Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online

round the family, including his generals, all brothers-in-law really, with bright scheming eyes. Sarees and turbans and their fingers afire with spill of sapphires. “If only father were alive,” he said. Then the dancing began.

I n the name of Allah the all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing, know that it is by his holy will that we come to free the peoples of the Nile from their immemorial and most cruel bondage to the Turks and the Mamelukes, free men of Frankistan bringing freedom, respecting Islam and the tenets of the holy prophet, may his name be praised and the holy name of Allah most high exalted for ever more.
    T he disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst. There he sat watching, on a mess of old ruins called Pompey’s Pillar, slashing away at old bits of pot with that whip of his. The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheikhs came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat.
    The trouble is, Carné said, all the fucking lies. First we were sailing to England, and then it was Malta we took, and now we’re here, and Christ knows why. The fucking heat and the flies and scorpions and all this fucking sand. On on on, loaded with fucking equipment, only dry biscuits to eat and no water bottles, not that there’d be any water to put in them. Thiriet went mad, crying out ha ha ha I see you mother stop swirling about in the air with all that water pouring out of your tits, then she seemed to call out shoot yourself son, better that way, and by Jesus he did. Blondy and Tireux saw what they swore was the Nile just over the next sandhill, and Hubert said it was what they call a mirage, then he wanted to peel down his breeches to shit but we were told on on on on, got to get there before the Nile floods, wherever the fucking Nile is, so he shat all the time in his breeches like the rest of us. The sun of glory fills the sky , but it was a big baker’s oven up there with the doors wide open. Fossard screamed out that he’d gone blind, and so did Teisseire a bit later on, and later on Jacques Carrère. These fucking great swarms of black flies had plenty to drink, which was the sweat on our necks and faces. In a way you could see that a man could laugh at the extremes of the misery of it, for misery could not easily go any further, three days of it, stumbling through all this white sand like hot snow, the dried shit in our breeches, and knowing we were marching on on on on only to get cut to pieces with fucking axes and scimitars at the end of it. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains, as that bastard said. Once or twice we came to villages, but they were all empty or full of dead that the Bedouins had left to the flies and the ants, and the wells had been filled in with stones. Soon it was Alexandre Carrère that went mad and shot himself and nobody stopped him. We were like silent ghosts going through that sand, and the only sound was the buzzing of these fucking great black flies. The sky was pure metal, pewter or brass or something, clanking down on your head with no noise, and the sun was like a great round arse shitting fire.
    “W hat I hear,” Bonaparte said in his tent, whisking at the flies with his whip, “sounds very like mutiny. I gave General Mireur a chance