The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [383]
‘Why on earth are you taking me to Scobie’s rooms?’ I said again as we started to clip-clop down the length of the familiar street. Her eyes shone with a mischievous delight as putting her lips to my ear she whispered: ‘Patience. You shall see.’
It was the same house all right. We entered the tall gloomy archway as we had so often in the past. In the deepening dusk it looked like some old faded-daguerreotype, the little courtyard, and I could see that it had been much enlarged. Several supporting walls of neighbouring tenements had been razed or had fallen down and increased its mean size by about two hundred square feet. It was just a shattered and pock-marked no-man’s-land of red earth littered with refuse. In one corner stood a small shrine which I did not remember having remarked before. It was surrounded by a huge ugly modern grille of steel. It boasted a small white dome and a withered tree, both very much the worse for wear. I recog-nized in it one of the many maquams with which Egypt is studded, spots made sacred by the death of a hermit or holy man and where the faithful repair to pray or solicit his help by leaving ex-votos.
This little shrine looked as so many do, utterly shabby and forlorn, as if its existence had been overlooked and forgotten for centuries. I stood looking around me, and heard Clea’s clear voice call:
‘Ya Abdul!’ There was a note in it which suggested suppressed amusement but I could not for the life of me tell why. A man ad-vanced towards us through the shadows peering. ‘He is almost blind. I doubt if he’ll recognize you.’
‘But who is it?’ I said, almost with exasperation at all this mystery. ‘Scobie’s Abdul’ she whispered briefly and turned away to say: ‘Abdul, have you the key of the Maquam of El Scob?’
He greeted her in recognition making elaborate passes over his breast, and produced a clutch of tall keys saying in a deep voice:
‘At once O lady’ rattling the keys together as all guardians of shrines must do to scare the djinns which hang about the entrances to holy places.
‘Abdul!’ I exclaimed with amazement in a whisper. ‘But he was a youth.’ It was quite impossible to identify him with this crooked and hunched anatomy with its stooping centenarian’s gait and cracked voice. ‘Come’ said Clea hurriedly, ‘explanations later. Just come and look at the shrine.’ Still bemused I followed in the guardian’s footsteps. After a very thorough rattling and banging to scare the djinns he unlocked the rusty portals and led the way inside. It was suffocatingly hot in that little airless tomb. A single wick somewhere in a recess had been lighted and gave a wan and trembling yellow light. In the centre lay what I presumed must be the tomb of the saint. It was covered with a green cloth with an elaborate design in gold. This Abdul reverently removed for my inspection, revealing an object under it which was so surprising that I uttered an involuntary exclamation. It was a galvanized iron bath-tub on one leg of which was engraved in high relief the words: ‘ “The Dinky Tub” Crabbe’s. Luton.’ It had been filled with clean sand and its four hideous crocodile-feet heavily painted with the customary anti-djinn blue colour. It was an astonishing object of reverence to stumble upon in such surroundings, and it was with a mixture of amusement and dismay that I heard the now completely unrecognizable Abdul, who was the object’s janitor, muttering the conventional prayers in the name of El Scob, touching as he did so the ex-votos which hung down from every corner of the wall like little white tassels. These were, of
course, the slips of cloth which women tear from their underclothes and hang up as offerings to a saint who, they believe, will cure sterility and enable them to conceive! The devil! Here was old Scobie’s bath-tub apparently being invoked to confer fertility upon the childless — and with success, too, if one could judge by the great number of the offerings.
‘El Scob was a holy one?’ I said in my halting Arabic. The tired, crooked bundle of humanity with its head encircled in a tattered shawl nodded and bowed as he croaked: