might be for someone walking in a beautiful cemetery to come upon a newly dug grave. (‘It is beautiful’ said the child.) And indeed it was so — the great forests of masts and spires which rocked and inclined to the slight swell set up by water-traffic, the klaxons mewing softly, the reflections dissolving and reforming. There was even some dog-eared jazz flowing out upon the water as if from a waste-pipe somewhere. To her it must have seemed appropriate music for a triumphal entry into the city of childhood.