Wadi Sura/Cave of Swimmers

Wadi Sura/Cave of Swimmers

Wadi Sura is mentioned early on in the book, although it is only later in the novel that we realize the significance of this place for Almasy. Wadi Sura (Wadi meaning dried up body of water) is a series of caves, near a dried up body of water, likely a lake. It is near the Gilf Kebir, and the explorers find it during their search for Zerzura. When Almasy first mentions it, he is emphasizing his knowledge of geography. He remembers “In Wadi Sura I saw caves whose walls were covered in paintings of swimmers. Here there had been a lake. I could draw its shape on the wall for them. I could lead them to its edge, six thousand years ago” (Ondaatje).
When Wadi Sura is mentioned again, it is referred to as “the cave of swimmers”. He recounts a return to Wadi Sura,
“His limbs exhausted from the four nights of walking. He left his clothes spread on the rocks and climbed up higher into the boulders, climbed out of the desert, which was now, in 1942, a vast battlefield, and went naked into the darkness of the cave. He was among the familiar paintings he had found years earlier. Giraffes. Cattle. The man with his arms raised, in a plumed headdress. Several figures in the unmistakable posture of swimmers. Bermann had been right about the presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left her. She was still there. She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised to return for her. He himself would have been happier to die in a cave, with its privacy, the swimmers caught in the rock around them. Bermann had told him that in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock. But she was a woman who had grown up within gardens, among moistness, with words like trellis and hedgehog. Her passion for the desert was temporary (Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient (Kindle Locations 2043-2047). McClelland & Stewart. Kindle Edition.)
He is remembering his return to the cave of swimmers, after leaving the injured Katherine behind. She has died from her injuries, and he has not been able to make it back before her death. He is too late. This place, a place that was a triumphant discovery years earlier, it now somber. He mentions Bermann in this passage. Real life Bermann in fact mentions these caves in his lecture “Historic Problems of the Libyan Desert”,
“We lived with the members of mission in the narrow circle of granite boulders that surround the 'Ain Daua. It was May, and the heat was terrific amongst the stones. Refuge we found was in certain caves, or rather holes, with which walls of 'Uweinat are honeycombed. These grottoes, which offered protection against the heat, had been used during this winter by Major expedition, by the Italians, and by a party of British airmen-yet discovered that a little higher up similar little caves contained wonderful documents of an old civilization. It was Almasy who found the first of these caves and showed it to Professor Ludovico di Caporiacco, of the Italian mission, and to me. Two hours later about a dozen more of these caves were located, all covered with beautiful rock paintings in four colours, showing cattle and other animals, mostly tame ones, and human beings: dark-skinned warriors with bows in their hands” (Bermann, Historic Problems of the Libyan Desert, 461).
The cave of swimmers is a place that represents Almasy’s guilt and grief at the death of Katherine.