Читать книгу The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens - Edward 18th Baron of Dunsany Plunkett - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Murcote and I came back to the Club next night, and when we arrived Mr. Jorkens had already begun to talk.

“The man with the shining turban,” he said, “was losing the game.

“It was in one of those towns in which East and West meet constantly, each at its very worst, each depraved by the other. They meet there in purest sunlight and mutual contempt; absurd guides touting, disgusting boys begging, silly women scattering cheap coins and smiles: they meet there at the bad end of the town. And only a hundred yards or so away a different people walk with an ancient dignity.

“I stood at a corner by a bougainvillea, a little way off from that meeting of East and West, watching a game of draughts. It was not quite the kind of draughts that we play in Europe; for instance a piece that got to the end of the board developed extraordinary powers, its agility surpassing that of the king in our games, as the jump of the kangaroo surpasses that of the pig. And the capture of any piece by either player was made with a queer violence. The board was on the ground under the bougainvillea; a circle of shrouded figures sat watching the players, an Arab from further south, and a man that I could not place, who had gold thread round his turban. And the man with the gold in his turban was losing the game, and this seemed to breed in him a petulance against the watchers; and his petulance seemed to choose the most prominent target; and that was me, for I was the only European among the group of burnouses.

“ ‘You needn’t think such a darned lot of yourself just because you’re white,’ he said suddenly.

“I wasn’t thinking of myself at all, but people get queer fancies like that sometimes. I made no answer. And then he dropped out, like an afterthought, ‘If it comes to that, I’m white myself.’

“ ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ I said.

“Yet that remark had astonished me; it was not merely his brown face that belied his statement, Africa can do that to anyone; it was not merely his clothes; it was a curious, slow, listless way he had that suggested the child of the East: they seem in their long stay to have come to some arrangement with Fate; we don’t know what it is, but belike will come by it some day; meanwhile we struggle frantically, despising the calm of the East, and the East looks on and thinks—no, I don’t know what it thinks. But this man claimed to be white, and had no right to that calm.

“Then I left that game of queer draughts, and presently I met an Arab I knew, who was seated drinking coffee.

“ ‘Who is that man?’ I asked, pointing down the street, where the golden threads in the turban shone under the bougainvillea.

“ ‘He’s the King of Sarahb,’ he said.

“ ‘A king?’ I said incredulously. And others were seated near, and one or two said, ‘Oh yes, the King of Sarahb.’

“And then I think that the man I knew said, ‘Would you like to have a talk with him?’

“As likely as not I said ‘Yes.’

“But the conversation was in Arabic, and at this point my little stock of it gave out. At any rate he offered me coffee, and I sat down at his table, and I noticed an urchin slip away, going towards the draughts-players. We talked for a while of the mountains. And then the strange man appeared, walking listlessly, not carefully shaved, wearing the whitish garment that Arabs commonly wear, and his turban and old slippers.

“ ‘The King of Sarahb,’ said the Arab. And this man sat down at our table.

“Coffee was brought, and we talked. And for a long long while neither of us said anything worth saying, and many coffees were brought, and the afternoon wore away; and often I rose to go, yet never went, for I knew I should leave a mystery: and still he sat on there. And at last he spoke as the daylight hovered to go; and the holy men were calling from their balconies, sentence by sentence floating clear through the air; and eastwards a wonder of colour glowed upon cliffs of far mountains, and westwards the hills grew dark, whence an orange light flowed upwards, and in narrow lanes by mud houses here and there there showed an electric light. Before he finished the minarets were long silent and all the mountains dark; the stars were shining, and cigarettes moved glowing through the streets. This was his story:

“It was a long long time ago, he said, since he came to Africa, and he had never left it since. He did not like the way, he said, that they were doing things in Europe; so he left it, and more than this he would not tell me. How he lived he did not say, nor even where he lived, nor why he left one day and took the desert road, and then strayed from that alone into the wide desert. All he told me was that when he first saw he was lost, for that is what it amounted to, though he only thought he was not sure of his way, when first he was lost he knew he was just three days from water if he could find the road. The road, he said, was a perfectly good one. It seemed to amount to a certain tidying of the bare surface of the desert between two rows of pebbles, which had been merely swept off the space that thereby became a road. A most remarkable sight, he told me, if you came on it suddenly; in the savage waste this sudden evidence of civilisation, this relic of the labour of man, went perfectly straight as far as you could see to the left and as far as you could see to the right; you crossed it, and in a few yards you were back again where nothing had altered since Creation was ended. Baked earth, he said, rather than sand, and sprinkled with little rocks, as though colossal spadefuls of gravel had been thrown at it from a far planet; and very occasional tufts of dwarfed bushes growing. The whole desert he described as being like a gravelled drive carelessly weeded, of infinite breadth and leading to nowhere. In this place he realised he was three days from water, riding a camel alone, and carrying a certain amount of water in skins. He did not grow uneasy at first, because he knew that the road was roughly to the right of him, and as it was five hundred miles long he had only to travel more or less in the right direction to find it sooner or later. It was not till he had travelled for five days and found no road and finished up his water that a sudden fear came down on him, like the desert rising up, as he put it, and gripping him with a hand. He killed his camel then for the water that it would have inside it, as he had read in books; and got very little. Then he went on on foot, still looking for his road, and hurrying more and more as the day wore on. I don’t know how he had missed it if it lay the whole of one side of him; perhaps by not starting in the right direction in that land where all sides are so much alike, more likely by wavering and twisting when he thought he was going straight, for I take it that any landmarks there are change with every mood of the desert; or else he rode quietly across it while he looked for something far more noticeable than that road actually was. When night came he stopped his search reluctantly enough, but went to sleep with a conviction that early the next day he was sure to find that road. When he woke he was thirstier than he thought he would be, and understood then that he would have to find the road almost at once, and then to travel down it very fast, if he was to escape the desert and live. And the heat of the day came, and he gave up looking for the road and began chasing mirages. This is probably done at the last by everybody who dies lost in the desert; the temptation of the million-to-one chance of them being real water would be irresistible at the end. Of course he knew they were mirages, because he knew that there was no water in that part of Africa, but still he went after them; his eyes no doubt were clearer by now than his reason, and whenever they saw water he went for it. So he chased mirages desperately all the morning. And at last he found one that did not recede from him.

“That it was a mirage he knew, from the way that the sky came in and out of it, slipping under the bases of hills, a sure sign of mirage. And yet it did not move further off or disappear as he neared it. So that soon he saw the waters of its lakes lapping on the sand that shone very golden all round it, except at the back where ruddy brown mountains all mixed up with sky stood very sheer and rocky, shutting it off from the world. Amongst the lakes was a city all of white marble, with a flush of pink in it as faint as late sunlight, wandering amongst the towers, and here and there the flash of thin veins of gold. And the beauty of that city shining in the soft water, in a light all of its own, that had nothing to do with the wild glare of the desert, touched his heart as neither dawn nor music nor memory had ever touched it before; and he stood before its battlements by the edge of its lakes and wept.

“And as he stood there weeping, all the people that dwelt in the city came down to the edge of their mirage with garlands of northern flowers, dressed in the silks of holiday attire, and called to him in tones of earnest welcome. And still the tears ran on through the grime of his face; and one in authority, standing before the rest, called out to him that theirs was the city of Sarahb, and their king was long since dead; and now he was king and should reign in the dead king’s stead, and should enter into their city and be crowned King of Sarahb, and there, if he so desired, should be immortal.

“And the lost man looked up wondering, and they beckoned him eagerly; and all in the weakness of his will their beckoning drew him on, so that he tottered towards them and came to their outer rampart. And they opened their gateway that was towards the desert, and thronged about it and still beckoned him on, though none came through the gateway; and he passed through and the gates shut, and the lakes of illusion shone clear all about him, and a shout went up through all the ways of the city. And gathering about him they told him how the banquet of his coronation was being made ready even now in another part of the city. But he leaned towards the waters of the lakes of illusion, and would fain quench his thirst at them and then go on to the banquet. Dear me, dear me, I was thirsty once, and I know.

“Then they told him that at the table of the banquet were wines of no earthly vintage, but drawn from the grapes of valleys on a planet nearer the sun, and perfumed with odours not known by any dwellers here; yet he still leaned towards the waters. And they tried to draw him by a grassy path, that ran fresh by the lakes of illusion, to the long table on the further side, that was spread with its damask in the open air, with flagons shining on it, beneath the triumphant towers that gleamed in that curious light. And drawing away from them he came to the lapping water.

“And there an aged woman dressed in black silk, who appeared to be a witch or the follower of some such calling, approached and said to him: ‘Drink none of the mirage water.’

“And he sighed, ‘I am thirsty.’ And she told him to drink at the banquet, where the wines for him were not as the wines he knew, with the perishable taste of the vineyards of Earth: she gripped his wrist and told him the wonder of them: she pointed across the city to where those flagons sparkled. He could not tell me the wonder of those wines as the old woman told: language, he said, was not framed for it. And behind him all the people of Sarahb called to him gently, almost in the cadence of song, telling him the strange joys of the wine that they culled by magic, at evening from glittering planets that were most near to the sun. And the waters of illusion murmured and whispered and rippled.

“ ‘Drink not at all of these waters,’ said the woman that followed witchcraft.

“Weary and burning he stood by the edge of the mirage water. He knew what he was losing. Then as the woman warned him away with rapid signs of her hand, and as his people called him to come with them, he stooped down to that smiling water to moisten his mouth. He heard one shout from the witch, he heard his people wailing; then as he stooped the lake fell downwards from him; he shot a scooped hand after it, and soon was falling with it. The lake fell and fell before him, a glittering, twinkling light; the voices in the City of Sarahb faded almost at once from hearing; and he fell for miles in silence but for the roar of the air, and the lake grew darker as he fell. Soon it was all darkness.

“When it was light again the lake had left him, and he was back again in the desert. Two Arabs had found him there and given him water in time. To them he told his story; and soon it spread, and all the Arabs in that part of Sahara know it, and the nomads carry it further every year, and it has come to the towns where the markets are in which the Arabs barter, beyond the mountains in the arable land. And not a man of them doubts he is King of Sarahb, and he is known amongst them by no other name.”

Jorkens turned to drink a little whiskey and soda from a glass that stood at his side, and I suppose we all turned over in our minds the strangeness of his story, for the room was still for a long while. Then a man I did not know said:

“I suppose you can be quite sure that he really had entered the mirage?”

“To no man capable of discerning the difference between reality and illusion,” answered Jorkens, “was it possible to doubt it. The gulf between these two things is so profound that nothing and no one on one side can be confused with what’s on the other. I have seen that man look at a motor, at a newspaper, at a hotel; I have heard him speak about our modern problems. I could not have been mistaken. All of these things were sheer illusion to him. He was away on the other side. That man had entered the mirage and had its point of view. To hold that that point of view is right is quite another matter. Well, well,” he added, “I suppose we shall know some day.”