The Mysteries of Algiers (27 page)

Raoul gets a cigarette out and alight in his lips. Nounourse is as amazed as I was by the effect of the smoke issuing out of Raoul’s face. Then we hoist Chantal up. She will have to be helped to walk. Raoul and I each take an arm and, as we come out into the corridor, Nounourse brings up the rear, covering us with his gun. The Corsicans lay down their rifles and watch us walk by. One of them looks as though he is about to be sick. Down below I can hear someone playing ‘The Cake Walk’ on the piano. Normally, Maurice would not tolerate that ‘black boogy-woogy, jigger-jigger music’ in his house, but obviously he has other things on his mind now. I think that we shall go to the Congo. This moment has the quality of a dark dream, but I recognize our behaviour, the behaviour of all of us in this house, as a manifestation, one manifestation among many, of the bizarre and decadent features of the capitalist world in its dying throes. Surely Marx was right when he wrote that capitalism ‘can just as easily turn the real, natural and essential powers of man into abstract ideas, as it can turn real imperfections and phantoms of the mind into essential powers and capacities’? As we descend the staircase the music stops.

Robert Irwin was born in 1946. He read Modern History at Oxford and taught Medieval History at the University of St Andrews. He also lectured on Arabic and Middle Eastern History at the universities of London, Cambridge and Oxford. He is the commissioning editor for the TLS for The Middle East and writes for a number of newspapers and journals in the UK and the USA.

He is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

He has published six novels:
The Arabian Nightmare
(1983),
The Limits of Vision
(1986),
The Mysteries of Algiers
(1988),
Exquisite Corpse
(1995),
Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh
(1997) and
Satan Wants Me
(1999).

He is the author of ten works of non-fiction:
The Middle East in the Middle Ages
(1984),
The Arabian Nights: A Companion
(1994),
Islamic Art
(1997),
Night and Horses and the Desert: The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature
(1999),
Alhambra
(2004),
For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies
(2006),
Camel
(2010),
Mamluks and Crusaders
(2010),
Visions of the Jinn; Illustrators of the Arabian Nights
(2010), and
Memoirs of a Dervish
(2011).

He is also the editor of
The New Cambridge History of Islam Vol. 4: Islamic Cultures and Societies to the End of the Eighteenth Century
(2010)

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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Publishing History

First published by Viking in 1988

first published by Penguin in 1988

First published by Dedalus in 1993

First ebook edition in 2012

Copyright © Robert Irwin1988

The right of Robert Irwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

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