I would, I said to her, very much like to journey some day to that new Renaissance court. She said she was sure I would be more than welcome. Only the best were attracted to Mussolini, recognising in him the same self-confidence, talents and audacity which had made them great in their chosen work. I imagined this marvellous court on a larger scale than Imperial Rome, with tall, airy white marble columns and gleaming floors, like pools, stretching into shadow. There we should all meet, intellectuals, artists, scientists and adventurers from every corner of the world, representing the nations and religions of the Earth, to exchange knowledge and ideas, to discuss in fluent discourse the means by which we should truly civilise the world.
That the experiment came to nothing, I said to the older Cornelius boy, was not the fault of the visionaries who began it. It was the fault of the blind reactionaries who conspired to stop it. There are few people in modern Italy who would not rather go back to the days of Il Duce, when they could be proud of their heritage, certain of their cause. The same could be said for Hitler, but the stories are not completely parallel. I am the first to agree: in some respects the Fuhrer went too far. But were the French completely free from blame? What does ‘fascist’ mean, anyway? It means nothing but ‘law’ and ‘discipline’. Are chaos and licence, such as we have today, to be preferred? A Rolling Stone gathers no responsibility, I told him. It would be wonderful if we could all caper about in Hyde Park and howl like some Sudanese zealot and be given a million pounds for it! He could not reply.
Not merely stupefied by a spoon-feeding State, I said, but inarticulate as well. Rhetoric, I discovered, is no longer on the Holland Park syllabus. There is scarcely a school in London that retains it! We are losing the realities and the meaning of the past. Without them we shall never create the future we desire. Why must they always simplify? I told them - I embrace complexity. It is my meat and drink. But they had nothing for me. Shortly afterwards I opened my shop.
‘The desert,’ I told her, ‘teaches us the arts of compromise. Without them, we could not survive.’
‘But you would not compromise on principle, al Sakhr?’
‘The desert makes a principle of compromise.’ I smiled. ‘What can you control there, in the end? The rainfall? The wind?’
She was silent for a few moments after that, standing against the wickerwork, one hand on a rope, the other on the basket’s rail, wearing only her shoes to give her enough height to peer down over the flatness of what looked, from there, like a vast slab of concrete scattered with rubble. I saw it suddenly as the foundation of a gigantic temple and in that vision the scale of Atlantis was revealed to me! Only when I looked upon the monumental buildings of the new dictators would this vision be recreated! They knew the spiritual value of such architecture. This is what they shared with the cathedral-builders. What is wrong with offering hard-working people a little glimpse of perfection?
My aviatrix had lost her calendar and had only her maps and compasses. She knew that it was probably still July and it was certainly 1927. As to our distance travelled, we should soon come upon some good-sized settlement where we would, with proper caution, regain our bearings.
Some evenings, in the twilight, we would dance the Argentinian tango to the tune from the portable gramophone.
We had both grown a little weary and complained of a certain clamminess, doubtless caused by the steam. We longed for cool water, to bathe in and to drink. The heat was into the 120s. I spoke of the hamman and its luxuries; the baths the Moor gave to the Turk. There were certain establishments in Oman, I said, where men and women were encouraged to bathe together. This excited her and it seemed churlish to disappoint her imagination. I described the sensual delights of the steam baths, the nature of their attendants and their pleasures. It gave me a uniquely delicious frisson which had nothing in it of lust. The sensation grew stronger in me as she discovered fresh levels of sexual ecstasy and experiment. Only when we had begun to suffer the effects of the heat and of remaining aloft for so long did I think to ask her if they had put a time-limit on her expedition. I still barely understood the scientific purpose of her flight.
‘My dear sheikh, it becomes whatever I wish it to be. The balloon is a relatively small expense. All I have to do to justify the voyage to the Italian government is make a few notes, a few marks on the map and take a reel or two of film until I have enough for a lecture tour! Another first for Italy! A jolly cheap one, too.’ She had already had some success, she said, with a one-woman dhow voyage from Aden to Bombay. She had signed a contract with a Milan publisher who wanted her book about it. ‘It’s a peculiar way of making a living, but it enables me to travel with some security and to be almost guaranteed an adventure! The publicity I receive ensures my safety. It’s only bad luck that brought me down at Zazara. Anywhere else would have had a newspaper and a wire.’
Thought of that near-disaster brought a frown to her wonderful eyes which deepened as she cocked her head to listen. She sucked her index finger and raised it into the air. She rose suddenly, plucking her compass from its box and checking our position. I grew a little concerned. ‘What’s wrong, Miss von Bek?’ I wrapped my jerd about me and got to my feet. The basket shuddered. There was something unfamiliar about our movement.
‘The wind’s changing,’ she said. ‘We’re beginning to turn south.’ Hurriedly she got out her maps and spread them on the carpet. ‘This could be awkward.’
I saw immediately what she meant. If we were flying between Ghat (which lay some 600 miles inland from Tripoli) and Touat (some 600 miles from Casablanca) and the wind had indeed shifted south then Kolya’s bitter prediction might be about to come true. In fact we would be fortunate to land in Timbuktu, the forbidden city on the far side of the Sahara.
I had grown used to seeing the sun always setting directly ahead of us, of sailing always into the last of the day’s light, but now I saw the sun swelling orange above the horizon off to our right. Below raced a succession of slatey drumlins, too puny to be called hills, while ahead lay the waterless dunes of the deep Southern Sahara.
I became poignantly aware of Kolya’s wisdom and knew a wave of utter self-contempt. ‘Orl roads lead ter Rome, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius, ‘so yer might as well pick a comfy one.’ Unfortunately it seemed to me then that I had chosen the riskiest road of all.
That night we attempted to read the map by torchlight, from time to time peering over the side at the dunes or at the magnificent stars as we tried desperately to determine our position. The stars were displayed as sharply as an astrologer’s chart with every pin-point an identifiable individual, every configuration perfectly defined, but neither of us could navigate by them. We were hoping to see a good-sized settlement where we could land and risk someone taking another potshot at us. Such problems beset the first balloonists in Europe, who whenever they landed were set upon by local peasants. We at least had the advantage of our Gatling and a couple of loaded Webleys as well as my Lee-Enfield. I felt a pang when I thought of my friend. He had been a fool not to come with us, yet, just as he was suffering the consequences of his decision, I would soon no doubt be suffering the consequences of mine. At Rosie von Bek’s persistent prompting, and with the help of some sustaining sneg, there was nothing to do but return to our habitual pursuits, praying that God was sufficiently well-disposed towards us not to let us perish in that blazing waste.
I had taken to telling her strange tales of the desert. She demanded the most complicated details, forcing me to draw more than I should have liked on my Egyptian experiences. Yet, by turning those horrors into a form of fiction, I managed further to restore myself. The knowledge I had gained at Bi’r Tefawi could, by some odd alchemy, be put to my advantage. Her own motives were purely sensual, yet she enjoyed a fantasy which she might never have dared bring to reality if we had not drifted unremarked above the surface of the earth. Yet over the next two days the raw truth of our predicament grew harder to avoid. Rosie von Bek’s manner became increasingly nervous as
she darted from side to side of the basket, checking the balloon’s functions, making certain that the engine was working. Unable to be of assistance, I continued, when not at her disposal, to absorb myself in the adventures of Sexton Blake, Detective. She chose to see my fascination as part of the stoic nature of the Bedouin, but since there was no action I could take The Union Jack soothed my mind, helping me ignore the unpleasant likelihood of our deaths in the desert. I was surprised that she saw no parallels between my anodyne and her own addiction to my verbal confections. It was not surprising that I should seek the consolations of Zenith the Albino or The Master Mummer after my surfeit of sensuality and terror, just as she had doubtless meanwhile satisfied her appetite for the adventures of the famous detective, his plucky assistant Tinker and their bloodhound Pedro pitted against a thousand deadly villains. Upholding the high standards of a benign imperialism, wherever his cases led him, even Blake could not live by idealism and romance alone, though I should make it clear there was not a trace of smut in those stories.
My refusal to let anxiety take control of me was, it seemed, soon justified. I was about to begin Chapter Five of The Clue of the Cracked Footprint, featuring the international adventurer Dr Huxton Rymer at large in the Orient, when my companion raised a cheer like a schoolgirl at a hockey match. ‘The wind, my Sheikh! Al rih! It’s turning! We’re saved! Hurrah!’
Carefully, I replaced my Union Jack magazine in its locker and went to stand beside her. The wind had indeed changed, but had become erratic. The balloon was buffeted violently, then struck again and again. I noted the colour of the sky, the agitated sand below us. We were on the edge of some kind of storm. There came thunder from below the horizon and the sun turned a sickly yellow. The sand ran like mud. From where we looked, it might have been a flood. Rosie moved closer to me, her eyes agitated, her manner uncertain. ‘Is this something we should fear, my Hawk?’
‘We are always in the hands of Allah, sweet child.’ I had no notion of the cause of this phenomenon. For a while the basket began to swing like a pendulum, as if far above us somewhere was the face of an enormous clock. Then I realised we were not moving at all. We appeared to be frozen at the centre of a small whirlwind. Even as we watched, a spiral of sand rose around us and the breath was dragged from our bodies. The temperature dropped radically. We were both shivering. It was as if we were in the power of some fierce desert djinn furious at our invasion of his land. We found ourselves at the very Heart of Chaos.
Then, suddenly, it was as if we were being propelled through the muzzle of Verne’s gigantic cannon which fired the explorers from Earth to the Moon! Now the balloon was travelling rapidly upward, the warm air of our canopy acting, in the falling barometer, to draw us out of the storm like dew to the sun. We were all at once drifting in the safety of the upper atmosphere where, we discovered from our hastily consulted compass, we were travelling north. It was my turn to exclaim with pleasure! To the north lay Tangier, Algiers or Tunis! And north of these, on busy sea-routes, were the ports of Italy! We had been miraculously saved, as Rosie remarked, by nothing more than balloonist’s luck. So little was known in those days. The mapping of currents and pressures, examination of lighter-than-air crafts’ behaviour was scarcely a science then. Though we were the first to experience that desert phenomenon, we were by no means the last!
Meanwhile, it took us some time before we could accept that we were thoroughly secure from the elements. The wind was once again our friend, the sun no longer an implacable enemy.
The entire bizarre episode, from the moment I had put down my Union Jack in response to Rosie von Bek’s cries, had filled four minutes, yet it would be several hours before our nerves were calmed and our spirits restored. Still I gasp at the good fortune that took us towards the coast, to escape forever that anguish of isolation.
Below us the dunes disappeared, to be replaced by red drifts which in turn became orange sarira, the baked rock, sand and pebbles which made up the greater part of the Sahara. But now, here and there, we began to see glimpses of water, the occasional pool or tiny stream. Here too was cultivation; a few poor fields, some animals, huts, or the heavy felt tents of Berber nomads. We viewed these signs of humanity with much the same mixture of excitement and relief a European feels upon entering the suburbs of a new city. Gradually more and more signs of life greeted us. The balloon raced over a terracotta landscape towards far-off mountains. It became easy to make out the faces of those we passed, to note the details of their cottages and shrines. So delighted were we at our change of fortune that it was some time before we realised we were losing height faster than was safe and that we could not possibly regain enough lift to take us over the peaks. The air in our canopy had grown cool while the sun rose to zenith overhead. Hastily, we let loose our water ballast and some of the sandbags we had brought from Zazara. Rosie von Bek restarted the engine for a few seconds, only to discover that she had used the last of the methylated spirits. She could make no more steam.
Our descent became relatively gentle as we desperately tried everything possible to keep the balloon aloft, to continue on towards the Mediterranean coast. Eventually we realised we should have to land, but were unsure whether to aim for the relatively unpopulated semi-desert or head for one of the towns closer to the mountains where we would not necessarily be welcomed.
‘I am beginning to understand,’ declared my Rose, ‘how the arms of Italy, displaying a prominent cross, are not the most diplomatic for these parts.’
I suggested we try to find some relatively isolated spot in which to control our own landfall. We would note the next large township and then bring the balloon down in the desert a half-mile or so away.
Accordingly, Rosie von Bek operated her valves and lines with pretty expertise, gradually slowing the balloon’s momentum while casually whistling some old Cheltenhamian air. She wore black and pink satin pyjamas over which she had thrown a light gelabea. With her dishevelled hair, her wonderful violet eyes staring from that golden skin, she was a goddess of the air. We had reached a place where a wide wadi curved between groves of date palms and opened onto a small lake on the shores of which were built a tumble of houses, seemingly piled one on top of another like so many brick-red children’s blocks, their walls contrasting sharply with the rich greens of the palms, the pale, clear water. This oasis town was quite different in appearance to the ramshackle collection of huts and houses which made up their Egyptian equivalents. I was impressed by the decoration on so many of the mud walls. There were brightly painted patterns, geometrical decorative script, and always the name of God. More surprising were the primitive representations of animals and people. These Berbers practised only a few of the eastern Arabs’ cultural habits. Even from here we saw that all the women went unveiled.
I was craning my neck to make out further details of the town when from behind me came a massive gasp. Signorina von Bek had pulled the ripcord! With a great blossoming of silk our bag was losing its emblazoned outer skin. We fell towards the baked, rusty earth. On our left were mountains and on my right desert. But below us was a huge oasis, with rivers connecting pool to pool, small settlements, even, perhaps, I dared hope, some outpost of white imperialism! As we descended I remarked on the picturesque nature of the scenery. This far better resembled my imagination’s Arabia than the mixture of hovels, religious monuments and ugly European façades which, with the addition of a few miserable palms on dusty boulevards, the Arab so frequently calls ‘civilisation’. Here was the landscape which had inspired E. Mayne Hull and G. H. Teed, which gave us Beau Geste and The Desert Song! And, riding towards us across this romantic tundra, as we came down easily in a shelf of soft red sand, was a party of uniformed horsemen on prancing Arabs who could easily have called themselves the Red Shadow’s men. With their red and gold tunics, blue trousers, dark red cloaks and brilliantly decorated saddles and bridles, they might have been the chorus of some fashionable operetta. I began to wonder again whether nature imitated art or if I were
not still somewhere in the Western Desert, dreaming this dream to avoid the truth of death. Yet I had never seen such handsome native riders.