A Writer's World by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

small villages of so bleak a position and so ominous a reputation. The sand of the desert, moving restlessly and irresistibly with the prevailing winds, was in fact marching upon the place inch by inch through the years. Some of the outlying settlements had already been swamped. Some had built great protective walls around themselves. In one small hamlet a single householder was left in possession, and he too was preparing to leave, for a brutal yellow sand-dune was poised above his shack. ‘The sand has its needs,’ he said philosophically. ‘We must allow the sand its rights.’ Everywhere there were broken walls, shattered houses and discredited barricades, all half-buried in the dunes.
    The detention camp was several miles away in the desert, and nobody seemed very keen to take me there, so I settled down in the main village of the oasis hoping to find some friendly guard or prisoner at large, but content enough to drink my coffee in the rambling main square of the place. Its manner was deadened but soothing; its people, mostly Berbers, listless but friendly. Many of the narrow streets were roofed with wood and earth, to dissuade the wild Beduin marauders of old from riding pell-mell down them on horseback. Along these shady pathsthe people moved with padded footsteps, carrying baskets decorated with odd little tufts of wool, and at night lanterns swung down side streets and over the open fronts of stores (with piles of beans, big glass pots of spices, and silent shopkeepers lounging against shutters). Hardly a woman was to be seen in this town of rigid tradition; only one cringing soul, embalmed in black, did I meet scurrying from the square in the shadow of a wall. The weather was excessively hot, and the hours of Kharga passed heavily.
    On market day, though, the place was transformed, and then I found a trail to my prisoners. The main street was lined with butchers’ stalls, piled high with white fatty camel-meat which the butchers, after a few brusque strokes with the chopper, tore between their bloody hands with a noise of rending flesh and muscles. Piles of this horrible stuff, I noticed, were being loaded into a small truck, guarded by a couple of policemen, and when I asked where it was going they said: ‘To the prisoners.’ Oho, I said, might I come too? Certainly not, they said. They were political prisoners, and obviously no foreigner could talk to them – what would the Governor say? However, somebody added with the suspicion of a wink, I might be interested instead to visit the hospital of Kharga, just over there, turn right at the square, and very interesting I would find it. So I went along that morning, and a young and agreeable doctor showed me round the place. In one ward we found a number of grumpy and scrofulous patients lying on palliasses on the floor. ‘What’s this?’ said I. ‘Not enough beds, then?’ ‘Oh, we have enough normally,’ said the doctor casually, ‘but just at the moment we’ve got a ward full of prisoners from the camp. Care to meet them?’
    And there they were, those successors of Athanasius, propounders of very different faiths: some of them communists, some Muslim Brethren. They looked a murderous lot, all the more sinister because of the bandages and plasters which covered their eyes or supported their limbs. We talked of this and that, of the past and the future, of the conditions of their detention and their hopes of release. Every morning, I learnt, they were given a lecture of indoctrination by a representative of the regime, but something in their eyes told me they were far from brainwashed. Two grey-haired police guards watched us from the veranda as we talked; and now and then a savage old reprobate lying on a bed in the corner intervened with some caustic witticism, delivered in the most cultured of English accents and with the bite of an educated and incisive mind.
    Thus Nestorius might have spoken, I thought, during his exile at Kharga.
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