The Mule on the Minaret Read online

  The Mule on the Minaret

  by

  ALEC WAUGH

  Contents

  PART ONE THE LAND OF MILK AND HONEY

  PART TWO THE CITY OF THE CALIPHS

  PART THREE THE MINARET

  In the bazaars of Damascus and Baghdad, they tell this among many other stories, about the legendary Hoja Nassiral-Dia. It happened on a certain day, that Hoja, travelling from Horns to Hama, reached shortly before noon, an unfamiliar village. In the market-place was a vociferous, gesticulating concourse. He was warmly welcomed. ‘Stranger,’ they said, ‘we are in trouble. The Muezzin is sick and we have no one to summon us to prayer. We are a small village; we have known one another all our lives and we know that not one of us is worthy to ascend the minaret. But against you, a stranger, we know nothing. It would be proper for you to do so.’

  ‘But I have my mule with me,’ protested Hoja. ‘If I leave him at the foot of the tower he will be stolen.’

  ‘Then you must take him up with you,’ the villagers insisted.

  So Hoja did as they requested. He climbed with his mule to the top of the tower and from its balcony summoned them to prayer. There was peace in the noisy market-place.

  But when he would continue his journey, he discovered that it is one thing to lead a mule to the top of a minaret, but quite another to lead him down. So he called on the villagers to help him. They shook their heads. Hoja was indignant. ‘But you told me to take the mule up with me.’ They laughed. ‘The man,’ they said, ‘who takes his mule to the top of a minaret, must bring it down himself.’

  Part One

  The Land of Milk and Honey

  Chapter One

  On an evening in late November, in the year 1962, the voice of the announcer boomed across the airport waiting-room at New York’s Idlewild.

  ‘Pan American announce the departure of their flight number 2 for Frankfurt, Beirut, New Delhi, Bangkok and Tokyo. Will passengers please proceed to their aircraft by Gateway Number 7.’

  Among the eighty or so men and women who obeyed the summons was an Englishman in the middle sixties, of rather more than medium height; sparse, with thick white hair, clean shaven, long nosed; caricaturists often presented him as a bird. He had an authoritative manner. As he walked down the corridor, a couple of newspapermen hurried forward.

  ‘Professor Reid?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘May we take your picture, please?’

  ‘Of course.’

  As the photographer arranged his camera, the other began the standard questionnaire.

  ‘You are going to Baghdad for the Al Kindi celebrations?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘As England’s first historian-philosopher?’

  The Professor smiled. ‘As the only one available.’ A scholar of New College, Oxford, he had taught for nearly forty years now in a redbrick university, Winchborough in Sussex. He was currently completing a two-years’ exchange professorship at Columbia. A disciple of Arnold Toynbee, he had, under the signature N. E. Reid, published a number of substantial volumes that had earned him the respect of his colleagues but no great measure of popular recognition. The moment called, he felt, for a display of modesty. ‘They would have preferred an Oxford or a Cambridge don,’ he said. ‘But no one cared to go; though I don’t think it would be tactful to print that.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone else want to go? This is off the record.’

  ‘Baghdad isn’t particularly comfortable. Most of our Orientalists had links with the old régime. It’s only four years since the King was murdered.’

  ‘Then why do you want to go? That question needn’t be off the record, surely.’

  ‘I was there for three years in the Second War. I’m curious to see in what ways its changed.’

  ‘You must have several friends there.’

  ‘I had, but I don’t know what’s become of those that are still alive and aren’t in exile.’

  ‘Will you try to get in touch with them?’

  ‘I’ll leave the first move to them. It might not be convenient for them to know an Englishman; but that again is off the record.’

  ‘You are breaking your journey at Beirut. Were you in Lebanon as well, during the war?’

  ‘For seven months.’

  ‘You won’t have any difficulty in meeting your old friends there.’

  ‘I’m trusting not.’

  ‘Fine, thank you very much, Professor; I’m most grateful. Is there anything you’d like to add?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Thank you.’

  ‘Bon voyage.’

  The camera clicked again, and the Professor walked towards the gangway.

  He smiled as he fastened his seat belt, and settled luxuriantly into the deep wide seat which the generosity of the Iraqi Government had accorded him. He stretched out his legs towards the foot-rest. It was the first time that he had travelled otherwise than tourist. It was ironically appropriate that he should be returning in such resplendent style to a country where he had served so austerely as a soldier, to read the final chapter of a story that, for him, had started twenty-one years earlier in Beirut.

  * * *

  Twenty-one years ago, November 1941, in the early afternoon, and he was standing in the hallway of a block of flats that had been requisitioned by the military. He was one of a dozen officers who had been, two months earlier, hurried out from London to the Middle East as a matter of the utmost urgency to staff the newly formed Spears Mission. After a seven weeks’ journey, in convoy round the Cape, they had at last, on a day of wind and rain, arrived. An orderly was reporting their appearance.

  From above them on the uncarpeted staircase came the clatter of high heels; a clatter that ceased suddenly. Reid raised his head. On the first-floor landing a tall, dark-haired young woman wearing a short sheepskin coat, had checked at the sight of the cluster of officers below her.

  ‘Who on earth are you?’ she asked. She had a rich contralto voice.

  Reid was then a captain and there were a couple of majors in the group, but he had become their spokesman during the voyage out.

  ‘We’re the new members of the Mission,’ he informed her.

  ‘You are; you really are, at last.’

  She sat down on the top stair and stared at them; then burst out laughing. She had a full, gay laugh which made him realize that though she was not pretty she was attractive. He noticed that her eyes were blue.

  ‘Did any of you,’ she asked, ‘read a last-war book by Ian Hay called The First Hundred Thousand?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Do you remember a chapter about the practical joke department in the War Office?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The department is still functioning. In August, after the collapse of the Vichy Forces, we needed a dozen officers for our Mission. It never occurred to London that Cairo had a pool of highly competent officers, invalided from the desert. Within five days we’d filled our vacancies. In the meantime London was busy ransacking every Corps Headquarters for extra bodies. Before we realized what they were doing, you had sailed. It’s been the autumn’s biggest laugh.’

  The autumn’s biggest laugh! It might have been that for the Middle East, but for Professor N. E. Reid it was the biggest blow delivered him since the war began. Two months back, when he had received his posting orders, he had felt that every personal problem in his life had been if not solved at least shelved for the duration. Now once again the gate swung open.

  The tall girl stood up. ‘Is anybody looking after you?’

  ‘An orderly is doing something.’

  ‘That probably means Colonel Weston. You’re in good hands. I’ll be seeing you all later. Good luck.’


  She came down the stairs with something that though not a stride was definitely more than a walk. Reid pictured her on skis. Every head turned as she went by. A subaltern at Reid’s side drew a long slow breath. ‘If that’s a fair sample of Beirut, we’re not on a bad wicket.’

  Simultaneously, there appeared at the head of the stairs a slim, short, very dapper man, adorned upon his shoulders by a crown and star; above his left-hand breast pocket was an array of ribbons. He appeared to be in the early fifties. He paused, as the young woman had, looking down on the miscellaneous collection of military personnel that the practical joke department of the War Office had landed on his doorstep. Then he smiled; there was a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Welcome, gentlemen; though I’m afraid that you’ll hardly regard as welcome the news I have for you. If you’ll follow me into my office, I’ll try to put you in the picture.’

  He led them into a room with a view over the harbour. Three years ago the flat, of which this was the main sitting-room, had no doubt commanded a high rent. It looked very bleak now, with its uncarpeted floor, its windows uncurtained but with black-out blinds, its bare furniture, and walls decorated with security posters against careless talk. An oil stove was smoking in the fireplace; over the fireplace hung a framed admonition: ‘Think, plan and act in terms of March 1942.’

  The Colonel seated himself on his desk. He had a breezy manner.

  ‘Now, tell me: how much do you know about all this?’

  Once again Reid was the spokesman. ‘Only what we were told five minutes ago by that charming young lady on the stairs.’

  ‘And that’s about all there is to know. It’s what we used to call, when I was a subaltern, a G.M.F.U. grand military fuck-up. Not the first and not the last. We must make the best of it, and that should not be hard. Don’t feel that you are not wanted here: you are. You are all of you handpicked. Middle East is, at the present moment, the most important area in the war. It is the one place where we are hitting back at our enemies and, what is more, hitting back effectively. It may be several years before we can open a second front in Europe; but on this front we shall be fighting continuously until the whole sector has been cleared. No one can tell how the situation will develop. One thing is certain, it will develop; that means opportunities for you all. It is a question of waiting, patiently; it won’t be for long; and during that period of waiting you can be very sure that we shall find means of keeping you occupied and useful.’

  He smiled, and the group smiled with him, but Reid’s smile was wry. He had heard this kind of speech before; many times before, during the last twenty-seven months.

  In 1916, as a schoolboy of eighteen, he had gone to Sandhurst. He had no intention of making the army his profession. But taking a short wartime view, it had seemed the simplest and most effective way of getting a commission. He had been gazetted as a regular army subaltern. As a result, in 1919, in order to take up at Oxford the scholarship that he had won before he joined the army, he had transferred to the regular reserve—the R.A.R.O. Every subsequent first of January he had duly and dutifully reported in writing to the War Office and in September 1939 he had been recalled, as a Lieutenant, to his regiment, along with a dozen other forty-year-old reservists, to the concerned embarrassment of the Colonel, whose speech of welcome at the depot had been very like the one that he was receiving now from Colonel Weston.

  ‘I am delighted to have you here,’ he had said. ‘I am sure that in a very little while we shall find the particular way in which to make the best use of you. You are none of you young enough for a Lieutenant’s job. It’s a question of athletics. You can’t play rugby football after thirty. At the same time you haven’t enough military knowledge for the job to which your age entitles you, a half colonel or at least a major. But it’s only a question of time. I’m sure of that.’

  A little later, he had called Reid aside for a private interview. ‘I recognize, of course,’ he had said, ‘that you are in a very different position from these others here. You are someone in your own rights and very much so. You are a person of achievement and distinction. We don’t want to waste you as a garrison adjutant in a remote back area. There must be exactly the right place for you somewhere, but it takes a little time to find it. You are, perhaps, a rather hard man to place.’

  A hard man to place. How often had not that been said to him during the last two years; at the end of each of the various courses—at Matlock, Swanage, Hendon—to which he had been sent by colonels despairingly confident that there must be the right niche for him somewhere.

  A hard man to place. Who could recognize it better than himself? And hadn’t he, each time he had been forced to take stock of himself, been exposed to the same sense of guilt, the inner voice that whispered, ‘You’ve no right to be here. You’re doing no good. The army hasn’t any use for you. You are an encumbrance. You ought to be in Winchborough, teaching.’

  How eagerly after a year as staff-captain in the military section of the Ministry of Mines, to which he had been posted as the result of a chance meeting in a cricket match, an appointment for which by taste and training, he could scarcely have been more unfitted—where he had fulfilled subordinate clerical duties for which in peacetime an untrained eighteen-year-old girl would have been hired at fifty shillings a week, how eagerly he had welcomed this appointment to the Spears Mission for which he had been selected on the grounds of his French and his historical familiarity with the area. At last, at last; here was work which would justify his remaining in the army. He could shelve his problems for a little longer. He had sailed with a clear conscience and a high heart; now once again he was back where he had started.

  ‘Don’t feel despondent,’ Colonel Weston was concluding. ‘It’s now just after three, and the Chargé d’ Affaires wants to see you at five o’clock. The General, by the way, has gone back to London. There are two things that I must explain: firstly this is a Legation; that is to say though you are soldiers under military discipline we are under civilian control. General Spears is now a Minister and except on special occasions, will wear civilian clothes. Secondly, because this is a Legation and also because we are here mainly for liaison purposes, we do not live in messes but in hotels and flats. We find it easier to meet the Lebanese that way and it’s easier with the French. Their popote is very different from our mess. They prefer their club, where they can entertain women. You, of course, are all honorary members of it, so I’ve arranged for you to stay in hotels and pensions for the first few days. That won’t be inexpensive and in a week or so when you’ve found your feet you’ll be able to make more suitable arrangements for yourselves. I’ve put the elder ones into the St. Georges, the younger ones into a convenient pension.’

  He picked up a list from his desk and read out his dispositions.

  ‘I suggest, therefore, that you go to your billets and get settled in. Back here, don’t forget, by five o’clock. The Chargé d’ Affaires is Cartwright, Frank Cartwright, seconded from the Sudan Service. Oh, yes, I forgot. There’s some mail for some of you; it came by air and beat you to it.’

  The letters were spread out on a table. One of the envelopes was addressed to Reid, in a familiar back-sloping script. At the sight of it, he half-closed his eyes. Rachel. It had all begun again, the resumption of a domestic problem across two thousand miles.

  * * *

  The St. Georges was on the waterfront, modern, five-tiered, set like a citadel, each bastion turned to catch the sun. The rain had ceased, but the sky was overcast and the sea beat choppily against the shingle.

  Johnson, a Sandhurst contemporary of Reid’s, though they had been in different companies, fell into step beside him.

  ‘Bad show,’ he said.

  Johnson was large, corpulent, balding, red-faced, with heavy features. He and Reid had spent a good deal of time together on the ship. He was the kind of Englishman who will maintain a strict barrier of reserve for days, and then suddenly late at night, after a fifth whisky, tell you the
whole story of his life. Reid could guess at what was passing in his mind.

  Johnson, like himself, had set high store by this appointment, though for different reasons. Johnson had had a difficult time during the 1930s. He had transferred to the Reserve in 1931 because he had seen no future in the army. Promotion was slow, pacifism was in the ascendant. Men who had commanded brigades during the war were still commanding companies. But 1931 had not offered favourable auguries to a man of thirty-four with no civilian experience. The motor firm in which he had invested half his retirement gratuity went into liquidation. His second venture in real estate, undertaken during the boom in luxury flats, fared better, but the boom did not last. Too many blocks of flats were built. Johnson had welcomed his recall to khaki.

  But the last two years had been no more satisfactory than the preceding eight. He was out of touch with the training and tactics of the modern mechanized army. He was not sent to join his regiment in France. He was found, instead, a number of administrative posts. But he had never been to the staff college; he was unfamiliar with staff duties. Younger men slid ahead of him. He had begun to anticipate a dreary, routine war that would leave him at its close several years older, less receptive, less elastic, with no compensating record of achievement. He had seen his transfer to the Middle East as the door of opportunity.

  ‘Anything may happen there,’ he had said to Reid in one of his hours of expansion. ‘Britain is going to consolidate the Middle East. The French have had their day. The Arabs will turn to us. Through the Mission we shall meet important people; that’s how you get on, through meeting the right people.’

  He was in a roseate mood, half-way through his fourth whisky. Fantastic dreams out of the Arabian Nights circled in his imagination. Anything might happen, anything. And now the cloud-based castle had dissolved.

  They walked down the hill in silence. As they turned into the carriage drive Johnson sighed. ‘There are times when I envy the man who has a safe job waiting him after the war.’