The Charm of Egypt

—Il Fascino dell’Egitto—

THE CHARM OF EGYPT

by

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Translated by

Lance L’Apollon

Illustrated by Branka Ryan

A N T E L O P E ii H I L L ii P U B L I S H I N G

Copyright © 2021 Antelope Hill Publishing

First printing 2021

Originally published in Italian by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1933

Translated into English 2021 by Lance L’Apollon

Illustrated by Branka Ryan

Cover art by sswifty

Edited by Rollo of Gaunt

Interior formatting by Margaret Bauer

Antelope Hill Publishing

Antelopehillpublishing.com

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-52-7

EPUB ISBN-13: 978-1-953730-53-4

Dedicato alla mia musa focosa, Etna

Contents

Translator’s Note

The Last Shred of a Futurist’s Sensibilities

A Floating Chapel of English Sailors

King Fuad

A Congress of Music from the Orient

Speed of the Italians

Armies of Palms Producing New Images

The Thoughts of a Buffalo

Hunting for Quails and Arab Women with a Half Arab

Eating In Dahabieh, I Blessedly Examine the Nile

The Sacred Mechanism

The Bardotti by Her Majesty the Cotton

Resistant Tacts of Fresh Fat and Sterile Glass

Thinking Malaise of the Desert

The Burning Pyramid

To Eat an Entire Pyramid

A Walk with My Mother on the Beach of the Ancient Port

The Greek-Egyptian Poet Cavafy

Death Overcome

A Colombaia of Caravaner Shoes

The English Cannons of the Citadel

Theater without Theater

An African Simulation of a Negro Aviator

Translator’s Note

During the length of my imprisonment in this modern world, and it feels like it has been a lifetime, I often dreamed of beautiful images of battle, power, and action. In our era, with no great struggle, we are robbed of our call to superhuman beauty and strength, deprived of heroes, of violence, and of will. In the same way, I assume you too have shared my cell, constricted and deprived of vitality.

A righteous spirit has been entrapped in these pages without having been discovered by the Anglophone world for almost a century. Therefore, I felt duty bound to do my best to translate these powerful words for you, so that you may rekindle that great spew of fire that your heart, as a lion cub, once knew.

Filippo Marinetti was the founder of Futurism. He too longed to break away from a world that threatened to snuff out all great spirits with its suffocating sclerosis. This is one of those shreds of will left over to us.

To capture his sentiment, my English translation is accompanied by the original Italian text on the adjacent page so that you may appreciate the poetry of the language in its original form. I have spent some time in southern Italy and have studied the language, but I am little more than a dilettante translator. My efforts however, to my estimate, accomplish their goal: to reveal this sprite of furious life to those few warriors who are worthy.

I dream one day there will be magnificent fighters mounted on steel Valkyries who will cleanse the world of its decadence and feminine softness. I will it to return to a world of great power and manly deeds.

Young warriors, take this book and let these lines of action run through you like electric light. Become that which we could only dream of.

Lance L’Apollon

The Charm of Egypt

The Last Shred of a Futurist’s Sensibilities

After many dynamic and creative years I returned to a fixed point of contemplation: Egypt, the land of my birth.

For a long time its skies filled with placid gold dust, the motionless waves of the yellow dunes, the high imposing triangles of the Pyramids, and the serene palm trees that bless the fat father Nile, stretched out in his bed of black earth and green grass, have been calling me.

The name and the roll of the ship Helouan already evoked the languid sailing rhythm of the sands and the large canvas wings of the windmills that had protected my childhood games from the sun. The temperature of the sea and the air softens as if the heated cheeks of my pupae were palpitating inside. My sensi-tivity tore apart, and I became its thinking open wound, charged across the arch of the marine horizon with my living shreds.

Gently, so as not to tear them, I grabbed from time to time those vibrant undulating strips of my flesh. A strange desire to escape drives them mad. Most of all, the long rosy memory of the French Jesuit college is stirred, with its immense courtyard guarded by palm trees, the clamoring tangle of fast bare legs, seafaring necks, parabolas of balls plunging into a dense green paradise of sycamores, magnolias and bamboo.

Here the fragrant and sonorous feast of the Sacred Heart is reborn. The altar full of jasmine was nestled in the foliage of a baobab tree, whose trunk dripped with rose petals. In the hot May afternoon the flames of candles, the flashing tinkling of the censers and the quick vermilion cassocks so intoxicated the turtledoves perched on the high regimes of the date-trees that the sensual gliding of their talons over the water stirred our children’s senses to the point of agony.

That very long ribbon of flesh also bore, embroidered with memories, our furibund game of war with two armies of schoolchildren all armed with a crusader cast-iron shield; the bloody machine-gunning of padded leather balls, and the cheerful thirty-year-old Jesuits who, wet with sweat, with rolled up sleeves and black cassocks raised on their free legs, make running attacks, counterattacks, pursuits and whirling fights.

A Floating Chapel of English Sailors

Meanwhile, another nostalgic thread of my flesh was twisting in front of my dreamy eyes; my brother Leone’s line plunging into the already dark water of the port of Alexandria under the sinking white sunburst of the already set sun. My brother was fishing, I was dreaming of hating fishing, the Sudanese servant in white galabieh prepared the bait. From time to time our little boat struck the gray and gloomy keel of the floating sailors’ chapel-boat, whose lowered lids never revealed to us, in so many afternoons, the shadow of a crew or devotees.

Another shred of my flesh had the sour honeydew and pungent smell of gaggie flowers, spraying out of the angles of the Antoniadis garden, to provoke the chaste and blind water of the Mahmudieh canal to crest its black buffalo to the hut of cattle and camel dung.

Ten miles from Alexandria, with the slow rolling of the ship, the undulating bluish mercury of the sea rose and fell in the thermometer of the window. Magically, the sea horizon was crested with palm trees. Our bow lowered, adorning itself with water. Every now and then the sea on the right offered to the cut of the bow its edge of gray dunes, so that the projector-beam of the sun, shining down from the slits of the clouds, bleached and sugar-coated its peaks.

King Fuad

An hour later, in the dark garden of Villa Ambron, I fused my soul with a large ficus elastica, whose weeping leaves replant green memories in the earth, eager to revive new salient green memories.

With the same calm and sure pace, the next day, in the palace of Cairo, King Fuad illustrated to me the systematic and rapid progress of Egypt.

As I listen to him, I think of the Muslim affinity for the fez, abolished by Kemal Pasha in Turkey because it generates passive moods.

Of all the headdresses, the fez is the least likely to assume a warrior or royal character. That of King Fuad blends its sloping lines with the sensual curves of a perfect oval.

A sinuous mouth smiles under a hooked mustache that still reminds one of the sultans on horse-back under the double arc of the scimitar and the moon.

With the gestures of a landlord to his fief, but without the typical gray silk parasol, he now glorifies the new maritime city that multiplies its shining neighborhoods of marble, crystal, electricity, neon to the palm grove of Vittoria, the reclaimed lakes, the swollen markets of fabrics, jewelry, and pastry shops, already gutted by mechanical speeds, the concentrated indolence of the Arabs in the trams that seem to kidnap them away into the sea, the stubborn pressing of smells, the Arabs heroically defend themselves against European modernity in the boroughs of Cairo.

I said to myself: I will no longer greedily savor the fresh, meaty oysters of my fifteen years amidst the lopsided turquoise wooden cabins of the small Ramleh bathhouse that shook with every wave on its iron poles! I will no longer have in my eyes and nostrils that sea of beautiful green crystal in which my father had brutally thrown my little baby body to teach me to despise life jackets.

A Congress of Music from the Orient

Suddenly King Fuad changed his tone, perhaps sensing the tragic struggle that was taking place in my veins between that groaning past and the magnificent future that strangled him. His Majesty’s energetic gestures and voice took on a regal Muslim gravity to collect all the scattered nostalgia:

“Today I attended an interesting concert of Egyptian music. Next winter, I will organize and chair the first major Arab music congress here in Cairo. All the composers, all the traveling musicians and all the improvisers of Islam will be summoned with their instruments. We will discuss the best way to develop the musical genius of our races, preserving the old artistic traditions and at the same time arousing new creative originalities.”

While King Fuad spoke, his hands searched with feminine delicacy in the air for the lost echoes of the beautiful songs of the past, the wandering voices of the muezzins of the shepherds and sailors caravans. He certainly wanted to merge them all into a harmonious synthesis that was both artistic and political. With the most inspired Arabic music, was it not possible to seduce and enchant the greedy, grim armored Europe who too lovingly gazed upon rich and contemplative Egypt?

With a delicious Egyptian chant sighed first with the mouth closed, then carried up by a very sad nasal voice, suspended and resumed twenty times, it will certainly be possible to move and finally dissolve the hard and knotty problem of the Suez canal, already encumbered by too much paper imposed by the League of Nations.

While taking care, as a sage king, to fight every day the cocaine trade that tries to corrupt his beloved villages, he dreams of pacifying with art the ambitions of his people, who have nothing, and thus could abruptly tear everything apart with suicidal violence.

Speed of the Italians

King Fuad adds:

“The Italian colony is admirable for its intelligence, industriousness and speed!”

This sentence suddenly reawakens in my visionary heart the iron life of my father, one of the first lawyers who landed sixty years ago in a muddy Alexandria without gas or drinking water, who traversed it every night clutching a lantern, to attend to the intricate deliberations of the potbellied pasha who called him felfel, with that speed of a superior acumen.

King Fuad concludes:

“I have a filial affection for the House of Savoy. Queen Margaret was a real mother to me. Ah, my beautiful Turin! I have a great friendship for your Great Foreign Minister, a worthy disciple of the Duce!”

Then, in the atmosphere of singsong palms, dunes, pyramids and Arab villages—the proud and joyous vision of the homeland—an island impatient to sail, electrified by the orders of the Chief and the tireless fervor of the crews erupting in a continuous fusillade.

The next day I boarded the train to go to Alexandria, smothered by memories. The first to break in my hands, like a fragile old toy, was the French Jesuit college of St. François Xavier, now transformed into the Governorate Guardhouse!

Anxious to wash my soul of the latest nostalgia I raced to the grid of the Antoniadis garden. The sun of that languid Egyptian December noon tried and tried again its most meticulous caresses on my futurist skin. But the fiery and sensual gaggie flowers of my adolescence were gone! Instead, a strong smell of tar came into my nostrils from the keel of a boat loaded with cotton. That willful tar, trafficking in danger and adventures, invaded my brain and forced me to raise my head.

Beyond the edges of the enchanted garden, a very high order of palms with a metallic tuft geometrically indicated the route to the Italian postal plane. With a groaning but tenacious hum of a warlike bee, the device flies over me. A black war flute, musically wounded the azure sky. He had for wings the severed hands of his musician, abandoned on earth

Armies of Palms Producing New Images

After speaking with the Sultan, I went immediately to consult the palms of the Nile and the whirling Dervishes. It was an exhaustive audition from the lyrical, sculptural, and musical point of view.

The commissioner Grassi, one of those Italians who dominate the East with their strong and simplifying intelligence, offered me the getaway-speed to avoid the tedious nostalgia of my illustrious interviewees.

By bus, from Alexandria to Cairo, I reviewed the tribal peoples’ armies of palms. With their animal-like trunks that are almost human and always lacking in vegetation, they impose themselves as the lords of the plain. They conquer it. Disorganized groups. Clustered Battalions. Lookouts. Philosophers veiled in meditating solitude.

Over there a palm staff commands an invisible battle. Others adored the sun and waited for a shower of gold with their fluffy tufts. On the horizon they marched like herds of elephants. I questioned an old palm tree bent by agricultural labors. He didn’t answer me.

My train was sliding over Egypt. Flat. Green. The blackish and gray villages of bovine mud, straw and camel dung, baking in the sun, are its crusts and growths. Dark buffaloes are its boils. The earth seems to hold everything crushed and glued to its chest: huts, trains, dead waters and slow currents with old papyrus sails under a vast and empty sky that the angry Nile will, perhaps one day, colonize with its unstoppable force.

The Thoughts of a Buffalo

Like a thief pursued, the train skims a banana grove thick with live emeralds and dripping with gold fringes. The canals draw high arched sails that look like knives. Camels and traders harmonize their curves with those of the villages all pregnant and overflowing with fertile plains. The train rhythmically churns out its clumps of soot. The wagon slows down, my body sways, entangling itself among the flies and in the warm wet breath of a crouching buffalo, which, like a large turtle, pulls its head from the immense muddy shell of the plain to watch over a drunken crowd of white Arab tombs.

The buffalo ruminates:

“I am the daughter of the black earth and the gray Nile. Lying down I look like a mound of silt. I sculpt myself in getting up and, immediately, my rump and my horns continue the profile of the low roofs overflowing with straw, brats, rags, kids, oven domes, smokeless earth pipes. I love stillness just a few steps from the rails and the road. I do not raise my muzzle at the passage of the trader who, sitting atop the undulating camel, stares at me without seeing me, and not worthy of a glance, with neither a goal to reach nor a care for countryside that smells strongly behind him. You will never again breathe a germ-rich atmosphere like mine! The air is volatilized silt. It presses your cheeks like a warm sponge. The long silvery robes, sweeping the black paths or the bright green of the meadows, incense the sky with good earth!”

Meanwhile, the blue was red-hot and scattered silver clouds appeared more and more lit, and were suspended like lamps above an invisible divinity, presented to the water.

With anxiety for light, for stones you shine, thirstily.

Hunting for Quails and Arab Women,
With a Half Arab

Kafr-el-Zayat! This name brutally tears my soul from reality, nineteen hundred and thirty-three, and plunges it into my twenties, with the color of light and fluffy joy.

Thirty years ago, the darkness smelled of mummies when the train stopped at the Kafr-el-Zayat Station, a small wooden shed wrapped in banana trees, on the banks of the invisible Nile.

Mohamed el Ragel, the pimp of the British General Staff, who had been warmly recommended to me by Sir Ward, was waiting to take us to the hunting convention and ... to do us the erotic honors of the village.

I still see it in my memory, as if it were yesterday, noisy and ceremonious, bowing, reaching out to us, moving our fingers nimbly to our mouths, and shouting imperious orders to our two negroes, who were carriers of provisions.

That great slouching porter seduced us all, from the first moment. Nice chocolate colored face, big black eyes, placid, clever, and hooked of nose.

Mohamed strode ahead of us, making the black ribbon of his fez dance and showed us the way with a majestic gesture. He certainly looked very noble in his waving robes of black crepe, half-open over a tight-fitting silk tunic with canary-yellow and pistachio-green stripes.

We were ten passionate hunters: three Greeks, five English and two Italians, all eager to kill at least a hundred quail, far from Alexandria, rendered uninhabitable by the Bahiram festivals. Cubic huts first appeared to us on both sides of the road; huts almost entirely built with Nile mud, yellowish and surrounded by tiny gardens. Then, palm groves loomed on the dawning horizon.

A sad, tired, and disillusioned dawn. Deathly silence was poured out over the gloomy countryside. Slowly the sky was streaked with greenish silver. Beyond the cultivated fields, the undulation of the sands was delicately colored purple with the caresses of the waning moon. A warm and soft moon, the color of yellow rust, fell, like a drop of gold, towards the distant sea.

Plantations of banana trees choked the road, and we felt delightfully bathed in the fragrant freshness of its scent.

A Bedouin tent bit into the pallor of the sky, appearing in the distance, like a huge vampire with parchment-like wings spread and nailed to the ground.

With curiosity, I studied the bizarre geometry of his patched canvases, his harlequin frills of dirty ocher and rust, which rounded off in the desert wind like old ship-hulls.

In front of the opening of the tent, a small hedge of branches and pieces of tin, and some goats of a disgusting thinness, which dragged limp and distended udders.

A mangy, scathed, skeletal dog ran towards us angrily…

That was the tent of Abdul el Ragel, Mohamed’s brother.

“Saidi Abdul,” shouted our guide.

“Saidi ya Mohamed!” answered a voice from inside.

And Abdul appeared from behind the hedge. He had a bold and severe profile: a great white wool cloak draped over his chest; his gesture was solemn, his appearance was both stately and gypsy-like. The two brothers had a long, whispered conversation between them, in which I could distinguish only the name of Fatma, repeated several times.

Sir Ward had talked to me a lot about Fatma, the most beautiful woman in the whole East, and he had also told me of her husband, Mustapha el Bar, a skilled hunter, condemned by misery and jealousy to practice the sad profession of a pimp of the Nile.

He was, it was said, an implacable enemy of Mohamed, for certain old stories which I have forgotten.

We said goodbye to Abdul, and set off again along the road that had become sandy through the desolate countryside.

It was an absolute camel carcass.

At about six, we came to a cluster of palm trees on the beach. The slate-colored sea gradually turned pink.

Sitting on our folding seats, ten meters from each other, we waited, with the common understanding of shooting only towards the sea, where the quail were about to come.

Mohamed, with his legs crossed in the sand, began to dig a large hole. He wanted me to see the heat of the sun concentrated under the ground.

At half past six, a rustle of wings, and the first quail, thrown like fireballs, swooped down in front of us. They were drooped from exhaustion.

The first shots failed. You couldn’t see enough of each other. In the intervals of the flights, Mohamed would frolic curiously a short distance from me, spearing imaginary quail with a long stick, smacking his lips and shouting:

“Schouff! (Look). Schouff! Pam! Pam!”

He assumed heroic, or languid, postures with aspirated hisses and grunts of pleasure.

We continued the hunt at nine. Some half-naked urchins came to offer us, for some paltry amount of coin, baskets full of figs, which were fresh and sugary.

The sun was rising. As the heat grew, the flies became furious. The sands now looked like ash. Mohamed skillfully made us fans, out of palm leaves, then began to recite Lafontaine’s fables. I still remember his nasal voice and his childish and bizarre gestures to imitate beasts.

On our return, we skirted the Nile, flowing oily and yellowish between shores felted with green. Among certain twisted figs and certain palm trees, I was amazed to discover a grown vine in the sand. Mohamed explains to me that the grapes of that plant are delicious, due to the organic matter deposited in that soil by the shells. The shadow of the palm trees is minimal: it is noon. We see the village. The small shimmering crowd of huts and walls, here and there dressed in branches of green, it appears to me immobilized, parched under the flames of the sun.

The landscape is exhausted and melted from the heat.

Mohamed leads us down a muddy ladder to an underground cistern with fresh, blue water.

As we descended, a woman in a blue robe passed us. She walked slowly up the slippery steps, carrying a dripping black jug on her head, and holding up her arms to support her. With each step, her hips swayed, and her small, round, and hard breasts were drawn taut under the fabric.

She stared languidly at us through her black rubber pupils, which almost covered her golden irises. Her mouth was hidden by a black cloth, tied to the veil of her head by a little heart that passed through a copper tube resting on her nose.

We followed her. But Mohamed stopped us with a nod. Under the blazing sun, with cautious gestures and a finger to his mouth, he promised us the wonderful Fatma for that very evening, when her husband would be gone.

The eyes of the beautiful Arab, those gazelle eyes, haunted me all day in the winding, stinking alleys, all buzzing with large green flies.

I confess that Fatma’s prostitution worried me. I anticipated a repugnant debate about the price, and all the banality of a princely paid coitus.

Ah, if I could have met the beauty, or seen her in some window, I might have combined things in a more romantic way!

I therefore explored, as I passed, the doors like entrances to dens, from which reddish fumes of nauseating fritters and the stench of excrement issued. Suddenly, I seemed to recognize her, on the threshold of a small house so low that the hens could jump from the terrace into the street.

It wasn’t her. I was left alone; I had detached myself from my friends at the last crossroads, and my anguish was growing.

On a small square, blind rhapsodies soured the fiery silence, humming lullabies accompanied by the yelp of fifes.

After an atrocious breakfast eaten quickly in a small Greek café, I went out from the village, now resigned to not see Fatma again before it was high night, to contemplate the sunset on the sands.

My friends called me from the top of a terrace. They were in the house of certain relatives of Mohamed, and he gave them, with many bows, the honor of his hospitality. There they were ritually offered some brandy from Chios, preserved in a tarred goatskin. In the alley, in front of us, a quiet little bar smelled of aniseed liqueur and absinthe.

Some large negroes passed by, dressed in white, who had bunches of jasmine on their ears and under their turbans. A few women passed, all veiled and mysterious. Among them, I tried to discover Fatma!...

My friends ate crumbly pomegranate sweets which smelled of roses, spicing them up with a honeyed lemonade full of pistachios.

It was dark. Beyond the houses with flowered terraces, the sunset dripped with incandescent lava. The sands burned. Then, slowly, as the night breeze blew, the flames and heat-waves subsided. The landscape is velvet with amethyst, and the sun, dying, dripped in liquefied and tasty gold that made me think of a hive dripping with honey. A distant island of vegetation appeared among the metallic and precious sands, like an emerald circled in gold. Mohamed bowed to the West, with one hand to his forehead, to ward off the evil spirits of the night.

On a terrace, an old man with a white beard, dressed in blue, unrolled a small mat, and from time to time, standing with his feet together, bent double, kneeling, face down, face to the ground, said his prayer to Allah, facing the West.

Women also went up to the neighboring terraces.

When the moist mother-of-pearl moon rose above the cottage opposite, Mohamed waved at me, squinting, and we followed him through the village. He had put some violets in his nostrils as a sign of joy.

We stopped in front of a group of four disjointed and oblique houses, whose terraces sloped down in a bizarre and pleasant disorder. They looked like four old witches in plaster and limestone, immobilized in an evening council.

In the middle of those houses, there was a courtyard. Mohamed entered through a shadowy portal and came out shortly afterwards, followed by a small and fat woman, with her head and mouth veiled. She had a flowing robe under which, one could guess with repugnance, sat long and drooping breasts. She was Fatma’s mother. I walked over to her. Copper rings jingled at her ankles and wrists.

Shortly after, a murmur reached us from inside. A few women followed by a ragged mob surrounded Mohamed. They all screamed, gesticulated, raising to the sky coffee and milk colored arms, covered with reddish tattoos and jingling bunches of bracelets. Fatma’s price was discussed.

I dragged Mohamed inside, to cut short those negotiations. The already high moon violently illuminated the wall that closed the courtyard at the end. But the family followed us and the dispute began again. It was dismal and strange, in the luxurious scenery of the moonlight edged with shadows, the tumult of that disheveled family that was laughing at the price of the girl of the house.

“Provided that Mustafa, her husband, does not appear suddenly!” Mohamed told me.

And the price was fixed.

The mother left us to look for her daughter. Mohamed nimbly climbed a ladder to the highest of the four terraces. He wanted to spy on the possible return of her husband. Standing, with his hands in visors, he sang in a monotone:

You have, Ilat, your flesh is sweet,

Your flesh is as sweet as banana,

Your flesh is pearlescent like the moon.

But the moon is cold,

And your breasts burn under my kisses.

Ilai, Ilai, your flesh is sweet!

Standing up there, overlooking the sleeping village nestled on the bank of the Nile, Mohamed sang, and explored the river, whose vast oily waters flowed heavily. Here and there, those waters seemed sumptuous velvets bitten by the silver buckles of the moon.

On the Nile, there was not even a lone boat. Very high on the edge of a cloud, the moon was grinning, a vicious and plastered face, with eyes rimmed with bluish trim. Over Mohamed’s head curved a graceful silver sky, as intimate and artificial as the skies of certain ancient panel paintings. All around there was an indefinable buzzing of insects, and the meow of a distant song on the river…

I do not remember at all the pleasures that the beautiful Fatma gave me. She was an ordinary woman

Mohamed continued to sing under the moon: “Ilai, Ilai, your flesh is sweet!…”

The room was filthy; the basin was yellowish and cracked!… And that damned door that was constantly being reopened!…

And to say that I had longed for those delights!…

Suddenly, a shot, then a heartbreaking cry, in the moonlight! (Mohamed was no longer singing…) and the thud of a heavy body, on an upper floor, perhaps on a terrace!…

I rushed out into the courtyard where there was an indescribable tumult. The women cried mournfully: “Mustapha killed Mohamed! Mustapha killed Mohamed!”

The mob howled, terrified. I elbowed my way, to climb up the ladder, and went up to the highest terrace. Mohamed lay face down in a pool of blood.

I tried to lift the body.

It was already cold and too heavy. It was not possible for me to carry it.

In the courtyard, my friends were in awe as some Arabs had come to say that Fatma’s husband, Mustapha, wanted to kill everyone.

But he made no other victims. He walked past me without even looking at me. He had killed Mohamed, because he had not paid him, the last time, the price of Fatma’s prostitution!…

Poor Mohamed el Ragel!

Eating In Dahabieh, I Blessedly Examine the Nile

Finally at the station of Kafr-el-Zayat bundled up with carts, noise, galabieh and shacks, I discover the Nile and its tortuous opulence of turbid green and mirror fluidity that bring maonas armed with very high antennas. There emerged beaks of giant shipwrecked flamingos. Here is the sailing procession of His Majesty the Cotton with its monumental leaded bales. Going down the great merchant river in the color of buffalo crocodile and brown London cloth, before crossing the sea and changing into European clothes.

The steam-plume flowered and embroidered a spiral flight of white pigeons. The dahabieh that carries me looks like a little blue house that has slipped off the shore in its sleep. Under the tarred keel the Nile speaks:

“You slept motionless. Now sleep sailing. If my march bores you I offer you the steps of my banks so that you may go up to the golden peace of the sky.”

They are very long steps carved by water in the blackish hallaua of silt. The dahabieh drops anchor in the garden of Ghesireh.

At the table, with distant sails nearby garlanded with white steam, we drink a liquid sun in the large square windows. Negroes attend to us, charcoal faces with solar sparkles, in dazzling galabiehs and belts of flame.

The dazzling Nile, which measures 700 meters wide at this point and 1000 meters beyond the island, is draped by distant gray mists bristling with scissor antennas. They invite me to race, and I chase them while sipping a Turkish coffee on a motorboat.

With sinuous languor, the river reveals to me, above its bed of black earth and green grass, the desert. Dunes. Yellow solidification of a music of sand and wind with impulses, crescendo, arpeggiated cadences, dying on the sly and very sweet shore.

What if the sands arise?

Prudently the Nile raises and rounds a large white sail of mist like a skirt in the sun to defend its sweet water face from the flame.

My speed accelerates the magical elevation of other white sails. This, very slow, seems like the grand white prayer of the adoring river, lying face down. Open your canvas arms. Swell with ecstasy. The sail rises, sure to appease the solar ferocity and soon obtain a fresh adamantine peace in the stars. Sailors doze off, sailing in the shade, lying on the pyramidal load of the hull immersed to the brim. The instinct of the prow comes alive. Behind comes the long black rudder, useless as a train of mud.

The babble of the Nile:

“Slowly I fatten the friendly earth, but my daughters of cloth in the wind swell the cheeks of the holy breath of Allah mixed with stars and blow it back into the windows of the goldsmiths of the boroughs!”

Like a magic pump, the tuf tuf tuf of the motorboat brings forth on the left horizon, above the green Cairo gardens, the long 100-meter-high, lilac-pink Mokatam plateau, and atop, the jewel-like Citadel, with slender minarets and domes of flesh drinking in the sky.

My friend Grassi sensed my desire and converted it into reality, taking me at grueling speed through the neighborhood of the dead, to the tombs of the Dervishes: Abdullah el Meghauri.

The Sacred Mechanism

With fury we skim the walls of the Citadel, tall perpendicular desert-colored stone jackets, rigid folds and black mouths of English cannons in the gun well.

At the foot of the Mokatam plateau, a staircase takes us under the observatory room of the Chief of the Dervishes. A small courtyard of pine trees and dusty cypresses. With our feet wrapped in cloth, we enter the large cavern carved into the limestone. Tombs, left and right. In the background, in a square of mats closed by iron grids, three Arabs all wrapped in black, lying down with their feet turned towards the entrance, roll like typographic rollers to ink themselves with fecundity.

Outside, on the terrace planted with eucalyptus, crouched or seated on the marble, the Dervishes in long black dress, with gray berets wrapped in white, were contemplating. With prominent heads accentuated by the green of their hats and fly-swatter necks pointing far above the English powder magazine, above the striped and thorny bulbs of the domes of the dead, above the Nile flowing between green gardens, the orange splendor of the pyramids. Three. Perfect geometric shapes. Each with its falling shadow triangle like a cloak fixed on the occiput.

A clamor of machines calls me back to the sacred cave. Like tops, the Dervishes spin, arms outstretched. The white tunic and skirt flare in the rotational movement. A mystical, imploring naivety melts the emaciated face that looks at the vault.

Up there the holy engine vibrates and hums. Fifteen lathes of the great stellar steel mill are now in operation. Filing the earth. Smoothing the rough surface. The tall gray unbowed caps pierce the hard air. From time to time, like oil, a plaintive prayer drips over them, pacifying the rusty snags of Arab musical instruments.

The ragged, crowded orchestra screeches, “Let’s imitate the rhythms of the universe! We mechanize the human-gears of the cosmic order!”

A human lathe stops. Two. Five. Sweaty. An exhausted one crouches next to me on the mat. The most ambulatory go to get the burnouses of their old companions, cover them lovingly, then all, crosslegged, begin to pray. Only then do I see the chief, the only one left on the mat while the others have turned away. His gray cap sits on his ashen face while he listens to the prayer. He gets up. They follow suit with a long siren huuuu as if in the fog of the Thames.

The Bardotti by Her Majesty the Cotton

A crowd of ragged Arabs, green, yellow, and blue, observes the painful screeching of pivots and cogwheels on an iron bridge, which, turning slowly, permits passage of high sails through sky and muddy riverbed, stretched on long taut ropes.

I observe a sleepwalking crowd. Stunned by the light. Still all smoky and filthy from its chocolate-colored villages, low winding silt hovels, cattle, goats, dogs, hens, reeking of gaudy groups of roosters and black buffaloes pointing their horns against the splendid washed majolica of the sky.

Crammed in the lock basin, the boats are anxious to carry a load of crude cotton: moaning, grumbling, creaking with rage in that European trap! With a heavy and rhythmic step, four black, beggarly, half-naked sailors advance. Infinitely occupied, curved, and digging the mud while staring at it, endlessly.

They tighten the rope to drag the huge half-sunken sailing ship some distance under a millionaire load of cotton that crushes the torrid sacks of seeds. These already ripen the future fiber whiter, shinier, and longer. A little black man who bites into a piece of sugar cane commands its navigation, astride the tiller.

Cotton boats besiege a small Arab cemetery on the shore whose gray graves with stalks, turbans and agave swords descend to bathe in the Nile. Nasal rattles and lullabies resound in the warm wool of the atmosphere.

On the shiny rails a snorting steam-train maneuvers, warning with a sign, “Beware of Trains.” Black brats are colonized by flies, and the sun is already high. The wide round white smoke of the locomotive incenses a blue minaret, its blue-clad muezzin, and its blue cry launched to the four winds:

Allaaaah Ahkabar!

Hawks circle above in a halo, winged scavengers jealously watching over the carcass of a dog, whose stench softens the acrid aromatic smoke of an oven built with bricks of camel dung, cooking in the sun.

Resistant Tacts of Fresh Fat
And Sterile Glass

An acute sensuality makes my lips and nostrils hot. My nerves, which, over time, have coated the wheels of my car, transmit to me the various tactile pleasures of the tires.

Fat road of black earth and mud. Fleshy, greasy, saturated with germs. The flanks slide down into the low country expanse of murky ponds, skeletal norias tortured by skeletal horses, bronze buffaloes set in the emerald of the meadows, ecstatic ibises and flying slivers of pigeons.

Suddenly my Nile-oiled skin trembles at the edge of a new tactile world, all dry, glassy and metallic: the desert!

I enter the sultry padding of a horizon of sand. Sakkarah. Sensually my parched hands enjoy the humidity of the sweaty rump under the saddle. The atmosphere is arid. Preciously a drop of sweat shines like a perfect pearl on the forehead of my companion, who looks like the Queen of Sheba, among the panting, noisy blackish brutishness of the donkeys.

They trot like children on the infinite mattress of sand, his succulent and fleeting tenderness.

Thinking Malaise of the Desert

The desert is the inhuman heart of the globe. Of course, with the agile and fragile legs of donkeys, we unravel the skein of his coldest and most mysterious feelings. The sand lives and thinks, but does not want to talk. Monotonous, absent, and distracted. The dunes neither say nor give anything to man. Leading us through a wrinkled path, it welcomes us in silence. A tremendous silence pervades the underground Serapium with its granite sarcophagi which contained the Sacred Oxen. Yet, with the utmost care, they had been soaked in aromatic plants, golden poultices, gems and papyrus! This was a mistake, since human rapacity and curiosity succeeded in overcoming and dispersing their immortal cohesion.

But, with what levers of audacity, muscles and iron, were the robbers ever able to lift or break those enormous tomb covers? Certainly the bellowing curses of that cattle, full of so much artificial life, must have struck them all into the sand, as a faithful guardian, furtively captured the escape of their nocturnal steps.

So much is felt and seen, rising from the thickness of the desert like long black rays, the tenacious wills that buzz like dynamos in the foreheads and in the chests of those Kings, Warriors, Magistrates, Crocodiles and Sacred Oxen. They truly live in the real permanence of their portraits of gold, silver, copper, stone!

The Burning Pyramid

So intoxicated with renewed earthly joy, we left those dunes and graves full of life for the soft silt road, as one comes out of a hard ascetic bed to slip into a perfumed tub.

The muddy heads of the camels float in the afternoon air as they drunkenly sweep against our car with their large load of sugar canes and corn leaves. The most heavily burdened show only their legs, undulating twigs on the march. A black man draws water from a well with the pail, reminding me of my thirst, and I come parched into the immense yellow flame that vibrates on the face of the pyramid of Giza. It burns all the way up, anxiously built up from three roads, to reach the sun, they rise up, and meet at the luminous peak.

Religiously I visit the base to ascertain a human height of each block. Then I detach myself from it. The gigantic rump, turned tail and elongated brick paws of the Sphinx offer meager carpets of shade. In one of these, eleven Arabs, donkeys and guides, coagulate in a blackish spot around a puddle of water, a few onions, and a flat, battered pizza.

A second group came, they were dark and in clear splendor: an Egyptian family has lunch on the sand. I see the sweet transparency of the black veil on those very black eyes. An anachronistic fur collar on that European silk dressed table. A Khartoumese caretaker carries a coal-black baby between rigid folds of whitish raw wool; it wraps her body and masks her face. When he gets up, his hard and heavy gait erases the footprints of his bare feet in the sand. The sun bites the folds of the mistress’s black mask, which also hides her nose. Her gold bracelets tinkle. I hear the zirzir zirzirzir of an elegant Parisian tail-stock dancing on the eternal rough granite. I perceive the tuv tuv of turtledoves and pigeons on the broken nose of the Sphinx. Distantly I can hear the Io Io Io of a donkey in a distant palm grove.

To Eat an Entire Pyramid

I’m hungry. We will eat soon at the Meana Hotel. Meanwhile, the scalded pyramid escapes all coloristic definitions: old gold, orange velvet, solidified rosy flame, etc. It has nothing nostalgic about it. Nothing eternal. It does not teach. It does not rule. Rather, it offers itself to be eaten immediately on the table, or rather in this sumptuous desert set. The scent of its savory calories sinuously seeks my nostrils. Its crust cracks with the reflections of the immense and skillful solar oven. Cooked to perfection. I click my tongue in my mouth involuntarily. It is no coincidence that distant palms repeat the ceremonious greetings of their tufts, above those dunes that magically change into domes inlaid with almonds and walnuts. The sky is sweet and oily white, like the best mastic preserves, that in which the adored child of the most brilliant confectioner in Egypt fell and died.

In the growing shadow of the Sphinx, I forget the breakfast at the Meana Hotel and I doze off chewing a delicious piece of Pyramid. When I woke up the shadows were marching through the desert like a dark army. The pyramid of Giza appears to me entirely built of crystallized pistachios. I ate some more, foreseeing what happened on my return to Cairo, when, turning around at speed, I saw it recomposed in the ancient romantic visions. Already it was floating in the reddish-gold liquid of a Victor-Hughian sunset. On the right, the white flowered stem of a minaret and the very high tuft of a palm were diluted like two tablets of oblique peace in the silvery water of twilight.

At midnight at the Semiramis Hotel the breath of the Nile gently opened my window. In the void the round moon rested lightly on the open foliage of a banana tree.

Eh! Eh! Eh! the nocturnal birds barked calling each other. Before it was stolen from me, I ate the moon, convinced that the appetite is always right, I had become enchanted by this exciting competition of Arab sweets.

A Walk with My Mother on the Beach
Of the Ancient Port

On one of those typical Egyptian January afternoons, so slow, soft, ecstatic and golden, I went to visit Costantino Cavafy, the famous Greek poet who prefers his native Alexandria to his distant and distracted Athens.

The brilliant Italian publicist Catraro spoke eloquently about it, while I was picking around and evaluating the reasons for historical nostalgia that can link the soul of a poet to the blue semicircle of the Porto Antico, now deserted but certainly cluttered with sumptuous invisible galleys.

This was my mother’s favorite evening walk, on which I accompanied her while trying to harmonize my dreaming steps with her determined and hasty ones. She seemed to be pursuing her painful regret; I was magnetized by the flames of the sunset, which, as a master of war and heroism, scenographically tried and re-tried all the possible battles of clouds, purple cavalry, rifles shooting, collapses of castles of gold, etc.

We were assailed by the biting stench of the great slaughterhouse, purple hovels besieged by piles of bloody fleece, heaps of rubbish and angry bellowing. My nostrils recall the horrendous breath of Death omnipresent in that sinister landscape of smells, among the shadows of a ghostly cattle that frightened the feet of Arab passersby in black skirts and slippers along the shining water. Now the great slaughterhouse no longer exists; a wide paved quay, defended by concrete blocks, allows us to reach the Roman ruins of the Selsele outcrop in the blue sea without shocks.

Fresh flying salt of bitter memories. Gaseous rustles of foam, which excited my dives as a young swimmer. We are two ebony profiles against a bright sky of white gum, standing on the pink nail of the hand of one of the two arms of the Porto Antico. The other pushes the Kaid Bey Fort into the high seas, an old whitish and fragile building, which, of course, the visionary eye of Cavafy does not see, since the ancient lighthouse, wonder of the world, stands up in its place.

“Let’s go home, Tom!” my mother said.

“Let’s go back,” I say now to my companion. Immediately the murky sunset changes into the great slaughterhouse of the past, steaming reddish guts collapsed down, incinerating the emerald leaves and pearls of a banana grove.

At the Caraeoi crossroads I encounter the geometric comings and goings of the English sentry and the steps of the Mohamed Ali Club, perhaps observed by myself as a child, still sensitive to the bars of the balcony of my paternal home. Is this clamor of schoolchildren and roosters of today, or of then? Higher than the minaret and muezzin already absorbed by the night, a palm tree blesses us on the threshold of the poet Cavafy.

The Greek-Egyptian Poet Cavafy

Here it is, a small gray head of a sweet intelligent tortoise, slender arms that hang like oars out of the immense Greco-Roman shell of this wise old shade, with dark red velvet walls and paintings that rain pulverized centuries.

Also dark red are the gold-decorated shorts of the Sudanese servant who hands me a whiskey and soda and the traditional Greek cheese mézé over the sanieh. Chewing, he like an Arcadian shepherd boy, I like a running flyer, we start a discussion on the poetry of tomorrow.

Cavafy praises the Futurist Movement, declaring its “symbolic interpretation of historical phases applied to poor daily life” hygienic.

He adds: “This interpretation must be verbalized without the old meters and without the rhyme, in the free verse.”

I reply that it is necessary to surpass the free verse and reach the simultaneity of the words in freedom that best express our great fast mechanical civilization.

The conversation rises. Other admirers participate. Everyone praises the original poet who hosts us. It is shown with examples that the Greek poet Palamas, Cavafy’s rival, remembers Victor Hugo for his verbal abundance and Lamartine for his sentimentality; Malakassis is a blend of De Musset and Sully Prudhomme; Porfiras, the youngest of the Greek poets, sums up Baudelaire and Verlaine; the sonnets of Griparis suggest those of Josè Maria de Heredia.

Moved, the landlord offers me a new mézé of cheese as he explains to me his desire to literally sculpt in his verses the demotic language that is the popular Greek language exalted by the famous linguist Psycharis.

This has a powerful vitality outside and against classical grammar which, rigidly traditionalist, is now destined to die in libraries.

The demotic language is dynamic. It lends itself to welcoming all the indispensable foreign words. Especially the Italian words.

Cavafy recites some verses where the words wear hat socks gloves sound harmoniously like necessary neologisms well blended; and shows me English, French, and Spanish equivalent words out of tune.

We talk about the Ibsenism of the playwrights Xenopulos and Nirvana. Spiro Melas, on the contrary, carries out an almost futuristic activity with his “Free Scene” where the works of the French avant-garde theater are excellently interpreted by the company of Maria Cotopuli, the Duchess of Athens, according to the opinion of the major Greek daily, “Elefteron Vima.”

When finally Cavafy, prayed to by everyone, decides to give us the declamation of one of his unpublished poems, Catraro intervenes to explain its mysterious title: The God abandons Antonio. In fact, we can read in Plutarch that while Antony was giving in to the voluptuousness of Cleopatra in Alexandria, one evening a melodious chorus of mandolas and flutes was heard moving away over the sea. All ran to the port beach, but they saw nothing. It was Dionysus, the protector of Antony, who abandoned his protege.

Cavafy slowly syllabizes his free lines, accompanying them with a gesture that was surreptitiously arabesque.

Today so many hands recall the languid weight of the music he sang. Catraro translates:

If, late at night,

An invisible orchestra moves away,

Pouring around and voices and music

Wonderful—the dying days of your Fortune, and your failed works, and

The false desires of your life,

Ah! do not hide from useless tears.

What warrior who has been waiting for a long time

Such a fortune, go to the extreme to

Salute to fugitive Alexandria.

Neither deceive you: do not say “It was a dream”

Do not say what evil you heard:

Disdain such vain hope:

What warrior who has been waiting for a long time,

And as befits you,

Master of that city,

Proud as iron unbowed,

Leave out the cowardly lament,

And throbbing listens—extreme joy

Listen to the melodies,

And the mystical orchestra

The beautiful instruments—Listen,

And give last farewell, To Alexandria, to the city you lose.

Taking leave of the poet an hour later, I raced by car to enjoy the shadows scented with gaggie flowers in the Antoniadis Garden.

It was a full moon, surrounded by nightingales. In the ecstatic atmosphere the colonnade of tall stone drips an immaterial milk. From time to time a dull roar ended with thuds: they demolish the ancient Villa, which is pregnant with memories, to improvise a very modern one intended for visiting European sovereigns.

The rumble of trucks loaded with ancient marble. Sometimes the funeral collapse of the rubble evokes a hilarious burst of grenades.

The Mahmudieh canal is full of liquid nostalgic moons, much like the very modern and ancient free lines of the Greek poet of Alexandria, Costantino Cavafy.

Death Overcome

I try to clarify the psychology of ancient and modern Egypt by studying the people when they move, semi-indifferent, between the sacred and precious sarcophagus statues.

The poet Nelson Morpurgo, head of the Egyptian Futurist Movement, guides me in the Museum of Alexandria. We are alone with the past in the fragrant silence of warm wool, saltpeter and aromatic plants. A fugue of little voices, giggles and the patter of restless feet breaks it. There is a crowd of schoolgirls, eyes wearing black scarves and veils; but their camellia-white hands astutely touch and re-grab the huge rump of the Ox Api, adored for its fecundating virtues. Just as the water of the Nile is drunk religiously, so too every young girl pretends or thinks she finds in that venerated stone the strength to create life.

The Greeks and Romans paid little attention to this problem and often abandoned children; the Egyptians, on the other hand, despised and hated sterile women. It is now established that the Sphinxes were scratched considerably to feed women with a paste of sure fecundity. This love of life crushed death itself, under the weight of the complete and indestructible sarcophagus.

The pride of the Kings continued to rule peoples of mummies and undead, in the sumptuous cavities of the pyramids.

With a fervent human solidarity, by dint of love and fraternity, and above all, with the will to mock Death, the Sinmorenti societies were organized. They were so happy to have enjoyed a whole life together that they wanted to prolong it together in the reign of the conquest of Death. Before immortalizing the body in salt-soaked bandages, they had fed it with meat from animals chosen for their special qualities of transfusion.

The hardworking and edible ox, the ferocious and feared crocodile were deified.

A Colombaia of Caravaner Shoes

This haunting ideology of immortality accompanies me as I visit El Asra University. I come into a large courtyard enclosed by arcades. Inside the mosque I am lost in the high solar dust dome and minaret, which offers down the cool twilight of its mats. A certain beehive atmosphere teems under the numerous ogive arches. Around each gather about twenty scholarly groups.

Each has about thirty students of every age. Each is adorned with a Fez, enclothed in a red and white turban. Squatting, they listen around the bench on which the professor, sitting with his legs crossed, talks, waving his torso. Schoolchildren imitate its oscillation, caught in the wind and the nasal chant of that eternal commentary from the Koran. Concentric circles of whispers and silences form around the wise stone that swoops from time to time.

The sweetish smell of food mixes with the perspirations of those bodies that adore the continuity of equal dispositions, and ignore adventure.

As we leave El Asra University, we notice a kind of wooden dovecote that contains students’ shoes and slippers in its cells. The nostalgic dust of all the streets of Africa and Asia that dyes them, dialogues with the nearby great holy niche facing Mecca. Therein lies the synthetic drama of silent objects that sums up the immense Islam.

The English Cannons of the Citadel

If, in the fast car, I raise my head, the turreted, desert-colored Citadel immediately attempts with the tips of its minarets to pierce the annoying hum of English aviators, while continuing to philosophically aim its guns on the silent anguish of Muslim crowds.

Against the limestone base of the walls, very ancient lines of camels transporting stones for the construction of Europe pass slowly, floating, but appear carved into the edifice.

We loudly run among the decapitated mosques, our speed barely disturbing the black habara of the Arabs who, piled up in front of the prison, wait in the hay to visit their loved ones locked up by the foreigner.

The Nile. Still, overcooked by the sun, the dahabieh or floating houses sleep along the shore, under palm trees drunk with sleep. They stand oblique. Bracing themselves so as not to fall. The new garden of Ghesireh, a green futurist-cubist geometry of boxwoods cut into spheres of cubic cones, contains in its large blue majolica tub all the coolness dreamed of in desert journeys.

There stands the gorgeous smooth blue of the empty sky. How do they hope to mow down those high arched sails between distracted palms and praying willows? Will Egyptian nationalism soon realize the dream of absolute autonomy and enter the League of Nations as a free ally and friend of England that has always been the master of the Upper Nile and a bank of the Suez Canal?

What contradictions!

But do not the howls of desert jackals and domestic feral dogs harmonize with the fluid nocturnal eternity of the Nile?

Theater without Theater

As many dramatic contrasts, of images, ideas, colors, rhythms, voices, feelings, should long ago have been given a literal place on the stage and formed into an Egyptian Theater. This, however, does not yet exist. This dawn will soon arrive.

In addition to the European Theater translated into Arabic, which today constitutes the primary repertoire, there are the plays by Joussef Wahby, Mohamed Teymour, Antoun Yazbak, Ibrahim.

In March 1923, Joussef Wahby founded his Ramses Company which, as a skilled capitalist boss and leading actor, he triumphantly brought all over Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria.

The historic theater has its own poet: Sciauki, the famous author of Cleopatra, and an actress: Fatma Marusc. This young, beautiful, intelligent and sensitive artist passionately offers the Arab public, in addition to the languid modulations of her crying over Antonio’s corpse, also an agile and voluptuous bare back—an authentic revolution in Muslim customs.

The best actors are Zaki Telemat, Azis Eid, Joussef Wahby, Georges Abid. Among them all stand out: Neghib Rihani who created original scenes, Ramzy, Abdel Rahman Rouchdi, Ibrahim el Masri, Mahmoud Kamel, Ismail Sobry, Aly Labib.

These actors try to create a typically national theater in modern Egyptian, abandoning the classical language.

There are erroneous efforts, like that of the actor Zaki Telemat who dreams of a Theater of historical magazines to offer to the Parisian public, and of another type: Kish Kish bey, the personification of the good-natured vulgar irony.

The actor-author Aly Kassar manifests himself with the same caricature formula.

An African Simulation of a Negro Aviator

Where am I? Upper Egypt? Tunisian interior? No! In reality this car cuts the Tunisian plain but at the same time divides Aswan from the Nile, which brings to the surface an elephantine hill like an immense pineapple! Now pomegranates, banana groves, palm groves intensify with furious trunks and foliage in skeins under these wheels that run, at the same time brake and loosen, in the endless Tunisian plain, stirring it eccentrically. On my face the dominating wind brutally blasts moaning lessons against our rapid quarter-notes. Bursts of yellow-green vineyards project towards the arch of the horizon, each seeming to carry the ambitious triangle of a camel on its crest: which solemnly drags behind it a small plow, like a broken toy. Now, he paints the vault of the sky with a raised muzzle. Thick hedges of a vineyard, like tangles of rusty fences, defend the vertebrate bat-like armor of the villages, whose tires, buffalo, donkeys, dogs, and muddy roosters live a fat brown life defended from the onslaught of the wind.

Here, gradually swelling, the plain gives birth to Kerouan, white, surrounded by agile and intricately articulated lacy walls. Ovoid domes lined perpendicularly, similar to white juicy fruits, gracefully alternate with the grim square towers of minarets loaded with war rather than prayers. From their balconies the city seems to me an immense collection of empty boxes and heavy overturned lids. Cropped with terraces of dusty silver, pocketed with bluish courtyards and velvety indigo alleys.

I tower over the uncovered geometrical shapes of the desert intestines, all cubes, spheres, triangles, cones of blisters, muscles, and nerves, all calcified. High sparks of green-gold flicker on the battlements of the walls that seem to be dripping with a torrid blue milk. The hot atmosphere stuffs my legs and back with lead and warm wool as I slowly proceed through the deep and winding crematorium into the alley. A black tangle of fabric, perhaps a woman, is advancing. In the dust, without noise, as she passed she certainly looked at me from a small hole in her dark curtain.

Even theatrically, on the left, packed in the shacks, a heap of Arabs or Bedouin, struck by sleep, cooked: boiled couscous, meat bones, broad beans and sweets. All this, served to perfection in a dazzling niche in the walls.

The high inverted crater of the sun tumbles down a murderous lava that chases me into the trapdoor of a cellar café: instead of the desired coolness, I receive in my nostrils stink flies and sickness of mold rancid with oil, cinnamon, vanilla, gaggia, carob, chickpeas, sweat, incense, ammonia, anise, jasmine, and cloaca. Fortunately, a cup of vervain lubricates my choked brain between a rinsing of cups and a French Tunisian voice that narrates:

“The first part of the film I’m shooting takes place on the oily waters of the Nile in Dahabieh, the second between two mountains of cotton bales heated by the August sun, the third in Constantina. It is a crude and noisy city. A lot to do for the sound! Every morning we were awakened by a cheerful shouting of cattlemen, roosters, donkeys, goats, and oxen. A large hotel overlooking the inns of nomads whose large courtyards contain hay, garbage, dogs, camels, geese, pigeons. Elegant and absentminded storks dominate the red tiles of the low roofs that seem to chew and squeeze the caravans of peasant cattle and human rags as they pass. The view is splendid and lends itself to everything! We will obtain a powerful cinematic effect with the mass of lopsided and blue-flecked huts that bulge to the left badly, held by the round viaduct mounted on slender arches. The capital scene will take place in a car launched at high speed on this viaduct that crosses the deep valley of the Rummel, ruffling the slow purple fumes that rise from the blue-brushed houses.”

“Here it cracks!” mutters a black aviator. “Kerouan is the city of slow death in quicklime! I’m tired of cooking in oil like a pancake. You have to fly to the oases. Yesterday, at dawn, I left Cairo with my little touring plane. I flew over Tripolitania and Tunisia and headed for El Kantara. What an aerial pantomime! Two immense waves of limestone, granite and sand, after floating in the sky in front of me, during half an hour of flight, suddenly seemed to petrify their convulsive gullies. They wanted to bar me from entering the desert! But Hercules had for me, and certainly for me, broken through that wall with his legendary football. I passed a hundred meters high in the passage while ten thousand palm trees crowded into it, dynamiting the spinning gears of their tufts, anxious to escape the solar flame and pulling all together the stream of water of the paternal wadi that guides them…

“Towards Biskra I flew over high parades of Bedouin farmers who go to work the land of others in order to work their own. I see the swaying of camels loaded with tents, crockery, children. At the top of the tallest, rich women swing under canopies of vermilion silk: each one carries on her side the favorite white hen or the faithful sleeping white-furred dog. They seem like black bronze statuettes on pompous marching pedestals. Among the folds of the desert, flocks of white sheep are revealed by the red solferino that marks all their heads. Always in search of fresh sands, I finally found the BuSaada wadi with its emerald gardens between walls of orange limestone. You will land in front of the El Caid hotel in a sunset of silky pink sand. The hotel was full of tourists and, in the oasis, under the brown Arab tent lined with scarlet, you sleep badly! Without a beautiful Algerian by your side! The large stars and the crescent weigh on the tufts of the palms. Sleep fights against the quarrelsome howling of dogs, aided by the tinnitus of insects and nocturnal birds that groan and gnaw on the barks. But as soon as the moon disappeared behind the dunes, the delights of Paradise invaded the oasis with a melodious breeze that set the infinite plumes of palm trees in motion; and these palms were all busy kissing, and kissing voluptuously, spreading a polyphony of the sweetest rustles and meandering illusory crackles. Watery ripples? Perhaps rain and hail? Despite my tiredness, my softened heart as I watched the only islet of that infinite ocean of blissful leaves. I flew off amidst the cries and slanting rays of a full sun, like a nest of red birds. On the lips of this metallic apparatus, the dawn was a vanilla strawberry ice cream.”

The tale of the black aviator gave me an acute desire to go out into the open. On the other hand, closed by the heat, a lane leads me outside the walls. In the green of the meadows sleep herds of graves and mixed sheep. Soft still music of stones, blood, marrows, bones and fleeces. Among the graves was harmony. Beyond, there stood eternity.

The soft rhythm of the car that takes me away from Kerouan accelerates the feverish and shameless unwinding of its chaste sash of lacy walls. Abruptly, behind them, the warrior square of the houses flattens out, anxious to escape the brilliant shooting of the stars and their silver sights.

In the clear optimistic evening, under the already distant walls, a fragrant fall of soft ashes, like jasmine and honeysuckle flowers, were torn by the wind in a heavenly garden.

The ashes scattered. They appear to me like the white milk of camels, left out to cool in the chill of the night.