Palace. I don’t think there were any other hotels. We arrived off the night train from Cairo in which all the sleepers had been booked so we had to sit up through the hot trundling night squashed thigh to thigh sharing a compartment with a bunch of nurses on leave from the military hospital in Heliopolis and a padre who kept trying toget up a game of whist. Eventually they all went to sleep and when the dawn came up – that translucent glowing desert dawn – we were the only ones awake and we watched the line of hills on the far side of the Nile go from pink to amber and the water turn sapphire blue. There were flights of white egrets and herons sitting hunched on the trees that overhung the bank and a black ibis posed like a sculpture on a sandbank. The fields in the cultivated mile or so between the river and the desert were bright with green clover or tall thick sugar-cane and they hummed with life – bare-legged fellaheen with their galabiehs looped up between their thighs, little figures of children in brilliant dresses – vermilion and crimson and lime – strings of camels and donkeys and buffalo. And the whole place seemed to be gently shifting – the grey-green feathery palms with their curving snakeskin trunks swaying and waving in the light desert wind. We sat holding hands and staring out of the window and it was like looking at a picture. A Breughel perhaps – one of those busy informative paintings full of detail, of people doing particular things, of a dog cocking a leg, a cat sitting in the sun, a child playing, those pictures where you feel you look into a frozen moment of time. I said that one of the things one never did was notice this place. See it for itself. For us it was nothing but a backdrop. ‘It’s a beautiful country,’ I said. ‘And we don’t see it.’
And he said, ‘We shall always see it.’
We got to Luxor and fought our way out of the station through the dragomen and the sellers of scarabs and black basilisk heads of Rameses the Second and flywhisks and each other’s sisters and got a room at the Winter Palace. We went to bed and stayed there till the late afternoon. We lay naked on the bed with the midday sun slicing in stripes through the shutters; we made love more times than I would have thought possible. He had five days’ leave. The first I had known of it was his voice on the phone asking if I could get away for a long weekend. He had been up at the front and he’d be going back there next week. Or to wherever the front by then was – that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions ofvehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way – no towns, no villages, no people – and nothing tangible to gain or lose. In which you fought for possession of a barely detectable rocky ridge, or a map position. In which there were suddenly hundreds of thousands of men where there had been nothing, but still the place remained empty. He spoke of the desert as being like the board in some game in which opposing sides manoeuvred from square to square; I used the image in a despatch and got a pat on the back from London office and told him I should have given him a credit. He said he’d wait for that till after the war.
Eventually, at dusk, we got up and dressed and went down for a drink on the terrace overlooking the Nile. Maybe that was the point when I spoke to Gordon’s acquaintance. If so, he is gone now; all that remains is the long low fawn shoulder of the hill above the Valley of the Kings with the sun going down behind it in a smoulder of gold and pink and turquoise. And the bland Egyptian evening sounds of ice chinking in glasses, the slap of the suffragis’ slippers on the stone of the hotel terrace,
And he said, ‘We shall always see it.’
We got to Luxor and fought our way out of the station through the dragomen and the sellers of scarabs and black basilisk heads of Rameses the Second and flywhisks and each other’s sisters and got a room at the Winter Palace. We went to bed and stayed there till the late afternoon. We lay naked on the bed with the midday sun slicing in stripes through the shutters; we made love more times than I would have thought possible. He had five days’ leave. The first I had known of it was his voice on the phone asking if I could get away for a long weekend. He had been up at the front and he’d be going back there next week. Or to wherever the front by then was – that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions ofvehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way – no towns, no villages, no people – and nothing tangible to gain or lose. In which you fought for possession of a barely detectable rocky ridge, or a map position. In which there were suddenly hundreds of thousands of men where there had been nothing, but still the place remained empty. He spoke of the desert as being like the board in some game in which opposing sides manoeuvred from square to square; I used the image in a despatch and got a pat on the back from London office and told him I should have given him a credit. He said he’d wait for that till after the war.
Eventually, at dusk, we got up and dressed and went down for a drink on the terrace overlooking the Nile. Maybe that was the point when I spoke to Gordon’s acquaintance. If so, he is gone now; all that remains is the long low fawn shoulder of the hill above the Valley of the Kings with the sun going down behind it in a smoulder of gold and pink and turquoise. And the bland Egyptian evening sounds of ice chinking in glasses, the slap of the suffragis’ slippers on the stone of the hotel terrace,
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