The Pillars of Hercules

We were alone on the deck. The Turkish passengers tended to be heliophobic. They sat under the awnings, in the smoky lounges, along the sheltered passageways. There were always six or eight of them in a lounge watching videos, one of their favorites a cowboy film starring Charlton Heston. They gathered for the meaty meals, which were usually mutton stews and thick bean soups and mounds of rice and followed by fruit in iced syrup. Breakfast was just olives and yogurt and cucumber slices. Even in this sunny weather they remained heavily dressed, the men in ties, the women in drab frocks and shawls.

“Put on your pantaloons,” a waiter in an ugly black uniform said to me when I entered the dining room one hot day in shorts.

On the third night out there was a cocktail party, with nonalcoholic punch, and the officers were introduced, just as on the Seabourne, but these were solemn, rather robotic-looking men in white uniforms, like ice-cream sellers being awarded prizes for good sales. It was also a Turkish Holiday—Republic Day—so we got a special meal of shish kebab, stuffed eggplant and a special dessert, and as usual the fat man at my table ate his wife’s main course and dessert. For most meals this woman sat toying with her food, and when her husband finished his meal he swapped plates and got hers.

No one read anything on the ship—not a book or a newspaper, nothing. Only Mr. Fehmi and I touched alcohol. The rest bought cups of coffee, they talked. They were the most sedate, as well as the politest people I had ever traveled with.

How polite would they be in an emergency? I pondered the question because we were so ill-prepared. A fire was always a possibility—everyone smoked. The ship was old, and poorly cared for. But there was no lifeboat drill at all; no suggestion of where the mustering stations were located; no mention of where the life jackets were stowed. I found mine in a tangle at the bottom of my closet. It probably did not matter. In the event of a sinking I felt sure that “My name Ali” would lead the stewards to their lifeboat and while he was stamping on the rest of the passengers’ fingers and pushing them away he would signal to me and let me aboard. Watch Ali, I thought: he knows the drill. He was usually to be found hiding on the lower stern deck, scowling with hatred at the sea.

The night before we landed at Alexandria I was invited to another dinner table. Three men beckoned, then stood and welcomed me.

“I am Samih—people call me Samih Pasha,” an older man said to me, and shook my hand. “I think I recognize that tie.”

“Household Cavalry,” I said.

“I am Fikret,” the second man said. He looked haunted and shy. He was attempting to smile. He was a radiologist and his evasiveness suggested he was having a bad time on board.

“I am Onan,” the third man said. He was young, soldierly, with an odd blaze in his eyes.

“There is another Onan in the Bible,” I said.

He ignored this. “I am making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”

The soldier, the medical man, the religious nut; and me. We became friends. After that, I ate almost every meal with them. At that first meal, Samih Pasha said, “I have been everywhere. Even Santa Barbara and Nevada and Singapore. Singapore is the cleanest city in the world, but it is not interesting. I am a military man. I should have liked that. But, ha! I wanted to leave Singapore after one day!”

“Tomorrow we will be in Egypt,” Onan said.

Almost all my life, I had dreamed of Alexandria. Most of life’s disappointments begin in dreams; even so, in the morning when the Akdeniz lay at anchor there, and I stepped ashore for the first time, I was horrified by the city—but wait.

Alexandria seemed filthy and flyblown until I had seen Cairo, which was in many respects nightmarish; yet after a while the Cairene nightmare wore off, the frenzy in the foreground (Meester!) diminished, and my returning to Alexandria was like being received into bliss. Thus, some dreams can be reclaimed, and most culture shock is probably curable.

“But sometimes,” a Turkish crewman said to me, “you have to do this,” and he held his nose.

Drawing towards it on the Akdeniz, Alexandria seemed to me the ultimate sea-level city, at the very lip of the Nile Delta, the flattest city imaginable, in a flat landscape, flatter than Holland, with no high ground behind it for two thousand miles to the Mountains of the Moon. Alexandria’s flatness and its elongated shape had compressed it, forced it to become mazelike, a city of secrets, and its harbor and position on the Mediterranean had made it one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Mediterranean.