It must be years since I last tried to write at such an hour. From the open window, behind me, comes a cataract of sounds that I've never, since we came to this hotel, been able to get used to. The Arabs, the trams, the traffic, everything leaks noise. We both sleep badly. I think with bitter nostalgia of our house in Zamalek, which we lost in our mad exodus to Palestine. Panel-beaters, klaxons, engines, newspaper-sellers - it's like the end of the world out there. I'm reminded again of the image of the ant struggling uphill with an enormous weight. It runs away from him, and he starts over, again and again. The same image as I had a year ago.

What business has a 'sensitive' (in the technical sense) person in the midst of all this?

Work has been heavy, since we came, with many difficulties, and non-existent resources. Much of the time is wasted. You lie down at night and look back at your day, drained dry like a glass of water. You don't know what's happened, what use any of it has been.

Even in this diary I haven't been able to write more often.

Last Saturday, the 22nd, telephone call from the British Embassy:

'This afternoon at 6. To meet a distinguished person.' (1)

Doors and portals with sentries and servitors, until you reach the inner garden. An English lawn bright green and at the end of it a triangular sail, poking up from the invisible river beyond. Various people from the newspaper world were gathered. Suddenly all conversation ceased. The signal had been given to go in. In the ballroom, a great chamber apparently in the process of being painted, in front of an exceedingly small table, hunched up like Rodin's Thinker, except for his head that was watching and following everything, sat Churchill. He wore mauve dungarees; held in his hand, like a stubby pencil, was a long cigar. With all this crowd around him, he looked somehow smaller, as though at the far end of an enormous lecture-theater. Then he spoke and came closer. At the end, when it was time for questions, some reporter wearing a fez asked him what he thought of Rommel.

Yesterday we returned from Alexandria, where we'd been since last Saturday.

I'd gone with Kanellopoulos to visit the Greek Brigade, now encamped in its new positions. The morale of the boys is impressive, the ease with which those mountaineers and islanders adapt themselves to every new circumstance, whether of climate or the machinery of war. You see them working in the desert sand, in the terrible heat, laying mines, testing their wireless, as easily as they would in their own villages.

Timos (2) was vehement, stubborn, well-meaning, as always. He insists on making out that Cavafy's 'Theodotos' is an obscure poem. I try to explain to him how I understand it; he won't be persuaded -

The final proposition has nothing to do with the beginning of the poem, insists Timos. Impossible to convince him that the poet is telling us transparently that evil affects not only important people, but insignificant householders too, indeed anyone. At that moment the waiter put down a tray on the table with four beef steaks.

'Are they good?' I ask him.

'Dripping blood, sir, a perfect treat. Such a treat, so bloody!'

'And that,' I tell Timos, 'is precisely what Cavafy meant.'

But he thinks I'm laughing at him.

Timos, who has a mania for tracking down Cavafy's sources, in the manner of someone doing battle with time or with some unseen enemy as he walks down the street, tells me that Cavafy once said what a good idea it would be to put together an anthology of forgotten verses, and gave as an example these ones:

Lines written by my father.(4) He adds that Mrs. Zelita had heard Cavafy say: 'They're lines by some poet from Smyrna - the best forgotten verses I know.'

Opening my eyes in bed - there's no let-up in the torment from the trivial humiliations of my daily life. Frayed nerves -perhaps. But this ability of our surroundings to plunge us up to the neck in mud, to wear us out with meaningless trivia. Maybe it was always like this, but in today's world it's a scandal. The life we're living gives me the impression sometimes of a lit candle, left behind in an empty room. Melting down to no purpose.

Since April of last year, when we left Greece, this is my first autumn.(5) All the months that have gone by: a heavy summer, a strange one, outside the rhythm of the seasons.

To Mr. and Mrs. Lachovaris' place. They always have company with them. A spindly Englishwoman, saying nothing, knitting. She's going to teach Maro the language. An Englishman with fair hair and the look of an intellectual - he looks younger than he is in reality - is fairly quiet too, then bursts into speech. We discuss the life of the Arabs, old houses in Cairo, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights.

He says the Egyptians don't like it if you talk to them about this book. They think it 'indecent': they're almost ashamed of it. But when it comes down to it, they're ashamed of everything.

Outside, it sounds like the end of the world, with shouting and soldiers singing. By now the nights are very cool, almost cold. Exhaustion every evening. Not real tiredness, more from nerves. Impression of swimming through mud. Perhaps, of course, all this may pass. Above all, there's a lack of people. And among the few who remain, most are mad.

We had lunch with Lachovaris couple. They have a house.

It's like all houses that have had a natural existence and seem such extraordinary things to those of us who live constantly on the move: things that have belonged to people who have lived and passed on, old photographs, books that have remained for years in the same place. The wife has infinite sensitivity; she comes from the Greek islands. The husband - it seems scandalous that anyone can be so honest in these times of ours - has an inexhaustible love, which he insists on dressing up in the garb of scientific logic. His reason tells him there's no future for the absurd. Does he or doesn't he know what he is himself?

We stayed with them until late. After tea they asked us if we'd like to listen to music. I looked at the catalogue of their record collection, a meticulously kept little notebook. The choice was good. I listened to the introduction to Bach's Second Suite, which for so many years has always kept the same freshness for me; the second movement of the Seventh(6); Capriccio by Stravinsky. Listening to music nowadays makes me miserable; instead of relaxing me, it affects me badly.

'Paris has become a German brothel under pain of death,' I read in today's Greek newspaper.

This time last year we hadn't yet moved into our house in Pretoria. It would take another month of smudging papers with ink until I could regain the habit of writing. That lasted until January. Then we were on the move again. The little writing-desk, which made it this far, is shut up now in a room in Sharia-Emad-el-Din (7), like a broken piano. Dear God, look kindly on our weaknesses. Here in the Middle East, as it's called, we're sinking all the time. We're not people any more, we're exiles. But we don't all share the same exile; there are as many conditions of exile as there are of us. We're the crew of a ship that's gone down, each one fighting for his life, each one separately, astride his own piece of flotsam.

…

Last Saturday night I stayed late at the office, working. A night of tragedy. Not the air raid, though it was spectacular enough; not the shop on the corner that went up in flames; but this:

In the early hours of the morning I heard a loud bang from the street. I went out onto the balcony and saw that two cars had collided at the cross-roads in front of the building. Both had stopped, no sign of life. A few moments later, just like a match flaring, one of the cars caught fire. An Arab jumped out, flames streaming from his gellabia. He leapt in the air, stopped, rolled over and over on the pavement, then took to his heels once more. Other Arabs were hitting at the car with sticks. By this time it had become an inferno. Perhaps they were trying to help the people trapped inside. It must have been a good ten minutes before the fire brigade arrived. I still had before my eyes the image of a charred mouse I'd once seen, when I read in the morning newspapers that the driver and his passengers had been burnt to ashes.

Heat and dreadful humidity. Ten o'clock at night, after dinner. Nerves snapping from the racket outside. Trams, bells, squeals of brakes, cornets, gramophones, Arab voices, horses' hooves, clanging metal - you'd think it had all been planned, just to spite you, specially.

Yesterday, at Buckley's,(8) for cocktails. Three small rooms filled with human bodies, all of them bathed with sweat. You feel like a piece of cabbage boiling in the pan. I've rarely been in such poor spirits.

Today is Bairam.(9) We went to sign official books at various palaces. Fezes and redingotes, caftans. Atmosphere of a great oriental festival, managed somehow, neutrally, in the midst of our war-fever.

…

This afternoon I stayed in the hotel, doing nothing at all but muttering and drawing pencil lines on paper. This made me feel better. I needed it.

All day in bed. Since the day before yesterday I've had a fever. It's the first time, since our return to Cairo, that I've spent so many hours away from the office.

Today's bulletin: 'Attack by the Eighth Army last night with air support. Fierce fighting continues.'(10)

This is the battle that we've been waiting for, for so long. We need significant successes here in Africa, before operations in Russia become frozen by winter. What successes?

Afternoon at 17:00, to Public Relations, Col. Philpots. In his office a file is waiting. He reads from it: 'Greeks fighting well. Fifty prisoners taken.' The news will be released in 2-3 days. He can't be persuaded to release it sooner.

…

At home. This biological feeling of disgust that rises sometimes and suffocates me. In the restaurant downstairs, I was observing the dreadful ugliness that surrounds us. Images passed chaotically before my eyes: great halls of theaters, full of people, in darkness before a brilliantly lit stage, where some performance was going on, music was playing. Books; pages of books held insistently open at such-and-such a place - I was that man, who was so moved by these things that he was discussing among his friends. What are we coming to, in this whirlwind? What have we become? I feel like shouting. And now as I write, I hear only one answer, the lamentation of Aeschylus' chorus:

Their criticism - of others - is made not in order to arrive at any object, but so that when the time comes they can say they have made it. For them what matters is not how they ought to act at this moment, but to be able to say, when they go back to Greece, 'We told you so.' And they talk, and talk, and never stop. But when you ask them, 'Today, here in exile, while the war is going on, what do you want to happen?' they answer with grimaces that mean nothing. They are like people who want to salvage some capital, great or small, for after the war, but fail to understand that everything we own and everything that exists, even we ourselves, through the merest accident, either now or in a little while, may be lost forever.

Evening before last, on my way in to Shepheard's, I met Leland Stowe.(11) He'd just arrived from the Russian front, and is on his way to America. His hair seemed whiter than before, himself a bit shorter. We ate together, with other American war correspondents. He's exceptionally lively, enthusiastic at finding himself among old friends. He says the Russian soldier is fighting for his country first and foremost, and doesn't care much about communism. A pity the company left me no opportunity to continue this discussion further.

Shepheard's, that caravanserai for all who pass through, has an unlimited monotony about it. Even the monotony of the new face. Every so often you meet someone you last saw in normal or extraordinary circumstances: he's surprised and you're surprised. You ask him, 'What happened to you?' and he tells you what he's been doing since then. Then it occurs to you that even these feelings are like a worn suit.