Chapter III

In the final stage I was in the thick of it again, though in a very different sort of thickness. Cotton was everywhere. The flakes of Minet el Bassal had become a snowstorm, which hurtled through the air and lay upon the ground in drifts. The cotton was being pressed into bales, and perhaps being cleaned too—it is shocking not to be sure, but the row was tremendous. The noise was made no longer by merchants—who seldom so far remount the sources of their wealth—but by a certain amount of wooden machinery and by a great many Arabs. Some of them were fighting with masses of the stuff which was poured over them from an endless staircase. Just as they mastered it, more would arrive and completely bury them. They would shout with laughter and struggle, and then more cotton would come and more, quivering from the impetus of its transit, so that one could not tell which was vegetable, which man. They thrust it into a pit in the flooring, upon which other Arabs danced. This was the first stage in the pressing—exerted by the human foot with the assistance of song. The chant rose and fell. It was better than the chants of the Bourse, being generic not personal, and of immemorial age—older than Hell at all events. When the Arabs had trodden the cotton tight, up they jumped, and one of them struck the flooring with his hand. The bottom of the pit opened in response, a sack was drawn across by invisible agents, and the mass sank out of sight into a lower room, where the final pressure was exerted on it by machinery. We went down to see this and to hear the “cri du coton,” which it gives when it can shrink no more. Metal binders were clamped round it and secured by hand, and then the completed bale—as hard as iron and containing two or three Arabs inside it for all I know—was tumbled away to the warehouse.

It is difficult to speak intelligently about or against machinery, and my comments made no great stir—_e.g._ “Why has it to be pressed?” and “Do the different people’s cotton not get mixed?” and “What I like is, it is so primitive.” To this last indeed it was somewhat severely replied that the process I had viewed was anything but primitive—nay, that it was the last word on cotton-pressing, or it would not have been adopted at Alexandria. This was conclusive, and one can only hope that it will be the last word for ever, and that for century after century brown legs and rhythmic songs will greet the advancing cataracts of snow. That peevish British officer would have forgotten his peevishness had he come here. He would have regretted his criticism of the Bourse. It was “A bomb in the middle of them is the only possible comment,” and when he made it I realized that there was someone in the world even more outside cotton than I was myself.

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THE DEN

At last I have been to a Den. The attempt was first made many years ago in Lahore City, where my guide was a young Missionary, who wasted all his time in liking people and making them like him. I have often wondered what he found to convert, and what his financial backers—old ladies in America and England—will have to say upon the results of his labours. He had lived in the Lahore bazaars as a poor man, and as he walked through their intricacies he explained how this became comprehensible, and that pardonable, and that inevitable, so soon as one drew close enough to it to understand. We did interesting things—went into a temple as big as a cupboard where we were allowed to hold the gods and ring the bells, visited a lawyer who was defending a client against the charge of selling a wife—and as the afternoon closed the Missionary said he supposed I should like to include a Den. He remarked that a great deal of rubbish was talked about opium, and he led me to a courtyard, round whose sides were some lean-to’s of straw. “Oh! it isn’t working,” he said with disappointment. He peered about and pulled from a lean-to a solitary sinner. “Look at his eyes,” he said. “I’m afraid that’s all.”

There my acquaintance with Vice stopped, until Egypt, the land of so much, promised new opportunities. It would not be opium here, but hashish, a more lurid drug. Concealed in walking-sticks, it gave delicious dreams. So I was glad of a chance of accompanying the police of Alexandria upon a raid. Their moral tone was superior to the Missionary’s, but they had no better luck. Advancing stealthily upon a fragile door they burst it open and we rushed in. We were in a passage, open to the stars. Right and left of it, and communicating with one another, were sheds which the police explored with their heavy shoulders and large feet. In one of them they found a tired white horse. A corporal climbed into the manger. “They often secrete bowls here,” he said. At the end of the passage we came upon human life. A family was asleep by the light of a lamp—not suspiciously asleep, but reasonably disturbed by our irruption. The civil father was ordered to arise and carry the lamp about, and by its light we found a hollow reed, at which the police sniffed heavily. Traces of hashish adhered to it, they pronounced. That was all. They were delighted with the find, for it confirmed their official faith—that the city they controlled was almost pure but not quite. Too much or too little would have discredited them.

A few weeks later an Egyptian friend offered to take me round the native quarters of the same town. We did interesting things—saw a circumcision procession, listened to an epic recitation—and as the evening closed he asked me whether I should like to include a Den. He thought he knew of one. Having laid his hand on his forehead for a moment he led through intricate streets to a door. We opened it silently and slipped in. There was something familiar in the passage, and my forebodings were confirmed by the sight of a white horse. I had left as an avenging angel, I was to return as a devotee. I knew better than my friend that we should find no hashish—not even the hollow reed, for it had been confiscated as an exhibit to the Police Station—but I said nothing, and in due time we disturbed the sleeping family. They were uncivil and refused to move their lamp. My friend was disappointed. For my own part I could hardly help being sorry for poor sin. In all the vast city was this her one retreat?

But outside he had an idea. He thought he knew of another Den, which was less exposed to the onslaughts of purity since it was owned by a British subject. We would go there. And we found the genuine article at last. It was up a flight of stairs, down which the odour (not a disagreeable one) floated. The proprietor—a one-eyed Maltese—battled with us at the top. He hadn’t hashish, he cried, he didn’t know what hashish was, he hardly knew what a room was or a house. But we got in and saw the company. There is really nothing to say when one comes to the point. They were just smoking. And at the present moment they don’t even smoke, for my one and only Den has been suppressed by the police—just as his old ladies must by now have suppressed my Missionary at Lahore.

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BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON

Of the three streets that dispute the honour of being Alexandria’s premier thoroughfare the Rue Rosette undoubtedly bears the palm for gentility. The Bond Street (I refer to Rue Chérif Pacha) is too shoppy to be genteel, and the Boulevard de Ramleh competes from this particular aspect not at all. In its length, its cleanliness, and the refined monotony of its architecture, Rue Rosette outdoes either of its rivals. They are tainted with utility: people use them to get something or somewhere. But Rue Rosette is an end in itself. It starts in the middle of the town and no man can tell where it stops: a goal it may have, but not one discoverable by mortal leg. Its horizon, narrow but uninterrupted, ever unrolls into a ribbon of blue sky above the wayfarer’s head, and the ribbon of white beneath his feet corresponds, and right and left of him are the houses that he thought he had passed a quarter of an hour before. Oh, it is so dull! Its dullness is really indescribable. What seem at first to be incidents—such as the trays of worthies who project from the clubs—prove at a second glance to be subdued to what they sit in. They are half asleep. For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

The poor street does not want to be dull. It wants to be smart, and of a Parisian smartness. Eternally well-dressed people driving infinitely in either direction—that is its ideal. It is not mine, and we meet as seldom as possible in consequence. But friends of a higher social outlook tell me that, by a great effort, they can feel perfectly at home in the Rue Rosette—can transform the municipal buildings into Ministries, and the Consulates into Embassies, and arabias into broughams, can increase the polish on the gentlemen’s boots and the frou-frou from the ladies’ skirts, until the Rue Rosette becomes what it yearns to be—a masterpiece by Baron Haussmann, debouching in an Arc de Triomphe instead of a Police Station.

I have never been able to make that effort. When fancies do come here, they are of an older and friendlier civilization. I recall Achilles Tatius, a bishop of the post-classical period, who wrote a somewhat improper novel. He made his hero enter Alexandria by this very street one thousand years ago. It was not called the Rue Rosette then, but the Canopic Road, and it was not genteel or smart but presented throughout its length scenes of extraordinary splendour. Beginning at the Gate of the Sun (by the Public Gardens) it traversed the city uninterruptedly until it reached the waters of the Harbour (near Minet el Bassal), and here stood the Gate of the Moon, to close what the Sun had begun. The street was lined with marble colonnades from end to end, as was the Rue Nebi Daniel, and the point of their intersection (where one now stands in hopeless expectation of a tram) was one of the most glorious crossways of the ancient world. Clitophon (it was thus that the Bishop named his hero) paused there in his walk, and looked down the four vistas, over whose ranks rose temples and palaces and tombs, and he tells us that the crossways bore the name of Alexander, and that the Mausoleum close to them was Alexander’s tomb. He does not tell us more, being in search of a female companion named Leucippe, whom he deems of more permanent interest, but there is no reason to doubt his statements, for Achilles Tatius himself lived here and dare not cause his characters to lie. The passage gleams like a jewel among the amorous rubbish that surrounds it. The vanished glory leaps up again, not in architectural detail but as a city of the soul. There (beneath the Mosque of Nebi Daniel) is the body of Alexander the Great. There he lies, lapped in gold and laid in a coffin of glass. When Clitophon made his visit he had already lain there for eight hundred years, and according to legend he lies there still, walled into a forgotten cellar. And of this glory all that tangibly remains is a road: the alignment of the Rue Rosette. Christian and Arab destroyed the rest, but they could not destroy the direction of a road. Towards the harbour they did divert it, certainly; the great thoroughfare contracts into the Rue Sidi Metwalli and becomes heaven knows what in the neighbourhood of the Rue des Sœurs. But in its eastern stretch it runs with its old decision, and the limestone and stucco still throw over it the shadows that marble once threw.

Of the two gates there survives not even a description. They may have been masterpieces of art, they may have been simple entrances, but they must certainly have included shrines to the god and goddess who respectively guarded them. No one took much notice of the shrines. Paganism, even in the days of Clitophon and Leucippe, was dead. It is dead, yet the twin luminaries still reign over the street and give it what it has of beauty. In the evening the western vista can blaze with orange and scarlet, and the eastern, having darkened, can shimmer with a mysterious radiance, out of which, incredibly large, rises the globe of the moon.

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THE SOLITARY PLACE

Delicate yet august, the country that stretches westward from the expiring waters of Lake Mariout is not easy to describe. Though it contains accredited Oriental ingredients, such as camels, a mirage, and Bedouins, and though it remounts to a high antiquity, yet I cannot imagine our powerful professional novelists getting to work at it, and extracting from its quiet recesses hot tales about mummies and sin. Its basis is a soft limestone, which rises on the seaward side into two well-defined and parallel ridges, and swells inland into gentle hills whose outlines and colouring often suggest a Scotch moor: the whole district has a marked tendency to go purple, especially in its hollows—into that sombre brownish purple that may be caused by moorland growths. Many of the bushes are like flowerless heather. In the lower ground barley is cultivated, and depends for its success upon an occasional violent thunderstorm which shall swill a sudden torrent off the hills. The ancients cultivated vines and olives here too, as the remains of their presses prove, and Cleopatra had a garden here, but from such luxuries the soil has desisted. It has beat a general retreat from civilization, and the spirit of the place, without being savage, is singularly austere. Its chief episode is the great temple of Abousir, which with its attendant beacon-tower stands so magnificently upon the coastal ridge. And inland lie the marble basilicas of St. Menas and his holy well. But these apart, there is nothing to catch the attention. The tents of the Bedouins, so Mongolian in outline, seldom cut the lines of the sky, but blend in colour with the stone, against which they crouch. The quarries, vast and romantic, lie hidden in the flanks of the limestone. They do not play the part that a chalk-pit does in the landscape of the Sussex downs. The place is not a wilderness, it is a working concern. But it is essentially solitary, and only once a year does it, for a brief space, put its solitude away, and blossom.

There is nothing there of the ordered progress of the English spring, with its slow extension from wood-anemones through primroses into the buttercups of June. The flowers come all of a rush. One week there is nothing but spikes and buds, then the temperature rises or the wind drops, and whole tracts turn lilac or scarlet. They scarcely wait for their leaves, they are in such a hurry, and many of them blossom like little footstools, close to the ground. They do not keep their times. They scarcely keep their places, and you may look in vain for them this season where you found them last. There is a certain tract of yellow marigolds that I suspect of migration. One year it was in a quarry, the next by the railway line, now it has flown a distance of five and a half miles and unfolded its carpet on the slopes beneath Abousir. All is confusion and hurry. The white tassels of garlic that wave in the shadow of the temple may be fallen to-morrow, the blue buds of the borage never have time to unfold. The pageant passes like the waving of a handkerchief, but in compensation without the lumber that attends the passing of an English spring, no stalks and reluctant exits of half-dead leaves. As it came, so it goes. It has been more like a ray of coloured light playing on the earth than the work of the earth herself, and if one had not picked a few of the flowers and entombed them in vases upon an Alexandrian mantelpiece, they could seem afterwards like the growths of a dream.

It would require a botanist to do justice to these flowers, but fortunately there is no occasion to do justice to flowers. They are not Government officials. Let their titles and duties remain for the most part unknown. The most permanent of them are, oddly enough, the asphodels, whose coarse stems and turbid venous blossoms have disappointed many who dreamt of the Elysian Fields. How came the Greeks to plant so buxom a bulb in the solitary place they imagined beyond the grave—that place which though full of philosophers and charioteers remains for ever empty? The asphodel is built to resist rough winds and to stand on the slopes of an earthly hill. It is too heavy for the hands of ghosts, too harsh for their feet, but perhaps ours were not the asphodels the Greeks planted, and their ghosts may have walked upon what we call Stars of Bethlehem. The marigolds are solid too, but for the most part the flora are very delicate, and their colours aerial. There is a tiny vetch that hesitates between terracotta and claret. There is a scented yellow flower the size of flax which is only found in one part of the district and which closes in the evening when the irises unfold. Two of these irises are dwarf, and coloured purple and deep blue; at third is larger and china blue. There are tracts of night-scented stock. Down in the quarries grows a rock plant with a dull red spire and a fleshy leaf that almost adheres to the stone. As for the shrubs, some have transparent joints that look filled with wine; while from the woolly fibre of others jut buttons like a blue scabious. Other blue plants wave their heads in the barley. Mignonette, purple and white anemones, scarlet and yellow ranunculus, scarlet poppies, coltsfoot and dwarf orange marigolds, nettles genuine and false, henbane, mallows, celandine, hen and chickens, lords and ladies, convolvulus. English daisies I do not remember. And many of these flowers are not the varieties we know in England. The lords and ladies, for instance, are smaller and thrust up their pale green spoons in the open ground. While, to compensate, there is a larger kind—an arum of great size with a coal-black sheath and clapper—a positively Satanic plant, such as Des Esseintes would have commanded for his conservatory. In this way, just here and there, the tropic note is struck, and reminds us that these familiar and semi-familiar flowers are after all growing in Africa, and that those swelling hills stretch southwards towards the heart of the dark continent.

But what impresses one most in the scene is the quiet persistence of the earth. There is so little soil about and she does so much with it. Year after year she has given this extraordinary show to a few Bedouins, has covered the Mareotic civilization with dust and raised flowers from its shards. Will she do the same to our own tins and barbed wire? Probably not, for man has now got so far ahead of other forms of life that he will scarcely permit the flowers to grow over his works again. His old tins will be buried under new tins. This is the triumph of civilization, I suppose, the final imprint of the human upon this devoted planet, which should exhibit in its apotheosis a solid crust of machinery and graves. In cities one sees this development coming, but in solitary places, however austere, the primæval softness persists, the vegetation still flowers and seeds unchecked, and the air still blows untainted hot from the land or cold from the sea. I have tried to describe this Mariout country as it is at the beginning of March, when the earth makes her great effort. In a few days the wind may scratch and tear the blossoms, in a few weeks the sun will scorch the leaves. The spongeous red growth of the ice-plant endures longest and further empurples the hills. This too will dry up and the bones of the limestone reappear. Then all will be quiet till the first winter rain, when the camels will be driven out to surface-plough. A rectangle is outlined on the soil and scattered with seed barley. Then the camel will shuffle up and down dragging after him a wooden plough that looks like a half-open penknife, and the Bedouin, guiding it, will sing tunes to the camel that he can only sing to the camel, because in his mind the tune and the camel are the same thing.

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THE POETRY OF C. P. CAVAFY

Modern Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul. Founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs, ill built, ill planned, ill drained—many hard things can be said against it, and most are said by its inhabitants. Yet to some of them, as they traverse the streets, a delightful experience can occur. They hear their own name proclaimed in firm yet meditative accents—accents that seem not so much to expect an answer as to pay homage to the fact of individuality. They turn and see a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly. “Oh, Cavafy...!” Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.

A Greek who wishes to compose poetry has a special problem; between his written and spoken language yawns a gulf. There is an artificial “literary” jargon beloved by schoolmasters and journalists, which has tried to revive the classical tradition, and which only succeeds in being dull. And there is the speech of the people, varying from place to place, and everywhere stuffed with non-Hellenic constructions and words. Can this speech be used for poetry and for cultivated prose? The younger generation believes that it can. A society (Nea Zoe) was started in Alexandria to encourage it, and shocks the stodgy not only by its writings but by its vocabulary—expressions are used that one might actually hear in a shop. Similar movements are born and die all over the Levant, from Smyrna and Cyprus to Jannina, all testifying to the zeal of a race who, alone among the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, appear to possess the literary sense and to desire that words should be alive. Cavafy is one of the heroes of this movement, though not one of its extremists. Eclectic by nature, he sees that a new theory might be as sterile as the old, and that the final test must be the incommunicable one of taste. His own poems are in Demotic, but in moderate Demotic.

They are all short poems, and unrhymed, so that there is some hope of conveying them in a verbal translation. They reveal a beautiful and curious world. It comes into being through the world of experience, but it is not experience, for the poet is even more incapable than most people of seeing straight:

Here let me stand. Let me too look at Nature a little, the radiant blue of the morning sea, the cloudless sky and the yellow beach; all beautiful and flooded with light. Here let me stand. And let me deceive myself into thinking that I saw them— (I really did see them one moment, when first I came) —that I am not seeing, even here, my fancies, my memories, my visions of voluptuousness.

It is the world within. And since the poet cannot hope to escape from this world, he should at all costs arrange and rule it sensibly. “My mind to me a kingdom is,” sang the Elizabethan, and so is Cavafy’s; but his is a real, not a conventional, kingdom, in which there may be mutinies and war. In “The City” he sketches the tragedy of one who misgoverned, and who hopes to leave the chaos behind him and to “build another city, better than this.” Useless!

The city shall ever follow you.
In these same streets you shall wander,
and in the same purlieux you shall roam,
and in the same house you shall grow grey....
There is no ship to take you to other lands, there is no road.
You have so shattered your life here, in this small corner,
that in all the world you have ruined it.

And in “Ithaca” he sketches another and a nobler tragedy—that of a man who seeks loftily, and finds at the end that the goal has not been worth the effort. Such a man should not lament. He has not failed really.

Ithaca gave you your fair voyage.
Without her you would not have ventured on the way,
but she has no more to give you.

And if you find Ithaca a poor place, she has not mocked you.

You have become so wise, so full of experience,
that you should understand by now what these Ithacas mean.

The above extracts illustrate one of Cavafy’s moods—intensely subjective; scenery, cities and legends all re-emerge in terms of the mind. There is another mood in which he stands apart from his subject-matter, and with the detachment of an artist hammers it into shape. The historian comes to the front now, and it is interesting to note how different is his history from an Englishman’s. He even looks back upon a different Greece. Athens and Sparta, so drubbed into us at school, are to him two quarrelsome little slave states, ephemeral beside the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed them, just as these are ephemeral beside the secular empire of Constantinople. He reacts against the tyranny of Classicism—Pericles and Aspasia and Themistocles and all those bores. Alexandria, his birthplace, came into being just when Public School Greece decayed; kings, emperors, patriarchs have trodden the ground between his office and his flat; his literary ancestor—if he has one—is Callimachus, and his poems bear such titles as “The Displeasure of the Seleucid,” “In the Month of Athyr,” “Manuel Comnenus,” and are prefaced by quotations from Philostratus or Lucian.

Two of these poems shall be quoted in full, to illustrate his method.[2] In the first he adopts the precise, almost mincing style of a chronicle to build up his effect. It is called “Alexandrian Kings” and deals with an episode of the reign of Cleopatra and Antony.

Footnote 2:

A third is on page 56.

An Alexandrian crowd collected
to see the sons of Cleopatra,
Cæsarion and his little brothers
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were brought to the Gymnasium,
there to be crowned as kings
amidst a splendid display of troops.

Alexander they named king
of Armenia, of Media, and of the Parthians.
Ptolemy they named king
of Cilicia, of Syria, and Phœnicia.
Cæsarion stood a little in front,
clad in silk the colour of roses,
with a bunch of hyacinths at his breast.
His belt was a double line of sapphires and amethysts,
his sandals were bound with white ribbons
embroidered with rosy pearls.
Him they acclaimed more than the small ones.
Him they named “King of Kings!”

The Alexandrians knew perfectly well
that all this was words and empty pomp.

But the day was warm and exquisite,
the sky clear and blue,
the Gymnasium of Alexandria a triumph of art,
the courtiers’ apparel magnificent,
Cæsarion full of grace and beauty
(son of Cleopatra, blood of the Lagidæ!),
and the Alexandrians ran to see the show
and grew enthusiastic, and applauded
in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
bewitched with the beautiful spectacle,
though they knew perfectly well how worthless,
what empty words, were these king-makings.

Such a poem has, even in a translation, a “distinguished” air. It is the work of an artist who is not interested in facile beauty. In the second example, though its subject-matter is pathetic, Cavafy stands equally aloof. The poem is broken into half-lines; he is spelling out an epitaph on a young man who died in the month of Athyr, the ancient Egyptian November, and he would convey the obscurity, the poignancy, that sometimes arise together out of the past, entwined into a single ghost:

It is hard to read ... on the ancient stone.
“Lord Jesus Christ” ... I make out the word “Soul.”
“In the month of Athyr ... Lucius fell asleep.”
His age is mentioned ... “He lived years....”—
The letters KZ show ... that he fell asleep young.
In the damaged part I see the words ... “Him ... Alexandrian.”
Then come three lines ... much mutilated.
But I can read a few words ... perhaps “our tears” and “sorrows.”
And again: “Tears” ... and: “for us his friends mourning.”
I think Lucius ... was much beloved.
In the month of Athyr ... Lucius fell asleep....

Such a writer can never be popular. He flies both too slowly and too high. Whether subjective or objective, he is equally remote from the bustle of the moment, he will never compose either a Royalist or a Venizelist Hymn. He has the strength (and of course the limitations) of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it, and, in conversation, he has sometimes devoted a sentence to this subject. Which is better—the world or seclusion? Cavafy, who has tried both, can’t say. But so much is certain—either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

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