The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (17 page)

The air had cooled as the moon rose in the sky and the wind picked up. Max, toting his unwieldy photo cases, paused to button up his shirt. They picked their way along the shore beneath escarpments that rose up steeply on either riverbank into a wide canyon. They’d moored the boat last in a fleet of dahabiyahs, as far away from their fellow Europeans as possible. Had it not been for Miss Nightingale and her ridiculous maid, he would never have agreed to such a visit. But he could not refuse her. He always found it difficult to be cruel in person (as opposed to in writing). And Max, he knew, welcomed the chance to socialize. His brilliant friend was a gregarious and polished man who enjoyed small talk even if he sometimes approached people the way a dentist eyed a mouthful of rotten teeth.

“I am forced to admit that they were quite pleasant, as pleasant goes,” Max remarked as they emerged from beneath a jutting cliff.

“Yes, they were. But then it isn’t hard to be nice if one is wealthy. I think they must be loaded.” They passed a dahabiyah almost as impressive as Miss Nightingale’s where someone was playing the flute. No, it was a duet. Off-key violin arpeggios reached them on the breeze. The sound was haunting.

“My God, Mozart on the Nile.” Max groaned.

“I don’t think it’s Mozart, Du Camp Aga, though I do detect a melody buried in the whining.”

“What did you and Miss Nightingale talk about off to yourselves?”

The music droned on, fainter and more sour as they passed its source. A swampy odor—the Nile at low tide—filled his nostrils. He’d become fond of the sulfurous fug, which smelled like fish and sex. Slowing his pace, he answered, “What did you and the Brace-bridges discuss?”

“Well, Charles Bracebridge is no slacker. Reads Latin and Greek, has a villa in Athens, loves Byron—”

“Loves Byron?”

“Apparently. They’re both great Hellenophiles.”

“One point in their favor, then.” He made a mental note to ask Bracebridge about the great poet. “That raises them from the ranks of
épiciers
and drudging professionals, don’t you think, effendi?”

The
cange
came into view, its upper half pewter in the moonlight, the lower portion dissolved in the black of the river. The sentry called out something in Arabic and Joseph jumped up, tied a blanket around his naked body, and hailed them. With the sentry’s help, he hastily deployed the gangplank.

“They are definitely elites,” Max said. “But I reserve judgment on the young miss since you monopolized her completely. Quit stalling and tell me what you and she discussed.”

Joseph galloped down the gangway and removed Max’s cases to the boat.

“Trouble,” Gustave said, stopping just short of the
cange.
“We discovered we are both troubled.”

“Sounds like you passed confidences.” Max playfully blocked his way onto the boat and leered at him.

“We were just making idle chatter.”

“She hasn’t got much of a figure, has she?” Max moved aside and they boarded the boat. “Does she even have breasts?”

Max’s taunting annoyed him. He suddenly felt protective of Miss Nightingale’s breasts, whatever their size, whether bee stings (most likely) or lemons. “She isn’t like that. I mean, I don’t think of her as a woman.” He found it difficult to describe her, nor did he want to. “More a kind of presence.”

“What does that mean, a
presence
? You make her sound like a ghost.”

They unfolded stools and sat down. “I’m not sure.” He lit his pipe. “I said it in jest.”

“Jest my eye. You spent most of the evening with the little English flower.” Max packed his chibouk and lit it.

“Piss off!” Gustave clapped him on the shoulder. “The truth is I was dreaming of Kuchuk Hanem the whole time. And don’t forget, you still owe me a photograph of her.”

“The great alma, Kuchuk Hanem.” Smoking his chibouk, its stem more than a meter long, Max resembled a long-billed bird. “Would she spread her legs, I wonder, for the camera?”

“She might, if we pay or flatter her enough.” With the side trip to Koseir, how many more weeks until they returned to Esneh? Three? Five? He would shower her with gifts. Dates. Ribbons. Henna to decorate her hands and feet and pet sheep. One of his quills? She was illiterate, but might find a sexual use for it. “We should make the picture in her house, not on the boat,” he cautioned. “In public, she tries to pass herself off as a schoolmarm.”

“Good point.” Max yawned, then announced he was retiring. He planned to work the next day. Bidding good night, he descended to his cabin, smoke floating up behind him in a wispy wake.

Gustave expelled a few smoke rings, watching them expand and wobble into nothingness.

He was as surprised by what he had said about Miss Nightingale as Max was. Not a woman! Well, she was certainly not a candidate for a muse or mistress, though he could not help but compare her to Louise, who also had a brain and an education but was devoting her life, it seemed, to the martyrdom of love, sacrificing herself on the
altar of his unrequital. In the end, he preferred his prostitutes, who gave a convincing impersonation of undying love and harbored no expectations afterward. Nor any literary ambitions. No, he must never give Louise a foothold again. The gifts he had bought her in Egypt, he decided, were obeisance to past trysts, not an invitation for future ones.

Miss Nightingale, by contrast, was not glamorous or, apparently, amorous.
Earnest
suited her best. Her gaze was sharp as a falcon’s, and as unsettling. She burned with utter sincerity; commitment to some ideal steadied her gaze. If she knew how to flirt, she hadn’t displayed her talent tonight. But she was kind and sympathetic—her consoling touch on his arm had moved—no—melted him.

He drew one more time on the pipe, then tapped it on the side rail, spilling the embers overboard. Just down the beach, light from a native hut illuminated three camels perched on the sand like unwieldy prehistoric birds. They were tethered to an acacia tree, their slender knobby legs folded beneath them, their long necks tucked against their flanks. He listened to the creaking of the masts and rigging, the soft clatter of the wind in the palm fronds, the lulling slosh of the waves. A bud of joy flowered in his chest.

He was drunk and exhausted. Why, he asked himself, had he offered to teach her about making squeezes when he hated it so?

9

THE WEIGHING OF THE HEART

F
lo awakened before dawn and lay abed in the pitch darkness, ruminating. The letter she’d written leaned against the candlestick on the top of the bookcase that served as her nightstand.

But now, not another thought about him! She’d not savor the memory of the evening, but put it aside, like a sweet left on view in a dish both to tantalize and reassure. If she saved the pleasure for later, perhaps, before she knew it, the sweet would multiply into a tray of delicacies, mouthful after melting mouthful she could gorge on. If he answered, or came calling.

She unfastened the tapes of her levinge, removed her sleeping cap, and sat up. She lit a candle stub, then thought better of it, candles being so precious, and reached for the oil lamp stowed on a lower shelf. It gave less light but was steadier, and in its wan aura she donned her brown Hollands and a pair of palm slippers. She slipped the letter into her bodice.

She’d wanted to witness the effect of the sunrise on the façade of the great temple of Abu Simbel every day since they’d arrived. Selina and Charles had spoken of joining her, but after a week it was clear that they were unwilling or unable to risk climbing in the dark. According to Bunsen, dawn was extraordinary, and twice a year the
light penetrated to the innermost chambers. During the vernal and autumnal equinoxes? She’d look it up this afternoon. The baron’s book was a mass of prose knotty as an oak, thick with awkward phrasing rooted in his German. She’d already compiled revisions for the Murray book; perhaps she’d edit Bunsen, too. Now, though, alone and unescorted (the ball and chain was still slumbering), she exited her room and crept across the deck. She’d be back before she was missed.

The crewmen were asleep, and except for the captain and Paolo, who accorded themselves the privilege of a hammock, were snugged in their niches, the foredeck a lumpy expanse of blanketed bodies. Paolo had ordered them to wear trousers under or over their djellabas—indeed, to sleep in them—making it safe for the women to be among them at odd hours. For a few extra piastres, they’d cheerfully complied.

She stepped up the portable stairs and over the gunwale, then down the flimsy gangway with its rope railings and onto the damp shore. There, she extinguished her lamp and stood in the enthralling darkness. The moon had already set and the sky was the depthless black of tarpaper, a few stars pinning it down like nails. A breeze lifted the down on her arms and neck. She scanned the clock of the sky. Could one predict from the stellar alignment the exact moment the sun would swing from one side of the heavens to the other, like the disk of a celestial pendulum?

The sandy incline between the temples was so familiar she knew her way in the dark, the grains cool over her feet. Halfway up, without alarm, she sank to her knees, turned sideways, and tacked to the crest. There she sat upon the rocky earth, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness so that eventually she could just make out the ragged margin between the trees and sky.

The great rock temple of Ramses II was the most imposing sight she’d seen in her twenty-nine years, no small claim for a woman who’d toured most of the European capitals, crossed the Alps and Apennines, and swooned at her own insignificance from the crags and vales of Scotland. It had even replaced the Sistine Chapel, where
only a year before she had lain for hours on the floor beside Mariette, drifting upward to join the muscled bliss on Michelangelo’s ceiling.

She expected to observe a different grandeur and wisdom in Egypt. Her heart thudding, she faced west, where the colossi loomed invisibly. Slowly, as though limned with pencil on black paper, the outline of their mountain abode emerged from the dark surround. The cliff turned a metallic gray so transitory and ghostly that the statues seemed only now, after three millennia, to succumb with a last glimmer to their eternal stillness. Then the sun cracked open behind her, a ruddled splinter at the horizon. As the light gained radiance, it reversed the first impression of fading glory to one of impending majesty.

Dawn began to burnish the pairs of disproportionate legs, the hands like flounders in the laps. The ancient stone carvers had rendered the lower half of the seated figures crudely, lavishing their skill and passion on the magnificent heads and headdresses, and particularly upon the pharaoh’s visage. That face! Repeated everywhere in Egypt, but nowhere more powerfully, it combined serenity with absolute power. Such calmness of soul moved her to exultation. She could look upon that face every day and never tire of it. Even the head that lay choked in the sand did not detract from the awe. Ramses the Great
was
great. He had ruled for more than sixty years of a golden age. What must it have been like when he passed to the Field of Reeds at ninety-six? Four generations had known no other sovereign. They would have mourned his loss like the death of a god.

The sun crept higher in the sky, transfusing the limestone figures with pink light until they flushed, as if rousing from slumber. The nostrils seemed to flare, the lips to part, the eyes to narrow their gaze, surveying from their fastness the landscape at their feet and every living thing within it. With a flash of pain at her throat, Flo’s breath caught, as if commandeered by the reviving Osiridae. And then, in the next instant, the moment of their awakening passed and the day lay before her, the stone figures lifeless, archaic monuments. The mountain erupted with the smells of morning—baking earth,
the faint steam of evaporating dew, the tang of insect chitin crushed underfoot.

She studied the figure intaglioed into the rock face above the four colossi. Ramses was making an offering to his namesake, the sun god Ra. Not a sacrificial ram, not gold, silver, or armfuls of lotus flowers; instead, he proffered the small figurine
ma’at,
that symbolized justice. The frieze brought tears to her eyes.

At the smaller temple, too, a wall relief had set her weeping with joy, and she’d returned three times to take notes for letters home.
I never understood the Bible,
she’d written,
until I came to Egypt.
Though less impressive, the small temple echoed and affirmed her deepest beliefs. For there, Ramses was crowned by the good and evil principle on either side. What a modern philosophy! Had any theory of the world gone farther into faith and science than this? For she, too, believed that evil was not the simple opposer of good, but its collaborator, the left hand of God, as the good was His right.
Just like her,
the Egyptians believed that evil was the brother, not the foe, of Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld and Eternal Life, though afterward, according to Bunsen, the Egyptians abandoned this idea and scratched out its nose and eyes in the old carvings. But in Ramses’s time, good flowed from evil, and out of evil, good. And in the journey to the afterlife, which mimicked the dying and rising sun and was not so different from the hours before the Resurrection, the petitioner’s heart was weighed against a feather in the seventh room of the night. If the scales tipped to either side it was devoured. Evil threatened him at every gate and had to be appeased with charms and spells. Some of them were so poetic that she’d memorized them.
O my heart which I had from my mother! O my heart which I had from my mother! Do not stand up as a witness against me!
As she gazed raptly at the temple façade, she felt again a conviction thrumming in her body—that the world was bound together in an intricate, harmonious web governed by natural laws that men could discover slowly and with great effort. That was God’s will—the human revelation of divine order.

She kneeled on a rock, still gazing at the faces of Ramses. Were it
not for her ideas about evil, her life would have been so much simpler. She could have converted to the church of Rome, working out her destiny within an order, as a nun. But the Catholics preached that evil was easily identified and routed, when in fact it lay tangled with the good, like the clean and dirty blood in the umbilicus. She couldn’t subscribe to such an arbitrary notion. Didn’t the unborn child need both to survive until he was delivered, and afterward, wasn’t he heir to both? Wasn’t he marked like Cain? And blessed like Moses?