Monument Maker, page 17
21/7/1884
Much has taken place during my silence. The waters of the Nile have risen. We have grain for a few months at most. Gordon of Khartoum has given the order that we must prepare our paltry fleet for a raiding party. A cavalry, Gordon of Khartoum calls it. His own yacht, the Tewfikieh on which he arrived, stands at port like the boat of my dreams. Gordon of Khartoum is the Holy Ghost. I am the son. For days we affixed sheets of metal that burned in our hands to the sides of skeletal steamers. Some of the parts we were able to salvage from the dead woman’s vessel, metals that Gordon of Khartoum claims are unknown in all of Egypt. For the metals of Egypt, he tells us, are multifarious, and more are known there than in any part of this world. The metal that we took from the dead woman’s vessel was unlike the crude boilerplates that we tore from the abandoned buildings. It was cold to the touch, so cold that our fingers would often attach themselves to it, so that many of us shed our fingerprints in the construction.
The roar of the engines sounds like a pack of asphyxiating jackals. Gordon of Khartoum watches us with the pride of a small boy. We punch holes in the steel for rifles. We build great wooden turrets to house the guns. Muhammad Ali Pasha has been chosen to lead the raid. He is to take four boats and six hundred men against the fort of Gereif on the Blue Nile. Word has reached us that a band of outlaws advances on the fort on horseback. The fleet is to bolster the vehemence of their attack. The Yezidis work amongst us in their own silence. They have been much perturbed by the arrival of the dead woman from another land. History is running backwards, one of them said to me. To take the reins of fate at this stage will require a Herculean effort. I asked them what they knew of Hercules. He stands at the gate of the Mediterranean, they said, and he seals passage in and out. Yet he allows nothing in. They speak in riddles, these Yezidis.
6/8/1884
A remarkable discovery has been made. While salvaging parts from the dead woman’s craft a small white cube was discovered near the engines at the back. There were many outlandish theories as to its function. It appears constructed of another metal altogether, a metal unknown to the charts of Egypt, almost weightless and of a dazzling lustre. It appears to be hollow inside, yet it feels like the insides are supporting the outsides by an invisible force, preserving its integrity by some kind of lack. Orphali insists it is the misplaced womb itself. And that its occupant may already be amongst us. The story of Moses is in the blood of Egypt, Gordon of Khartoum replied when Orphali presented his daring interpretation. Besides, God help anything, even an emissary of Satan, washed up on this embattled isle. The Yezidis are particularly enthusiastic about the discovery. I fear there is something in their thought that they dare not reveal. Ecco Omar requested an audience with Gordon of Khartoum that both Fonte and I attended. Here we met Muhammad Ali Pasha for the first time. The Mahdi himself, Ali cautioned us, was once a boatbuilder. This came after the suggestion by Omar that the cube was in fact a form of engine. The cube, in our understanding, Omar said, represents eternal truth. And eternal truth is the motor of history. Do not the Muslims worship the double cube? Gordon of Khartoum responded. Sir, Omar said, they do not hold any monopoly over the building blocks of this world. Your own palace, he said, is it not a white cube? Are we not, sir, within its bonds right now? Besides, these Islamics will be caught up short in the unfolding of the cube, which itself is the revelation of history, and which reveals itself as a cross! What do these Yezidis care for crosses? I thought to myself. Their god is the flaming tail of a peacock!
You ask of me to picture the future inside an empty box? Gordon of Khartoum responded. All of our futures will end in empty boxes, Fonte interjected. That is macabre, sir, Gordon of Khartoum rounded on him. Eternal life will see us break the bonds of the box! More theology, I cautioned Gordon of Khartoum. But now we need a plan. If the cube is, as you insist, a kind of magical engine, one that would drive history itself, then we should use it as such, Orphali suggested. We should affix it to the stern of our finest warship and use its power to vanquish the dervish army once and for all. This is when Muhammad Ali spoke up. With the Mahdi being a boatbuilder, he said, who is to say that he did not fashion the craft using metals unheard of in Egypt, did not in fact construct this cube as a form of Trojan Horse in order to ensnare us? Who is to say that it does not contain some kind of curse?
Jesus was a cross-maker, Fonte said, do you think he would defile crosses for the downfall of others? Go, leave my presence, Gordon of Khartoum commanded. I have heard too much. The answer will come in prayers or as a small dove, bearing down. We left the palace and drank with the Yezidis and a one-legged woman whom Omar claimed he had married and who was deaf and mute and whom the sun had shrivelled to the size of a small doll.
7/8/1884
Ecco Omar’s wife is of the sect of Sun Watchers. In these last days in Khartoum much apostasy has sprung up. The Sun Watchers believe that women experience the caress of the sun much more vividly and sensuously than men. Therefore, the solar current is more easily transfused throughout the woman’s body. Deaf women, blind women, mute women, paralytics, the socially ostracised, the incomplete, these women are favoured amongst the Sun Watchers as being more adapted to bathing in the sun’s rays through forfeiting the traditional roles of women. Many of them have gathered on Tuti Island and can be seen via telescope from the roof of the palace. They lie naked in the grasslands, their blackened bodies in full view of the dervishes of Sheik el Obeid as they redirect the powers of the sun and carry it back to Khartoum. Omar wishes to taste the sun and so he took his wife that he might drink of her nightly. Her secretions he describes as a form of nectar. It is said that should a man become as a woman, through the skill of a doctor or magician, he too would feel the caress of the sun and the depth of its love.
I recall my own days on Tuti Island when I lived there as an itinerant, sleeping in the citrus groves beneath the stars, walking the stubbled donkey tracks. I recall the sense of imminence and expectancy that characterises a healthy boyhood. That it should come to this. That the fields of my youth should be peopled by the crippled, the naked and the lame, that their bodies should lie contorted in my past, bombarded, as if dropped from the heavens. What language does it speak, this alignment of limbs, what signature does the sun write in their bodies? The women are perhaps closer to the past and the future. We men are citadels or palaces or puzzled pointless cubes; monuments, as Gordon of Khartoum said, to futility.
Now Gordon of Khartoum says we shall endure. Now he says the cube shall be the foundation of our victory and the motor of our greatest warship. He says this was revealed to him in prayer. Fonte believes that there is a second cube that was discovered by Gordon of Khartoum and his men in the catacombs. What to make of this doubling of the present? This is the building of a temple, Fonte said, and I saw it as a prison house, a hospital. Then I asked myself what was the difference. Degrees of faith, perhaps, I replied.
11/8/1884
I was granted a personal audience with Gordon of Khartoum. I feel we have grown close. My presence in his life is as a phantom limb, a missing hand. In conversations he feels my presence as his lack. I stand by him and observe the goings-on in what we all now know to be the final days of Khartoum. But Khartoum falls to Khartoum, so really there is only beginning.
We met in the book tower. We sipped our drinks in silence. He has written for reinforcements, Gordon of Khartoum tells me, again and again. They may be on their way. They may not.
Why? I dared ask him. Why this stand? For Khartoum, he said, and I understood that the city had become the sum of possibilities and that I was witness to a bacchanal where Gordon of Khartoum would celebrate the uniting of his many selves in a single gesture of defiance. I saw Tuti Island as the marital bed, the sun-baked deformities writhing beneath the sheets, appalling. I thought of the outlandish female, the bride who died on her wedding night. I thought of the coming together of my own parents, all the impossible unions in time.
Are there books on weddings in the library? I asked him. Gordon of Khartoum looked at me with the two sides of his face at once. There is the usual trash on couplings, he said. Cheap fare. And then there are conjunctions. He took a book down from the shelves, one bound in black vellum, and opened it at a certain page. Do you have any understanding of angularity? he asked me. I confessed that my geometry was poor. Stars and planets that form a conjunction are powers that are blended, he read. They are united; therefore they act in consort. The closer their operation—in time but not in space—the more the effect will be felt as a personal, subjective working. There is a concomitant blurring of the players, they recognise themselves as one, indivisible. This is known as the Blind Spot. It is a form of monomania made up of star stuff. It results in the confusing of the individual with the spiritual quest. Its angle is zero degrees.
How does this hold with your faith? I asked him, and I hoped it wasn’t an impertinent question. We are all one in Christ, Gordon of Khartoum said. I venture you could take that further, I suggested to him. I saw the two sides of his face flicker. Khartoum, he replied, and no further.
12/8/1884
The fleet has set off from the shores of Khartoum along the course of the Blue Nile. The whole of Khartoum has exhaled. There is a new contagion in the waters. They are great constructs of wood and metal, monstrous, broken colossi, and they gleam and turn invisible and return in the sun. The silence has been broken. The dawn was glorious. It will not bring an ending. No one in Khartoum believes that, including Gordon of Khartoum himself. Nevertheless, it remains necessary. We play our part, not like puppets, but soon Khartoum will be the vanished womb that will become our tomb, which is the song of the Lotus Eaters as they perform in the squares and outdoor meeting places of the city. As long as the blood flows, and is not spilled, we receive our directions. Even then, it is still possible. We watch the four boats through telescopes from the roof of the palace of Khartoum until they become black dots, insects, grave markers. Godspeed, Gordon of Khartoum muttered under his breath, and I shuddered. All the speed in the world merely hastens our end. It is felt by the city itself. It holds us closer and we move more slowly through it. It beckons us to tarry in its streets. You have come to love me, it says. But I must change beyond recognition. Remember me as I was, in your secret places.
On my own I wandered through the gentle desolate streets and it seemed to be raining flowers, the back alleys seemed piled high with them when previously they had been filled with the carcasses of animals. There were impossible pinks and whites, too delicate, even, to fall from heaven. Already, the new city is seeded. It is snowing, within itself, and the snows bring a thousand seeds to fruition. The seeds are dry, as the stone itself, as the rocks I kick before me in the empty streets. There is more beauty in this world than we could ever dream. That is why our dreams are taken over and used up inside of us. They are not commensurate with the world outside. The race begins, I said to myself, and I saw the flowers once more, this time gentle in the wind, their heads reaching up, to the sun. It is snowing inside us in order that we might once more travel to the sun. And what ships will take us there. Bodies of wood and metal, of flesh and stone. And tiny buds, like the tits on a small boy, in the summer of his youth, in the wintertime.
13/8/1884
These are remarkable days in Khartoum. The Yezidis left with the war fleet, starved for beheadings and disfigurement. Gordon has retired to his book tower though occasionally can be seen atop the palace with his telescope, scanning the horizon for the movement of the tribes, for the great plumes of smoke, for the sudden appearance of a warship and a flag. Fonte has travelled to the isle of Tuti himself, to better study the phenomenon of the Sun Watchers and their naked vigil on the beach in the full eyes of the Mahdi and his men. I find myself singing the song of the Lotus Eaters beneath my breath. What is a song for if not to taste of the letters and words, to feel them as real in our bodies, to hold them between our teeth and have them twitch like little helpless birds? But we fool ourselves. Truly it is we who are sung.
Yes, the city is breathing. Expiring? Perhaps. Its breathing isn’t laboured but it is deliberate, as when the wanted man lies in bed at night and in order to gain control over his thoughts he breathes deeply and he holds his breath and then he exhales. As such he clears his head and experiences a lightness that runs all the way to his toes. So everyone, in these remarkable days in Khartoum, seems to float a few inches from the ground. But signs are merely signs, markers along the way; they point neither one way nor the other. I watch two muscular young men bringing a coffin down a thin flight of stone stairs between two buildings. One of them spits in his hands before lifting the coffin then walks backwards with such speed and confidence that I almost bite my tongue. Two soldiers walk slowly along a dust track near the marshes. One of them whistles to himself. A woman shouts at a man with a walking stick, who sits down on a wall to rest. Some children reach for the contents of a nest on a small ledge above a cafe. A patron chases them off with a brush. A crowd in a tree-covered square gathers around an ignominious human torso as he performs somersaults for food and small change. I hear a wretched derelict say to his friend that technically a somersault requires that the feet pass over the head. A stump doesn’t count, he says, and the two walk away as if they had any coins to give in the first place. In a dead end near the home of Biraggo Fonte I watch as a young man fellates an older, fatter man who stands against a wall, his robes pulled up and held in place by his neck. I see the young man’s head repeatedly push at his belly as it moves back and forth. A pair of donkeys stand motionless in the sun. A mosquito nibbles at the lobe of my ear. My heart beats. My skin tingles. Faces pass through my mind. My saliva is thick and yellow and coagulates in the sand. A man stands in the street and smokes kif. Occasionally he licks his lips and scratches his face. Mostly he looks at the ground. My heart aches without regret. My pulse slackens, and my balls tighten. The air tastes of salt and of chalk and of rancid meat and of hellfire. At night I sit by the door of a cafe and watch the children play in the street. And I write in this diary, which I fully expect to be consumed alongside me. Khartoum is the name I have given myself.
18/8/1884
Fonte has returned from his mission to Tuti Island, where he studied the ways of the Sun Watchers. He made a series of sketches where they lie like ancient swastikas across the sand. The swastika is the sign of the sun. A black sun, Fonte says. There are many suns, I remind him, suns behind the sun. Our sun is horse-drawn, Fonte says. Not propelled across the skies like a thunderbolt. I believe they are becoming invisible, Fonte explained. I believe they are being taken up by the sun. Into its carriage? I asked him in disbelief. No, Fonte said. They remain here on earth, but they go amongst us unseen. It is no rapture. I drew them until they were only shapes in the sand. You saw them disappear? You had a hand in it? Enough of books and of modellings and of fixing in time! he burst. He sat down on a rock. With a pencil in my hand I am a Medusa, he said. It is the sand itself that you drew, I said to him. The residue of the stone. But you are no mason. Have you not heard word of the Freemasons? he asked me. I confessed that I had not. Their origin runs through Jerusalem and Egypt, flows through the very waters that we watch over. They build in time, across time, via a network of initiates who are architects of the mind. They can turn flesh to stone, mind stuff to wood and steel. But can they make themselves invisible? I asked him. The cube is their sign, Fonte said. It is the cornerstone of the temple. In ancient times a sacrifice would be made, a cock killed or a ram slaughtered, and the stone soaked in its blood. It has travelled with Muhammad Ali Pasha to make feast on flesh, that is certain, I said. There is also a tradition that it forms a kind of time capsule, Fonte continued. That the master masons would fill it with the stuff of their time. Yet the cube was empty, I said. Unless it commemorates the time of the invisibles? Fonte looked to me. When we first split the skin of the outlandish woman I believed that we had given demons passage to our own time. But I have come to believe that instead it initiated the draining of the forms from our time. The cube is our memorial, our memento mori? I asked him. But who will we haunt? I said. What demons will become of us? Who is the woman that through the power of the cube became a man? he asked me in return.
24/8/1884
Incredible news has reached us of the rout of the dervishes of Gereif. We watched from the roof of the palace of Khartoum as the fleet seemed to float through the clouds on its return. Our Lord is a mighty fortress, Gordon of Khartoum said, and he put his arm around my shoulders. His eyes have become impenetrable. They have looked to the future so much that they have been hardened to its advance.
Have you heard, sir, of the Freemasons? I asked him. He smiled secretively. Have you heard of the Knights of the Temple? he asked me. The Crusaders? I asked him. Our Holy Land is forever rearranged in their stead. Did they not possess the head of John the Baptist? I asked him. They were heretics, Gordon of Khartoum said, and they were tried for their transgressions. But what is heresy, sir? Fonte demanded of him. It is whatever goes against The Book, Gordon of Khartoum said. The Book itself came out of the Holy Land, did it not, Fonte said, and the Holy Land came to be through the fornication of heretics. In the beginning was the word, Gordon of Khartoum said. Please, gentlemen, we have been here before, I said, attempting to break up the inevitable debate. And how is the word issued? Fonte continued. Heresy, he insisted, was the mixing up of the head with the genitals. That is heresy, Gordon of Khartoum accused him. Exactly, Fonte said. I thought I saw a smile on Gordon of Khartoum’s lips as he turned away and lifted his telescope to his eye.
