The English Patient

   Bermann and I talk to a snakelike mysterious old man in the fortress of El Jof—in the stone hall that once had been the library of the great Senussi sheik. An old Tebu, a caravan guide by profession, speaking accented Arabic. Later Bermann says “like the screeching of bats,” quoting Herodotus. We talk to him all day, all night, and he gives nothing away. The Senussi creed, their foremost doctrine, is still not to reveal the secrets of the desert to strangers.

At Wadi el Melik we see birds of an unknown species.

   On May 5, I climb a stone cliff and approach the Uweinat plateau from a new direction. I find myself in a broad wadi full of acacia trees.

   There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.

So a man in the desert can slip into a name as if within a discovered well, and in its shadowed coolness be tempted never to leave such containment. My great desire was to remain there, among those acacias. I was walking not in a place where no one had walked before but in a place where there were sudden, brief populations over the centuries—a fourteenth-century army, a Tebu caravan, the Senussi raiders of 1915. And in between these times—nothing was there. When no rain fell the acacias withered, the wadis dried out … until water suddenly reappeared fifty or a hundred years later. Sporadic appearances and disappearances, like legends and rumours through history.

In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it.

   Hana leans forward, sensing his drifting, watching him, not saying a word. Who is she, this woman?

   The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.

When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.

But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. We were young. We knew power and great finance were temporary things. We all slept with Herodotus. “For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before.… Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place.”

   In 1936 a young man named Geoffrey Clifton had met a friend at Oxford who mentioned what we were doing. He contacted me, got married the next day, and two weeks later flew with his wife to Cairo.

The couple entered our world—the four of us, Prince Kemal el Din, Bell, Almásy and Madox. The name that still filled our mouths was Gilf Kebir. Somewhere in the Gilf nestled Zerzura, whose name occurs in Arab writings as far back as the thirteenth century. When you travel that far in time you need a plane, and young Clifton was rich and he could fly and he had a plane.

Clifton met us in El Jof, north of Uweinat. He sat in his two-seater plane and we walked towards him from the base camp. He stood up in the cockpit and poured a drink out of his flask. His new wife sat beside him.

“I name this site the Bir Messaha Country Club,” he announced.

I watched the friendly uncertainty scattered across his wife’s face, her lionlike hair when she pulled off the leather helmet.

They were youth, felt like our children. They climbed out of the plane and shook hands with us.

That was 1936, the beginning of our story.…