Kelly - The Lost Oasis

I N 1992 M ICHAEL Ondaatje won the Booker Prize for his novel, The English Patient, which was subsequently made into an Oscar-winning film. It told the story of a fatal love affair in the Egyptian desert on the eve of the Second World War between an archaeologist, a Hungarian Count named Ladislaus de Almasy (played by Ralph Fiennes in the film) and a married Englishwoman, Katherine Clifton (played by Kristin Scott Thomas). They had met, and fallen in love, while on an expedition to find the lost oasis of Zerzura in the Libyan Desert. When her husband, Sir Geoffrey Clifton (played by Colin Firth) finds out, in a fit of jealous rage, he crashes his plane, killing himself and crippling his wife. Almasy rescues her and places her in a cave in the Zerzura oasis (the walls of the cave are decorated with primitive paintings of swimmers and animals) while he goes off across the desert to Kufra in Italian Libya to find help.

But he does not return for another three years. War intervenes and Almasy is unable to get back to Egypt until just before the battle of El Alamein when, serving in the German Afrika Korps, he guides Rommels spies across the desert to Cairo. They are to report back by wireless, using a copy of Daphne du Mauriers Rebecca as a codebook, on British troop movements. Whereas Rommels spies are soon captured by the Cairo police, Almasy escapes into the desert. He makes his way back to the cave at Zerzura, where he discovers the dead body of his lover, Katherine, perfectly preserved by the dry desert conditions. He places her body in an old plane, which he had dug out of the sand near the cave. But his plan to fly her back to Italian Tripoli fails when the decrepit plane crashes and he is seriously burned.

The rest of the story is concerned with his slow, painful death, first in a hospital in Cairo, then in an abandoned monastery in Italy. A sympathetic nurse administers morphine to him, while a vengeful former British intelligence agent, Caravaggio (who is a fellow junkie following the injuries he received at the hands of the Gestapo) tries to find out whether the English Patient is indeed Almasy. Caravaggio regards the Hungarian Count as being ultimately responsible, through his involvement with Rommels spies, for his ill-treatment by the Gestapo. The film ends with the death of the English Patient who, in his final moments, is thinking of his twin loves: Katherine and Herodotus (with his secrets of desert travel).

It is a dramatic story, with all the essential elements of love, war and a harsh landscape. It has gripped the imagination of writers and filmmakers since the Second World War. Before Ondaatjes novel and film, it had inspired two best-selling novels: Ken Folletts The Key to Rebecca (1980) and Len Deightons City of Gold (1992). Folletts book was made into a film in 1989, as was an earlier biographical account of Rommels spies by Leonard Mosley, The Cat and the Mice (1958; filmed as Foxhole in Cairo in 1960). Although largely fictional, the novels and films on the subject of Rommels spies in wartime Cairo were based on the earlier accounts written by the main protagonists: Sadat, the Egyptian Nationalist and later President of Egypt (Revolt on the Nile, 1957); Eppler, the German spy (as told to Leonard Mosley, and his own account, Rommel Ruft Cairo, 1960, later translated as Operation Condor, 1977), and the British military policeman, Major Sansom (I Spied Spies