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    Mountolive
    Mountolive
    Mountolive
    Ebook452 pages8 hours

    Mountolive

    By Lawrence Durrell and Jan Morris

    4/5

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    The astounding third offering in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, a richly detailed and extraordinary expansion of the events of Justine and Balthazar
    David Mountolive is a British diplomat who views love as just another everyday transaction. But as romance turns to betrayal and secret alliances are exposed, Mountolive’s affair will bring the true complexity of contemporary love to the forefront amid the swirling political climate of Alexandria.    Continuing to push beyond the limits of the traditional novel, Lawrence Durrell maintains his unwavering focus in Mountolive. He recasts the romantic affairs and liaisons he so skillfully established in Justine and Balthazar through the eyes of the young Mountolive, building toward the series’ stunning conclusion.     This ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJun 12, 2012
    ISBN9781453261439
    Author

    Lawrence Durrell

    Born in Jalandhar, British India, in 1912 to Indian-born British colonials, Lawrence Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for the Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.  

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    Reviews for Mountolive

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    • 5/5
      The sound of water trickling and of sponges crushing softly upon the body of his brother, seemed part of an entirely new fabric of thought and emotion.

      Sorry for any undue disclosures, but I'm attempting to keep my stride, however flailing and gurgling, towards the conclusion. A reddened, sweaty review of the Quartet is to follow.
    • 5/5
      In this, the third volume of Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” the narrative shift focuses, this time to Mountolive, a character who has perhaps more in common with the real-life Durrell than even Darley, who narrated both volume I (“Justine”) and will narrate volume IV (“Clea”). Both Durrell and Mountolive were born in India and later joined the Foreign Service abroad.In this “sibling companion” to the other volumes, we find both more growing political intrigue and romantic machination. Just as “Balthazar” reconstituted and reframed the story of “Justine,” the entry of Mountolive as a major figure does much the same. He begins at the Hosnani estate of where Nessim, Narouz, their mother Leila, and ailing father all reside, and we quickly learn of Mountolive and Leila’s love affair. The jumps in time make it somewhat difficult to discern when this occurred (most likely well before the action of volumes I and II), but their relationship is handled every bit as well as the myriad other relationships, romantic and Plutonic, that have arisen. Mountolive takes a job as a British foreign service and hires Pursewarden, a more minor character from the previous two volumes, as one of his advisers. We also learn of a gun cartel that seems to be affiliated in some way with Narouz, whose political influence and rhetoric is becoming too strong for his own good. Mountolive’s knowledge of the gunrunning plot, along with the corruption the Pasha both accepts and participates in, let him leave Egypt, but not before becoming thoroughly disillusioned.It will come as no surprise to anyone who read my reviews of the first two novels that I have utterly enjoyed “Mountolive,” too. And since I know longer know how to gush about Durrell’s gorgeous, fantastic writing in an original way, I will do what I did in those reviews and leave you with a snippet from the opening chapter detailing Mountolive’s entry into the British Foreign Service and his involvement with Egypt:“As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting has the fish-drive become.”How can you not love this stuff?
    • 4/5
      Starts slow and ends strangely but mostly a good and different read. Durrell's prose is a window into an earlier time of writing. Languid and descriptive w many older English words that I had to look up. Scry? The story is also a light on the perils of occupation and the difficulty in mixing western & eastern cultures. The third book in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Robert Kaplan noted this book in one of his travelogue's.
    • 4/5
      Mountolive is the third member of the Alexandria Quartet. The narrator of Justine and Balthazar (previously unnamed but now called Darley) appears as a minor character in this book, but this is a more conventional novel in structure, using a disembodied narrator and taking the British diplomat, David Mountolive as the main point-of-view character. It takes us for a third time through the events described in Justine, but shifts the emphasis to a much broader, politically-oriented view, so that the epic love story at the centre of Justine becomes a minor, background incident. Although set in the thirties, this is very clearly a novel written in the aftermath of the Suez fiasco, exploring the dangers inherent in the pro-Arab policy of the British government before the war. The early chapters set on the feudal estates of the Coptic Hosnani family have an almost Russian flavour to them (possibly deliberate, as Durrell then briefly switches the scene to the British embassy in Moscow); by the end of the book we are back in a sordid Graham-Greeneland of bribery and espionage. The odd thing about this book, perhaps, is that you could easily read it and get a great deal of pleasure out of it without knowing a thing about the two earlier books. If you are reading them in sequence, you get the additional interest of seeing the actions and motivations of the story revised and undermined yet again, with whatever that tells you about the instability of narrative authority. Possibly because Durrell isn't writing in the persona of Darley any more, there is less self-conscious overwriting, although there are still more quotable phrases per page than one is altogether comfortable with. Sadly, Scobie, the most vivid of the minor characters in the earlier books, is absent, but we still have a few scenes with Pombal, while the novelist Pursewarden really comes into his own here.
    • 5/5
      Mountolive is the third novel in the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. In the first novel, Justine(1957) the narrator Darley, an Irish expatriate living and teaching in Alexandria, sets the stage for the innovative four volume work by describing his fascination with the ancient Egyptian city and his immersion into the complex social life of the Alexandrians. As a writer, he attempts to capture the essence of the city by chronicling over time the intricate and mysterious interactions of several characters living in the Mediterranean coastal city in pre-World War II Egypt. Justine is the flawed, sensual heart of her social group, married to and in love with Nessim, the eldest son of a wealthy Coptic Christian family who live on a vast ranch at the edge of the desert. As a Jew, she is forever excluded from true acceptance by Nessim's family and the culture of Alexandria. She is impulsively driven to find self -acceptance and identification with the essence of the life of the city. She searches desperately but unsuccessful to find meaning in life in Alexandria, that she conceptualizes as a small precise key to a beautiful and intricate pocket watch. The urgency is to find the key before age reduces her passion and youthful allure.The second novel, Balthazar(1958) involves Darley's review of an interlinear (a book written in more than one language) sent to him by Balthazar a psychiatrist acquaintance who presents a more detailed view from multiple cultural sources of the social and political situation in Alexandria described in Justine. Important information not earlier available is supplied and the historical accuracy of events is supplemented by Balthazar's complex written psychoanalytic interpretation of Justine, Nessim, and other key players. The personalities of the characters are shown to be less fixed and more determined by interpersonal agendas and apparently random events in Alexandria than Darley presented in volume one of the quartet. Even with the structured focus on unconscious motivations of the characters and their defensive interactions, the essence of life in Alexandria seems chaotic and random.In the third novel, Mountolive (1959), Darley describes the career and psychological development of a British diplomat trained for a lifetime to maintain "good form" at all times. Part of his training as a young man involved early placement by the British High Commission in Alexandria as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting. At that time he had a letter of introduction to the Hosnani family, the Coptic Christian family owners of the ranch Darley introduced in the first novel, Justine. The reticent Mountolive came of age rapidly in his brief early experience placement and learned the value of maintaining a careful, conservative, British approach to people and diplomatic decision-making, his "stiff upper lip." With knowledge gained from this experience, Mountolive left Alexandria for many years occupying additional upwardly mobile posts in the British Empire between the World Wars. In the third novel of the Quartet, after years of training in diplomacy and obedience, he returns to Alexandria as British Ambassador to Egypt during the same time period described in Justine and Balthazar. He anticipates that finally he can make decisions on his own and exert a British structural influence on Egyption culture, politics, and the lives of characters he met during his first visit to Alexandria.Before long, Mountolive discovers that his concentration on maintaining good form in Egypt is only as attractive as his uniform and his ambassadorial presence in society has only minor effects on social and political situations. As World War II approaches, Coptic Christians become targets of Moslem discrimination, Justine finds her risky existential key, Nissim and Balthazar organize military support for a pro-Palestinian movement, a British staff member commits suicide, the Egyptian king dies, pro-Hitler sentiment increases, and Mountolive realizes he has important responsibilities without any power to influence events. The main characters develop a common belief that somewhere in the heart of experience there is order and coherence which we might surprise them if they are attentive enough, or patient enough. But they all ask themselves, will there be time? Will Mountolive seek a path of least resistance or will he persist in his largely ceremonial ambassador role? What will happen to the Hosnani family members and other social/political ties established by Mountolive. The novel shows the restrictions on individual free will even in an exotic city like Alexandria during a turbulent historical era and sets the stage for the concluding part of the Alexandria Quartet, Clea. I highly recommend Durrell's major literary accomplishment that influenced the direction of post-World War II literature. Looking at the same events from different perspectives (Justine-existential, Balthazar-psychoanalytic, Mountoloive-social/structural) Darley constructs a narrative that establishes in the reader a tolerance for ambiguity and an acceptance of the existential power of a fully conscious life.
    • 4/5
      for me, this book doesn't quite match up with it's predecessors. it lacked some of the poetic writing from justine and balthazar. even some of the beautiful and horrific scenes were lacking. i think this is because the perspective is no longer through darley. interpreting the events through this character is what made things come alive. i am glad that durrell decided to travel back to this formula for the final installment. but it forces me to wonder, why didn't durrell keep it that way for the whole series? what was the advantage for this novel? it just made it more scientific, exact, direct, lacking the emotion.there are still some amazing sections of this book and the layer that is added is deep. i can't wait to finish the final piece.
    • 4/5
      at times this novel is great, a true examation of love and desire tje reader is taken to a world and an age that gone, but in the book you see the start of our time and the end ot the older time got weaker as the novel went on
    • 3/5
      The third book of the Alexandria quartet.Experimental fiction that was reportedly a commercial and critical success when first published, it has not aged well. Some of the stylistic quirks, such as heavily quoting the words of a fictional author in the story, just seem odd, while others are just self indulgent, such as the repeated returns to quote Scobie the gay former seaman and now police officer. Still the series is impressive in the capacity to represent the same events from the perspective of different story tellers at different times, and the while thing, in my view, is not great, but a good near miss. Read June - July 2010.
    • 5/5
      See the review for Justine.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this chapter of the Alexandria quartet, and can see how the layering of the narrative was successful in carrying the spirit of the overall work. Here we get a political angle to the motivations, and a showing of the steel teeth that lay not so far beneath the surface of pre-war Alexandria, and by extension, through the British Empire as a whole. It wasn't any work to press on to the next volume.
    • 4/5
      I am slowly making my way through Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, four books originally published 1957-1960. I still have to read Clea, but so far, Mountolive is my favorite. It is a more straightforward and linear narrative than the first two books, Justine and Balthazar. David Mountolive is a British diplomat who gets promoted and moves back to Alexandria. The storyline covers his initial life in Egypt, and his relationship with the Hosnani family, particularly Leila and her grown sons, Nessim, and Narouz. It covers Mountolive’s rise in the administrative ranks and sheds light on the nefarious events that have earlier occurred, such that the reader understands why one of the characters was murdered. After the first two installments, I have gotten used to Durrell’s elaborate writing style, and after initially not liking it all that much, I am now enjoying it. I think it helped that this third book in the series is written in third person. I do not think any of these books stands alone very well, so if you are planning to read this classic set, start with Justine.
    • 4/5
      The conflict between duty and personal relationships. Mountolive does what the second book could not: freed from Darley's narration and shifted to a third person perspective, it casts the first book in a new light rather than merely adding to its layers. It has the power to stand on its own, although anyone skipping the first two novels would cost this one its ability to surprise. Even Balthazar, it seems, was often treading in the dark. At first it reads only like the next link in a chain as Mountolive's story builds on our introduction to Nessim's family. Then as Pursewarden, Nessim and Justine receive further illumination, it folds back in on itself.At the same time as the puzzle box reveals its extra facets, however, in bringing clarity to vagueness it also brings the prosaic to the artful. Darley is largely dismissed behind his back, but for the reader to do the same would be to brush away the slick presentation that Durrell brought to his first novel and (to a lesser degree) the second. This third is more fun and easy to read, but it is also more conventional and lacks the same depth. I regret Durrell had the casual propensity of tossing the "N" word into the mix. It disturbed my easy enjoyment of what's otherwise the best entertainment value of the quartet so far, if not the most skillful.
    • 4/5
      As we gradually realise the scope of Durrell's literary experiment, in this, the third of the Alexandria novels, it becomes clear how no one human can ever truly know any other human, and it's heartbreaking. Durrell's prose is often too rich, veering into a purple so rich Caesar wouldn't wear it, but for every shot that misses, three hit their mark. Mountolive's drive through the storm is rivaled for beauty only by the dust-storm sequence in "Justine", and the final chapter is a slow, pulsing, vivid depiction of the last moments before death. I'll probably give myself a few weeks to cleanse the palate before reading the final volume in the series, but I'm a Durrell convert for life, I can tell.

    Book preview

    Mountolive - Lawrence Durrell

    AN INTRODUCTION TO LAWRENCE DURRELL’S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

    by Jan Morris

    This celebrated tetralogy from the 1950s was defined by its author as an investigation of modern love, but has often been regarded by its readers more as an evocation of a city – the Greco-Arab, multi-ethnic Alexandria of its title. Almost infinite variations of love are certainly explored in its 1000-odd pages, and the presence of Alexandria certainly permeates the work, but for myself I think the legendary fascination of the quartet is essentially existential. The work itself is greater than its themes, and casts a spell that is neither precisely emotional nor specifically topographic.

    Actually it is neither specific nor precise about almost anything. It was an experimental novel of its day, perhaps related to the work of Durrell’s friend Henry Miller, perhaps to Ulysses. It was based upon the premise that people and events seem different when considered from different angles and periods, and that they can best be recorded, as Durrell himself put it, stereoscopically. The four volumes concern the same characters, but several narrators tell its complex tales from their several viewpoints, and they write at different times. It is a device, Durrell claimed, amounting to a new concept of reality, reflecting the ideas of Freud and Einstein and a convergence of Western and Eastern Metaphysics.

    If that sounds over-blown, well, the Quartet itself is not without pretension, in concept as in performance. As has generally been admitted, it is often ornately over-written, sometimes to an almost comical degree. The high ambition of its schema sometimes makes its narratives and characters inexplicably confusing, and its virtuoso use of vocabulary can be trying (pudicity? noetic? fatidic? scry?) But if there are parts of the work that few readers, I suspect, will navigate without skipping, there are many passages of such grand inspiration that reaching them feels like emerging from choppy seas into marvellously clear blue Mediterranean waters.

    For it is true that the city of Alexandria does colour the entire work. Durrell lived and worked in the city from 1942 to 1945, and he believed strongly in the effect of place upon human temperaments. Alexandria’s peculiar Levantine character, as it existed during Durrell’s time there, is insistently summoned into these pages. His responses to the place were moulded partly by E.M. Forster’s elegant Alexandria, A History and Guide, first published in 1922, and more especially by the greatest of Alexandrine poets, Constantin Cavafy – who had died in 1933, but whose drifting presence in the books is almost as haunting as the presence of the city itself.

    It was Cavafy who wrote of Alexandria "There’s no new land, my friend, no/ New sea; for the city will follow you, /In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly.… One of this work’s narrators goes further still: man is only an extension of the spirit of place, says Nessim (I think it is) in Justine. The several narrators of the Quartet are certainly enslaved by Alexandria’s genii loci, and readers are likely to be entrapped too, because the work, so opaque in other contexts, is clear enough when it deals with the city. We soon learn the geography of the place, from the handsome Rue Fuad to the meshed Arab backstreets, from the elegance of L’Etoile or the Cecil Hotel to the hashish-cafés of the slums or the sandy approaches to the Western Desert. We see inside the mansions of rich cosmopolitans and diplomats, we visit stifling attic bedrooms, brothels and pleasure pavilions by the sea.

    Much of all this is factual. Durrell based much of his fiction upon personal experience, reminiscence and tittle-tattle, which gave the Quartet, for his contemporaries, something of the allure of a roman-à-clef, not least in its sexual allusions. In fact a general sensuality is the most Alexandrine aspect of the Quartet, but it does shows itself, too, in somewhat hazy illustrations of individual sex – modern love, as Durrell put it. These dark blue tides of Eros are far from pornographic. Sometimes, it is true, we are unsure who is loving whom, and now and then there are homosexual and cross-dressing deviations, but mostly the love elements are straightforward and moving, and really do dominate, as Durrell implied, the devious goings-on of the plot.

    Which are full of surprises. Some, I dare say, really are Freudian or Einsteinian in origin, or metaphysically intercultural, but they often seem to me like twists in a skilful thriller, closer to Le Carré than to James Joyce, and sometimes embroiled in melodrama – the slime of plot and counterplot, as another of Durrell’s characters defines it. He was particularly admired for his descriptive writing, and these books are rich in masterly set-pieces, but he was also a fine story-teller, adept in techniques of suspense and deception. Reader, watch out! Shocks are always around the dusty corner, in the Alexandria Quartet.

    The four books of the tetralogy originally appeared separately – Justine in 1957, Balthazar and Mountolive in 1958, Clea in 1960. They were immediately recognized as remarkable works of art, but the verdict on the whole work, while always respectful, was mixed. French critics adored it. Americans lapped it up. English reviewers were not so sure. Lawrence Durrell, a lifelong expatriate, never was an admirer of English culture, and his elaborate prose did not greatly appeal to more austere littérateurs like Angus Wilson, who called it floridly vulgar. Its pretensions were mocked, its avant garde excesses parodied, and although the books were commercial triumphs, he wrote nothing so publicly successful again.

    But the whole thing itself, this immense imaginary construction, has stood the tests of time and taste, and has never been out of print – probably never will be. Half a century after its completion those florid vulgarities, those modernist pretensions, seem no more than incidental to its unique flavour, which lingers in the mind long after its labyrinthine plots (for they are myriad, and muddling) have been forgotten.

    The Alexandria Quartet is one of a kind, and as I see it, on the whole a masterpiece.

    I

    As a junior of exceptional promise, he had been sent to Egypt for a year in order to improve his Arabic and found himself attached to the High Commission as a sort of scribe to await his first diplomatic posting; but he was already conducting himself as a young secretary of legation, fully aware of the responsibilities of future office. Only somehow today it was rather more difficult than usual to be reserved, so exciting had the fish-drive become.

    He had in fact quite forgotten about his once-crisp tennis flannels and college blazer and the fact that the wash of bilge rising through the floor-boards had toe-capped his white plimsolls with a black stain. In Egypt one seemed to forget oneself continually like this. He blessed the chance letter of introduction which had brought him to the Hosnani lands, to the rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria. Yes.

    The punt which now carried him, thrust by slow thrust across the turbid water, was turning slowly eastward to take up its position in the great semicircle of boats which was being gradually closed in upon a target-area marked out by the black reed spines of fish-pans. And as they closed in, stroke by stroke, the Egyptian night fell — the sudden reduction of all objects to bas-reliefs upon a screen of gold and violet. The land had become dense as tapestry in the lilac afterglow, quivering here and there with water mirages from the rising damps, expanding and contracting horizons, until one thought of the world as being mirrored in a soap-bubble trembling on the edge of disappearance. Voices too across the water sounded now loud, now soft and clear. His own cough fled across the lake in sudden wing-beats. Dusk, yet it was still hot; his shirt stuck to his back. The spokes of darkness which reached out to them only outlined the shapes of the reed-fringed islands, which punctuated the water like great pin-cushions, like paws, like hassocks.

    Slowly, at the pace of prayer or meditation, the great arc of boats was forming and closing in, but with the land and the water liquefying at this rate he kept having the illusion that they were travelling across the sky rather than across the alluvial waters of Mareotis. And out of sight he could hear the splatter of geese, and in one corner water and sky split apart as a flight rose, trailing its webs across the estuary like seaplanes, honking crassly. Mountolive sighed and stared down into the brown water, chin on his hands. He was unused to feeling so happy. Youth is the age of despairs.

    Behind him he could hear the hare-lipped younger brother Narouz grunting at every thrust of the pole while the lurch of the boat echoed in his loins. The mud, thick as molasses, dripped back into the water with a slow flob flob, and the pole sucked lusciously. It was very beautiful, but it all stank so: yet to his surprise he found he rather enjoyed the rotting smells of the estuary. Draughts of wind from the far sea-line ebbed around them from time to time, refreshing the mind. Choirs of gnats whizzed up there like silver rain in the eye of the dying sun. The cobweb of changing light fired his mind. ‘Narouz’ he said, ‘I am so happy’ as he listened to his own unhurried heart-beats. The youth gave his shy hissing laugh and said: ‘Good, good’ ducking his head. ‘But this is nothing. Wait. We are closing in.’ Mountolive smiled. ‘Egypt’ he said to himself as one might repeat the name of a woman. ‘Egypt.’

    ‘Over there’ said Narouz in his hoarse, melodious voice ‘the ducks are not rusés, do you know?’ (His English was imperfect and stilted.) ‘For the poaching of them, it is easy (you say ‘poaching’ don’t you?) You dive under them and take them by the legs. Easier than shooting, eh? If you wish, tomorrow we will go.’ He grunted again at the pole and sighed.

    ‘What about snakes?’ said Mountolive. He had seen several large ones swimming about that afternoon.

    Narouz squared his stout shoulders and chuckled. ‘No snakes’ he said and laughed once more.

    Mountolive turned sideways to rest his cheek on the wood of the prow. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his companion standing up as he poled, and study the hairy arms and hands, the sturdy braced legs. ‘Shall I take a turn?’ he asked in Arabic. He had already noticed how much pleasure it gave his hosts when he spoke to them in their native tongue. Their answers, smilingly given, were a sort of embrace. ‘Shall I?’

    ‘Of course not’ said Narouz, smiling his ugly smile which was only redeemed by magnificent eyes and a deep voice. Sweat dripped down from the curly black hair with its widow’s peak. And then lest his refusal might seem impolite, he added: ‘The drive will start with darkness. I know what to do; and you must look and see the fish.’ The two little pink frills of flesh which edged his unbasted lip were wet with spittle. He winked lovingly at the English youth.

    The darkness was racing towards them now and the light expiring. Narouz suddenly cried: ‘Now is the moment. Look there.’ He clapped his hands loudly and shouted across the water, startling his companion who followed his pointed finger with raised head. ‘What?’ the dull report of a gun from the furtherest boat shook the air and suddenly the skyline was sliced in half by a new flight, rising more slowly and dividing earth from air in a pink travelling wound; like the heart of a pomegranate staring through its skin. Then, turning from pink to scarlet, flushed back into white and fell to the lake-level like a shower of snow to melt as it touched the water —‘Flamingo’ they both cried and laughed, and the darkness snapped upon them, extinguishing the visible world.

    For a long moment now they rested, breathing deeply, to let their eyes grow accustomed to it. Voices and laughter from the distant boats floating across their path. Someone cried ‘Ya Narouz’ and again ‘Ya Narouz’. He only grunted. And now there came the short syncopated tapping of a finger-drum, music whose rhythms copied themselves instantly in Mountolive’s mind so that he felt his own fingers begin to tap upon the boards. The lake was floorless now, the yellow mud had vanished — the soft cracked mud of prehistoric lake-faults, or the bituminous mud which the Nile drove down before it on its course to the sea. All the darkness still smelt of it. ‘Ya Narouz’ came the cry again, and Mountolive recognized the voice of Nessim the elder brother borne upon a sea-breath as it spaced out the words. ‘Time … to … light … up.’ Narouz yelped an answer and grunted with satisfaction as he fumbled for matches. ‘Now you’ll see’ he said with pride.

    The circle of boats had narrowed now to encompass the pans and in the hot dusk matches began to spark, while soon the carbide lamps attached to the prows blossomed into trembling yellow flowers, wobbling up into definition, enabling those who were out of line to correct their trim. Narouz bent over his guest with an apology and groped at the prow. Mountolive smelt the sweat of his strong body as he bent down to test the rubber tube and shake the old bakelite box of the lamp, full of rock-carbide. Then he turned a key, struck a match, and for a moment the dense fumes engulfed them both where they sat, breath held, only to clear swiftly while beneath them also flowered, like some immense coloured crystal, a semicircle of lake water, candent and faithful as a magic lantern to the startled images of fish scattering and reforming with movements of surprise, curiosity, perhaps even pleasure. Narouz expelled his breath sharply and retired to his place. ‘Look down’ he urged, and added ‘But keep your head well down.’ And as Mountolive, who did not understand this last piece of advice, turned to question him, he said ‘Put a coat around your head. The kingfishers go mad with the fish and they are not night-sighted. Last time I had my cheek cut open; and Sobhi lost an eye. Face forwards and down.’

    Mountolive did as he was bidden and lay there floating over the nervous pool of lamplight whose floor was now peerless crystal not mud and alive with water-tortoises and frogs and sliding fish — a whole population disturbed by this intrusion from the overworld. The punt lurched again and moved while the cold bilge came up around his toes. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that now the great half-circle of light, the chain of blossoms, was closing more rapidly; and as if to give the boats orientation and measure, there arose a drumming and singing, subdued and melancholy, yet authoritative. He felt the tug of the turning boat echoed again in his backbone. His sensations recalled nothing he had ever known, were completely original.

    The water had become dense now, and thick; like an oatmeal soup that is slowly stirred into thickness over a slow fire. But when he looked more closely he saw that the illusion was caused not by the water but by the multiplication of the fish themselves. They had begun to swarm, darting in schools, excited by the very consciousness of their own numbers, yet all sliding and skirmishing one way. The cordon too had tightened like a noose and only twenty feet now separated them from the next boat, the next pool of waxen light. The boatmen had begun to utter hoarse cries and pound the waters around them, themselves excited by the premonition of those fishy swarms which crowded the soft lake bottom, growing more and more excited as the shallows began and they recognized themselves trapped in the shining circle. There was something like delirium in their swarming and circling now. Vague shadows of men began to unwind hand-nets in the boats and the shouting thickened. Mountolive felt his blood beating faster with excitement. ‘In a moment’ cried Narouz. ‘Lie still.’

    The waters thickened to glue and silver bodies began to leap into the darkness only to fall back, glittering like coinage, into the shallows. The circles of light touched, overlapped, and the whole ceinture was complete, and from all around it there came the smash and crash of dark bodies leaping into the shallows, furling out the long hand-nets which were joined end to end and whose dark loops were already bulging like Christmas stockings with the squirming bodies of fish. The leapers had taken fright too and their panic-stricken leaps ripped up the whole surface of the pan, flashing back cold water upon the stuttering lamps, falling into the boats, a shuddering harvest of cold scales and drumming tails. Their exciting death-struggles were as contagious as the drumming had been. Laughter shook the air as the nets closed. Mountolive could see Arabs with their long white robes tucked up to the waist pressing forwards with steadying hands held to the dark prows beside them, pushing their linked nets slowly forward. The light gleamed upon their dark thighs. The darkness was full of their barbaric blitheness.

    And now came another unexpected phenomenon — for the sky itself began to thicken above them as the water had below. The darkness was suddenly swollen with unidentifiable shapes for the jumpers had alerted the sleepers from the shores of the lakes, and with shrill incoherent cries the new visitants from the sedge-lined outer estuary joined in the hunt — hundreds of pelican, flamingo, crane and kingfisher — coming in on irregular trajectories to careen and swoop and snap at the jumping fish. The waters and the air alike seethed with life as the fishermen aligned their nets and began to scoop the swarming catch into the boats, or turned out their nets to let the rippling cascades of silver pour over the gunwales until the helmsmen were sitting ankle-deep in the squirming bodies. There would be enough and to spare for men and birds, and while the larger waders of the lake folded and unfolded awkward wings like old-fashioned painted parasols, or hovered in ungainly parcels above the snapping, leaping water, the kingfishers and herring-gulls came in from every direction at the speed of thunderbolts, half mad with greed and excitement, flying on suicidal courses, some to break their necks outright upon the decks of the boats, some to flash beak forward into the dark body of a fisherman to split open a cheek or a thigh in their terrifying cupidity. The splash of water, the hoarse cries, the snapping of beaks and wings, and the mad tattoo of the finger-drums gave the whole scene an unforgettable splendour, vaguely recalling to the mind of Mountolive forgotten Pharaonic frescoes of light and darkness.

    Here and there too the men began to fight off the birds, striking at the dark air around them with sticks until amid the swarming scrolls of captured fish one could see surprisingly rainbow feathers of magical hue and broken beaks from which blood trickled upon the silver scales of the fish. For three-quarters of an hour the scene continued thus until the dark boats were brimming. Now Nessim was alongside, shouting to them in the darkness. ‘We must go back.’ He pointed to a lantern waving across the water, creating a warm cave of light in which they glimpsed the smooth turning flanks of a horse and the serrated edge of palm-leaves. ‘My mother is waiting for us’ cried Nessim. His flawless head bent down to take the edge of a light-pool as he smiled. His was a Byzantine face such as one might find among the frescoes of Ravenna — almond-shaped, dark-eyed, clear-featured. But Mountolive was looking, so to speak, through the face of Nessim and into that of Leila who was so like him, his mother. ‘Narouz’ he called hoarsely, for the younger brother had jumped into the water to fasten a net. ‘Narouz!’ One could hardly make oneself heard in the commotion. ‘We must go back.’

    And so at last the two boats each with its Cyclops-eye of light turned back across the dark water to the far jetty where Leila waited patiently for them with the horses in the mosquito-loud silence. A young moon was up now.

    Her voice came laughingly across the variable airs of the lake, chiding them for being late, and Narouz chuckled. ‘We’ve brought lots of fish’ cried Nessim. She stood, slightly darker than the darkness, and their hands met as if guided by some perfected instinct which found no place in their conscious minds. Mountolive’s heart shook as he stood up and climbed on to the jetty with her help. But no sooner were the two brothers ashore than Narouz cried: ‘Race you home, Nessim’ and they dived for their horses which bucked and started at the laughing onslaught. ‘Careful’ she cried sharply, but before a second had passed they were off, hooves drumming on the soft rides of the embankment, Narouz chuckling like a Mephistopheles. ‘What is one to do?’ she said with mock resignation, and now the factor came forward with their own horses.

    They mounted and set off for the house. Ordering the servant to ride on before with the lantern, Leila brought her horse close in so that they might ride knee-to-knee, solaced by the touch of each other’s bodies. They had not been lovers for very long — barely ten days — though to the youthful Mountolive it seemed a century, an eternity of despair and delight. He had been formally educated in England, educated not to wish to feel. All the other valuable lessons he had already mastered, despite his youth — to confront the problems of the drawing-room and the street with sang-froid; but towards personal emotions he could only oppose the nervous silence of a national sensibility almost anaesthetized into clumsy taciturnity: an education in selected reticences and shames. Breeding and sensibility seldom march together, though the breach can be carefully disguised in codes of manners, forms of address towards the world. He had heard and read of passion, but had regarded it as something which would never impinge on him, and now here it was, bursting into the secret life which, like every overgrown schoolboy, lived on autonomously behind the indulgent screen of everyday manners and transactions, everyday talk and affections. The social man in him was overripe before the inner man had grown up. Leila had turned him out as one might turn out an old trunk, throwing everything into confusion. He suspected himself now to be only a mawkish and callow youth, his reserves depleted. With indignation almost, he realized that here at last there was something for which he might even be prepared to die — something whose very crudity carried with it a winged message which pierced to the quick of his mind. Even in the darkness he could feel himself wanting to blush. It was absurd. To love was absurd, like being knocked off the mantelpiece. He caught himself wondering what his mother would think if she could picture them riding among the spectres of these palm-trees by a lake which mirrored a young moon, knee touching knee. ‘Are you happy?’ she whispered and he felt her lips brush his wrist. Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds. ‘Mountolive’ she said again, ‘David darling.’—‘Yes.’—‘You are so quiet. I thought you must be asleep.’ Mountolive frowned, confronting his own dispersed inner nature. ‘I was thinking’ he said. Once more he felt her lips on his wrist.

    ‘Darling.’

    ‘Darling.’

    They rode on knee-to-knee until the old house came into view, built four-square upon the network of embankments which carved up the estuary and the sweet-water canals. The air was full of fruit-bats. The upper balconies of the house were brightly lit and here the invalid sat crookedly in his wheel-chair, staring jealously out at the night, waiting for them. Leila’s husband was dying of some obscure disease of the musculature, a progressive atrophy which cruelly emphasized the already great difference in their ages. His infirmity had hollowed him out into a cadaverous shell composed of rugs and shawls from which protruded two long sensitive hands. Saturnine of feature and with an uncouthness of mien which was echoed in his younger son’s face, his head was askew on his shoulders and in some lights resembled those carnival masks which are carried on poles. It only remains to be added that Leila loved him!

    ‘Leila loved him.’ In the silence of his own mind Mountolive could never think the words without mentally shrieking them like a parrot. How could she? He had asked himself over and over again. How could she?

    As he heard the hooves of the horses on the cobbles of the courtyard, the husband urged his wheel-chair forward to the balcony’s edge, calling testily: ‘Leila, is that you?’ in the voice of an old child ready to be hurt by the warmth of her smile thrown upwards to him from the ground and the deep sweet contralto in which she answered him, mixing oriental submissiveness with the kind of comfort which only a child could understand. ‘Darling’. And running up the long wooden flights of stairs to embrace him, calling out ‘We are all safely back.’ Mountolive slowly dismounted in the courtyard, hearing the sick man’s sigh of relief. He busied himself with an unnecessary tightening of a girth rather than see them embrace. He was not jealous, but his incredulity pierced and wounded him. It was hateful to be young, to be maladroit, to feel carried out of one’s depth. How had all this come about? He felt a million miles away from England; his past had sloughed from him like a skin. The warm night was fragrant with jasmine and roses. Later if she came to his room he would become as still as a needle, speechless and thoughtless, taking that strangely youthful body in his arms almost without desire or regrets; his eyes closed then, like a man standing under an icy waterfall. He climbed the stairs slowly; she had made him aware that he was tall, upright and handsome.

    ‘Did you like it, Mountolive?’ croaked the invalid, with a voice in which floated (like oil in water) pride and suspicion. A tall negro servant wheeled a small table forward on which the decanter of whisky stood — a world of anomalies: to drink ‘sundowners’ like colonials in this old rambling house full of magnificent carpets, walls covered with assegais captured at Omdurman, and weird Second Empire furniture of a Turkish cast. ‘Sit’ he said, and Mountolive, smiling at him, sat, noticing that even here in the reception rooms there were books and periodicals lying about — symbols of the unsatisfied hunger for thought which Leila had never allowed to master her. Normally, she kept her books and papers in the harim, but they always overflowed into the house. Her husband had no share of this world. She tried as far as possible not to make him conscious of it, dreading his jealousy which had become troublesome as his physical incapacity increased. His sons were washing — somewhere Mountolive heard the sound of pouring water. Soon he would excuse himself and retire to change into a white suit for dinner. He drank and talked to the crumpled man in the wheel-chair in his low melodious voice. It seemed to him terrifying and improper to be the lover of his wife; and yet he was always breathless with surprise to see how naturally and simply Leila carried off the whole deception. (Her cool honeyed voice, etc.; he should try not to think of her too much.) He frowned and sipped his drink.

    It had been quite difficult to find his way out to the lands to present his letter of introduction: the motor road still only ran as far as the ford, after which horses had to be used to reach the house among the canals. He had been marooned for nearly an hour before a kindly passer-by had offered him a horse on which he reached his destination. That day there had been nobody at home save the invalid. Mountolive noticed with some amusement that in reading the letter of introduction, couched in the flowery high style of Arabic, the invalid muttered aloud the conventional politenesses of reciprocity to the compliments he was reading just as if the writer of the letter had himself been present. Then at once he looked up tenderly into the face of the young Englishman and spoke, and Mountolive softly answered. ‘You will come and stay with us — it is the only way to improve your Arabic. For two months if you wish. My sons know English and will be delighted to converse with you; my wife also. It would be a blessing to them to have a new face, a stranger in the house. And my dear Nessim, though still so young, is in his last year at Oxford.’ Pride and pleasure glowed in his sunken eyes for a minute and flickered out to give place to the customary look of pain and chagrin. Illness invites contempt. A sick man knows it.

    Mountolive had accepted, and by renouncing both home and local leave had obtained permission to stay for two months in the house of this Coptic squire. It was a complete departure from everything he had known to be thus included in the pattern of a family life based in and nourished by the unconscious pageantry of a feudalism which stretched back certainly as far as the Middle Ages, and perhaps beyond. The world of Burton, Beckford, Lady Hester.… Did they then still exist? But here, seen from the vantage point of someone inside the canvas his own imagination had painted, he had suddenly found the exotic becoming completely normal. Its poetry was irradiated by the unconsciousness with which it was lived. Mountolive who had already found the open sesame of language ready to hand, suddenly began to feel himself really penetrating a foreign country, foreign moeurs, for the first time. He felt as one always feels in such a case, namely the vertiginous pleasure of losing an old self and growing a new one to replace it. He felt he was slipping, losing so to speak the contours of himself. Is this the real meaning of education? He had begun transplanting a whole huge intact world from his imagination into the soil of his new life.

    The Hosnani family itself was oddly assorted. The graceful Nessim and his mother were familiars of the spirit, belonging to the same intense world of intelligence and sensibility. He, the eldest son, was always on the watch to serve his mother, should she need a door opened or a handkerchief recovered from the ground. His English and French were perfect, impeccable as his manners, graceful and strong as his physique. Then, facing them across the candle-light, sat the other two: the invalid in his rugs, and the younger son, tough and brutish as a mastiff and with an indefinable air of being ready at any moment to answer a call to arms. Heavily built and ugly, he was nevertheless gentle; but you could see from the loving way he drank in each word uttered by his father where his love-allegiance lay. His simplicity shone in his eyes, and he too was ready to be of service, and indeed, when the work of the lands did not take him from the house, was always quick to dismiss the silent boy-servant who stood behind the wheel-chair and to serve his father with a glowing pride, glad even to pick him up bodily and take him tenderly, almost gloatingly to the lavatory. He regarded his mother with something like the pride and childish sadness which shone in the eyes of the cripple. Yet, though the brothers were divided in this way like twigs of olive, there was no breach between them — they were of the same branch and felt it, and they loved one another dearly, for they were in truth complementaries, the one being strong where the other was weak. Nessim feared bloodshed, manual work and bad manners: Narouz rejoiced in them all. And Leila? Mountolive of course found her a beautiful enigma when he might, had he been more experienced, have recognized in her naturalness a perfect simplicity of spirit and in her extravagant nature a temperament which had been denied its true unfolding, had fallen back with good grace among compromises. This marriage, for example, to a man so much older than herself had been one of arrangement — this was still Egypt. The fortunes of her family had been matched against the fortunes of the Hosnanis — it resembled, as all such unions do, a merger between two great companies. Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land which supported their fortunes. She was obedient and pliant, loyal as a finely-bred animal. Only a disorienting monotony beset her. When young she had completed her studies in Cairo brilliantly and for a few years nourished the hope of going to Europe to continue them. She had wanted to be a doctor. But at this time the women of Egypt were lucky if they could escape the black veil — let alone the narrow confines of Egyptian thought and society. Europe for the Egyptians was simply a shopping centre for the rich to visit. Naturally, she went several times to Paris with her parents and indeed fell in love with it as we all do, but when it came to attempting to breach the barriers of Egyptian habit and to escape the parental net altogether — escape into a life which might have nourished a clever brain — there she struck upon the rock of her parents’ conservatism. She must marry and make Egypt her home, they said coldly, and selected for her among the rich men of their acquaintance the kindliest and the most able they could find. Standing upon the cliff edge of these dreams, still beautiful and rich (and indeed, in Alexandrian society she was known as ‘the dark swallow’) Leila found everything becoming shadowy and insubstantial. She must conform. Of course, nobody would mind her visiting Europe with her husband every few years to shop or have a holiday.… But her life must belong to Egypt.

    She gave in, responding at first with despair, later with resignation, to the life they had designed for her. Her husband was kind and thoughtful, but mentally something of a dullard. The life sapped her will. Her loyalty was such that she immersed herself in his affairs, living because he wished it far from the only capital which bore the remotest traces of a European way of life — Alexandria. For years now she had surrendered herself to the blunting airs of the Delta, and the monotony of life on the Hosnani lands. She lived mostly through Nessim who was being educated largely abroad and whose rare visits brought some life to the house. But to allay her own active curiosity about the world, she subscribed to books and periodicals in the four languages which she knew as well as her own, perhaps better, for nobody can think or feel only in the dimensionless obsolescence of Arabic. So it had been for many years now, a battle of resignations in which the element of despair only arose in the form of nervous illnesses for which her husband prescribed a not unintelligent specific — a ten-day holiday in Alexandria which always brought the colour back into her cheeks. But even these visits became in time more rare: she had insensibly slipped out of society and found herself less and less practised in the small talk and small ideas upon which it is based. The life of the city bored her. It was shallow as the waters of the great lake itself, derived; her powers of introspection sharpened with the years, and as her friends fell away only a few names and faces remained — Balthazar the doctor, for example, and Amaril and a few others. But Alexandria was soon to belong more fully to Nessim than to herself. When his studies ended he was to be conscripted into the banking house with its rapidly ramifying ancillaries, roots pushing out into shipping and oil and tungsten, roots needing water.… But by this time she would have become virtually a hermit.

    This lonely life had made her feel somewhat unprepared for Mountolive, for the arrival of a stranger in their midst. On that first day she came in late from a desert ride and slipped into her place between her husband and his guest with some pleasurable excitement. Mountolive hardly looked at her, for the thrilling voice alone set up odd little vibrations in his heart which he registered but did not wish to study. She wore white jodhpurs and a yellow shirt with a scarf. Her smooth small hands were white and ringless. Neither of her sons appeared at lunch that day, and after the meal it was she who elected to show him round the house and gardens, already pleasantly astonished by the young man’s respectable Arabic and sound French. She treated him with the faintly apprehensive solicitude of a woman towards her only man-child. His genuine interest and desire to learn filled her with the emotions of a gratitude which surprised her. It was absurd; but then never had a stranger shown any desire to study and assess them, their language, religion and habits. And Mountolive’s manners were as perfect as his self-command was weak. They both walked about the rose-garden hearing each other’s voices in a sort of dream. They felt short of breath, almost as if they were suffocating.

    When he said good-bye that night and accepted her husband’s invitation to return and stay with them, she was nowhere to be

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