Jerusalem Commands

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I MUST APOLOGISE to readers who did not expect to wait some eight years between the second and third volumes of Colonel Pyat’s memoirs and I hope they will forgive me when they understand the difficulties involved in preparing his papers for publication, in transcribing tape-recordings and fitting those into some sort of chronology. Meanwhile my own work had to be done, so it was not until February of 1986 that I found time to travel to Morocco and then to Egypt, taking part of Pyat’s own journey by sea and by land (being lucky enough to rediscover the now dry Zazara Oasis), ultimately to Marrakech. Here the Colonel’s account of the fabulous court of El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, differs somewhat from Gavin Young’s sketch in Lords of the Atlas.

Once again, in Marrakech and the settlements of the Sub-Sahara, I was fortunate, meeting many people willing to help in my research. Several of these remembered the Colonel as ‘Max Peters’. Many older people, I discovered, revered him. They said he was the greatest Hollywood star of all. They were disgusted, they said, by the jealous rumours suggesting he was Jewish. Yet in Egypt scarcely anyone knew of him. I was lucky enough to talk to a retired English policeman in Majorca. He had been in the Egyptian Service under Russell Pasha (whose memoirs also confirm much of Pyat’s account) during the time Colonel Pyat was in that country and remembered many of the facts almost identically, especially in relation to the drug- and slave-trades.

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