From The Glass Scimitar
by Herne Hunter (Tarkovsky, Flint & Smitt, Bury, 1937)
El Alouria Hotel, Tangier, 18 July
Dear Wethers,
Since a progress report is long overdue, I am making time to write while Mostyn has gone out to comb the Kasbah again. I have drawn the blinds, yet still the infernal sun seems to burn into my very soul. Mostyn is in a brown study. I do not like to send him out alone, but I simply could not bear to set foot in the hellish streets again. The light and heat are blinding, the din maddening, and as for the stench, it is surpassed only by the hideousness of the filthy hands of the children forever tugging at one's garments.
I am barricaded in. I sweat like a bull. I hear the vacuous braying of the passing "Diplomatic" party beyond my door ("Aaffricahn aambassadoorr. Black!" as the waiter uttered with hoarse contempt last night at dinner, doling the harare soup as if it were boiling oil and my unfortunate dish the detested denizens of the continent's interior. In his defence, the arrogance and boorish ignorance of these officials does little to commend them to the fastidious observer of the civilised codes. Their olive-skinned, doe-eyed female companions, all shining silks, glistening jewels and clattering bangles, are certainly not their daughters!). All the day long, as the yellow heat burns in through the slats of my drawn blinds, and the Devil's gallery passes below with clamorous cacophony, the waiters, in Fez, pantaloons and curled slippers, glide along the corridors.
The bar never closes. From luncheon to dawn it is populated by its regular crew: gin-sodden, soul-dead, Europeans gone native and to ruin, like Ted Manningtree, late of the FO; or the hashish-addled LaCoste, who was a fine writer on the NewYork Times; Father Craskin, a Donegal priest working in Liverpool, here, as every year, "to sample life's other vistas" (indeed! and that is why he spends his days by the silvery fountains and tumbling bougainvillea of the Hotel pool, with Bharat, the freeloading son of the proprietor; as for his nights, Mostyn and I could tell a tale or two - let us just say that his preference is for male company, non-Caucasian, and never above 30 years old); the shabby, shuffling Manounier, with his stories of the old Hotel and his appalling friend, the goitered Greek baker, Lazarides. Such derelicts and decadents throng the gorgeous Moorish chambers of this hotel, pestering the waiters, the bar-tenders, Mnsr Jouff the proprietor, Henri the muscle-bound masseur, and flattering the dreadful, long, dusky stick insect of a piano-player, Doubral. But I must stop here, Wethers, for Mostyn has returned. The game moves on, as you would say.
Bingo! Mostyn has heard it from our contact, while haggling for a leather camel and a brass platter, that The Black Venus is docked in the harbour since yesterday. "A body of Prussians, one of them lame and accompanied by an Ethiopian valet" has lodged at various secret havens in the town. You know what this means. Tonight we make for the Half Moon Club on Rue Les Oiseaux, in the guise of English buffoons patronising the belly-dancing. Himmelfarb cannot evade us for ever. Wherever Von Kletterer haunts, the mystical Levantine shall not lag far behind. And when I can sense the nearness of Himmelfarb, then I can almost envision the emerald glint of the Glass Scimitar. It is a pity about the leather camel and brass platter, but then Mostyn never could withstand a forceful salesman.
"Hell and night must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light", as the Bard's most inscrutable villain, Iago, has it. Wish us luck, dearest Wethers!
