The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (3 page)

“We will be happy to oblige you, then,
mademoiselle,
” Max said, switching back to French. He doffed an imaginary hat and swept it before him in a broad arc. “No more shooting on this road. Where are you headed, by the way? You are the first white woman we’ve seen in these parts.”

“I am touring the Nile,” she replied in French. “Visiting the monuments.
Nous trois.
” She gestured toward a couple on the far side of the road. The woman waved back. The man saluted. There was not the nick of a doubt in Gustave’s mind that this pair was English too, though they were surely too young to be her parents. An aunt and uncle perhaps?

“So are we,” Gustave said. “Max is making photographs, and I am recording the inscriptions.”

For the first time she looked pleased. “I, too, am sketching and reading the inscriptions.”

“You can read them?” Max asked. “The hieroglyphics, I mean?”

“Oh, yes, most of the time, with the help of my good friend Herr Professor Bunsen.” She paused. “That’s a
book,
” she explained, smiling quickly. The two men nodded.

“And of course you read Greek,” Max said.

“Yes, Father taught it to me and my sister. We were very fortunate.”

“What is your itinerary?” Max asked. “Perhaps we may assist you in some way.”

As she and Max talked, Gustave thought about the Collier sisters and decided that it was the eyelashes that distinguished English-from Frenchwomen. Englishwomen were not inclined to show theirs off, while the French used them as semaphores, signaling with quick blinks and flashes, like peacocks in a courtship dance. Miss Nightingale blinked only when necessary. She was like an English sparrow, short of wing, busy with purpose; not, by a mile, the flirtatious, feathery bird of paradise. All her delicacy, which was considerable, was contradicted—indeed, canceled out—by her commanding voice and pragmatic eyes.

It soon became clear that Miss Nightingale’s itinerary on the river was nearly identical to theirs. She was also traveling by houseboat, in a splendid
dahabiyah,
a bigger, more deluxe version of their
cange
. She, too, planned a long stay at Abu Simbel, after which she would float downriver touring select monuments. She had spent the previous few days visiting four temples just south of Aswan at Kalabsha,
Dakkeh, Beit el-Wali, and Gerf Hussein, the last by moonlight with the entire village hooting at her heels. Today she and her companions had bought dates in Derr. She would return home via Europe by late summer. They all agreed it was confusing that the Nile insisted on flowing north to the Mediterranean, and that Upper Egypt lay to the south and lower Egypt to the north. “It always seems backwards when I look at the map,” Max said. “Yes,” Miss Nightingale replied with a nod, “I believe most rivers flow south.” They chatted for a while about the Blue and White Nile, the mysterious sources of the river.

“Did you
adore,
” Gustave took her hand,
“comment ça se dit en anglais?”
He switched to French. “Did you like the crocodiles and the hippopotami at Kalabsha? But the people, you must have been as shocked as we were. They wore no clothes.”

“Oh,”
she said, as if someone had pricked her with a needle. “Yes, we saw the poor creatures.” Her expression turned grave.

“Don’t tease our new friend,” Max said, elbowing Gustave.

“We must remember,” Gustave said, recalling the bouquets of naked breasts and buttocks—some of the women had worn little more than beads around their waists—“they are all innocents.”

“Women and children living in such squalor,” Miss Nightingale opined, her voice grim. “One wishes one could intercede on their behalf.”

“Yes,” Gustave agreed, noticing that her French had improved. “Sometimes one does, one must enter their lives. It seems too tragic to refrain.” He could sense Max stifling a smirk. He loved to torture him this way. Max would reprimand him later for the double entendres. They’d have a good laugh.

“Baksheesh, always baksheesh.” Miss Nightingale’s voice rasped in imitation of the beggars. She shook her head in disapproval, though whether of the constant request for money or the deplorable condition of the beggars was not clear.

Suddenly she straightened up and her demeanor changed. “How are you sleeping then?” she asked, her voice edged with eagerness, as if she had a secret to share.

Max and Gustave shot brief glances at each other. “Well enough,” Max said. “Why do you ask?”

Miss Nightingale drew a little closer. “I am sleeping with a new invention.”

Obscene images tumbling through his mind, Gustave pasted a smile on his mouth and blinked, waiting. Max grew more animated, not from bawdiness, Gustave knew, but curiosity—Max could turn serious in an instant. Another trait of his that Gustave did not altogether admire. Laughter, after all, was far too rare. One could be serious all night while one slept.

“What
sort
of invention?” asked Max.

Just then, Aouadallah returned with a lifeless, nearly obliterated egret dangling by its waxy yellow feet from his fist. Gustave turned to him.
“Alors?”

“Do you wish to cook it, effendi?”

He picked up the bird by its neck and examined the long, lacy breeding feathers sprouting from the wings and the fancy tufts at the skull and belly. “No, we will keep only these long plumes and a few wing feathers. The big ones.” He splayed the wing to point them out.
A monkey, six meters of Dacca cloth, a mummy, stones from the Parthenon, the photograph of a whore, a red vest, and egret feathers.
He handed his gun to Hadji Ismael to stow on the donkey.

“It’s called a
levinge,
” Miss Nightingale replied. “It keeps out insects and promotes sleep.” Cheerfully, she described its construction and design. “Once I’m inside”—she hugged herself and stood on tiptoes—“I tighten the tapes and then I’m like a butterfly in a cocoon. We all have one, on the boat. We call it ‘levinging.’”

Gustave tried to picture her in the contraption. “Do you cover your face?” he asked. For it was to her face and small, pale hands that he was drawn, the hands in particular, which seemed vulnerable and pure, as if they had not yet touched much of the world. She was so earnest!

“Yes, of course. To keep the mosquitoes off, but you leave room for breathing.”

“You must be bandaged like a mummy,” Gustave said.

“Yes!” Miss Nightingale agreed. “Exactly! I expect that’s where M. Levinge took the idea. But it’s very comforting to be so tightly wrapped.”

“I’m certain,” said Gustave, recalling Kuchuk Hanem’s body warming his in the chill of her rock-walled room.

“If you give me your address,” Miss Nightingale said, “I shall send you the plans so that you can make one for the rest of your trip. I am sure you shall need it in Damascus and Constantinople. The insects will be frightful. You’ll be there in the summer.”

“No doubt,” Max said. He took out his card and wrote out their mailing address in Cairo.
“Merci beaucoup.”

“I thank you in advance for the good nights of sleep,” Gustave added.

After the threesome shook hands, Miss Nightingale crossed the road and returned to the couple who had dismounted and stood patiently waiting. Pink and plump, the woman of the pair reminded Gustave of a drawing exercise in art class—the human body as three circles set on top of each other, with a round face, a larger, rounder bosom, and a bell-shaped bottom. Only a belt defined her waist. So much roundness suggested a warm and generous nature. The man was likewise corpulent. He embraced Miss Nightingale, patting her repeatedly on the back before supervising her climb onto a donkey. In the saddle, her feet nearly touched the ground. The asses in Egypt were bred to be small and desert-hardy.

Gustave waved good-bye as Miss Nightingale’s donkey bounced forward, responding to a leather quirt in the hands of an African behind it. She and her party went north, returning to their houseboat. He and Max set off in the opposite direction, the dead bird flapping from the saddlebag. Joseph had said not to pluck the feathers yet. They must blanch the bird as if to eat it; otherwise, the quills would be damaged.

Half an hour later, they reached the rock temple of Derr, a rather crude structure built by Ramses the Great. Max spent the afternoon
photographing while Gustave made squeezes of the hieroglyphs on the columns. The temple was not as impressive as he had expected, but it was old and important, Max said, most likely a rehearsal for the magnificence farther south, or possibly an afterthought.

The next morning, they left Derr for Abu Simbel in the wilderness of Nubia. There, Gustave calculated, he’d be five hundred kilometers and three weeks distant from Kuchuk Hanem on the last tame section of the river. South of Abu Simbel at Wadi Halfa, it devolved into an unnavigable 750-kilometer stretch of sunken rocks and rapids. The Nile was a long, skinny prick of a river.

2

CHATELAINES

T
here was something of the trickster in Florence Nightingale, a trait she’d reluctantly put aside as she reached womanhood, but which she had never completely outgrown or forsworn. This is why as soon as she’d determined that the two Egyptians discharging firearms on the road were, in fact, French, she had chosen to speak a halting, stilted, schoolgirlish français. She hadn’t known exactly why she did this, only that she could not resist the pretense. Perhaps she had hoped to overhear a shocking tidbit? The men might have commented on her appearance or manner, for instance, feeling as free to speak about her as they would to talk treason in front of the family cat. But nothing scandalous in their conversation had ensued.

Florence bent her head to peer through the small windows that ran the length of the cabins on the dahabiyah. The sleeping chamber where she sat floated just above the waterline, and if she lay on her divan with her head alongside or out the window, she could see both river and sky. The previous night, she’d watched the moon pave the Nile with silver. Now the sky was split in two: above, tufts of cotton drifted high in a gray patch, while closer to the horizon, the sun blurred into an aura of pale yellow behind cloud cover.

She pulled her traveling desk from a nearby compartment and set it upon her knees. Perhaps she’d felt free to mislead the Frenchmen because they themselves were so clearly involved in a deception. In their burnooses and caftans, they were literally draped in a lie—obviously in hopes of gaining access where it would otherwise be denied. Abbas Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, did not hesitate to enforce the death penalty for even minor offenses against Europeans. Abandoning Western garb might bring them Egyptian secrets but it also entailed risking their safety. At any moment, they could be mistaken for natives and robbed or even bludgeoned. To her mind, this bravery, though foolhardy, bestowed on them a dashing air. A grin stole across her face. Lying had its advantages. Aside from producing results unavailable by honest means, in a strange way, it built character—at least audacity.

Florence decided to write them in her usual polished French. If they crossed paths again, which was likely given the similarity of their itineraries and the paucity of Europeans on the Upper Nile, she hoped they’d forget her pitiful French of the first encounter.

Opening the mahogany traveling desk she had used since the family jaunt to Europe twelve years earlier, when she was seventeen, she withdrew her pen, inkpot, and a sheet of fine rag.

13 Février 1850

Chers Messieurs,

Quelle chance que de vous avoir rencontrés hier! On a si peu l’occasion en Egypte de voir des Européens que c’est un réel plaisir que de bavarder un peu ensemble. Comme nous le dit Homère dans
L’Iliade
“pour se sentir chez soi, on n’a besoin que d’une seule personne et d’une langue en commun . . .

I love French, even more so when I hear it spoken. No other tongue makes such a lovely music or conveys so well the spiritedness of its people. (Our French servant, Mariette, is as patriotic as
any Parisian I have met, wears a locket with a likeness of Napoleon, and mourns the Battle of Aboukir Bay, though she was not yet born when Egypt changed from French to English hands.)

I am enclosing my calling card as well as one from my companions, Charles and Selina Bracebridge. Our families write to us in care of the British consul, who then dispatches local runners for delivery. I trust that being chargés of the French government, your post will travel by diplomatic pouch. However it arrives, I hope you will let me know that this letter has reached you.

As I mentioned on the road, were it not for my levinge, my journey in Egypt would be listed among the great victories for their side in the annals of the insects. (What tiny ledgers those must be, inscribed on leaves or carved on daubs of mud to make petite earthen tablets. First commandment: Bite. Second commandment: Bite again.) English bugs are no match for the fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and other unnamed creatures that would feast on our poor hides the instant the sun sets.

I found this gadget, invented by a traveler to the East named M. Levinge, in my Murray guidebook.

It’s easy to make. All you need are two bedsheets, a piece of thin muslin to serve as a mosquito net, strong sewing thread (waxed twist is best), caning in three pieces to make a hoop, cotton twill tape, and a nail to suspend it from the ceiling. (I’m going to sketch it for you on a separate page.)

After entering the levinge through the opening at c, you pull the tape tight and tuck it under the mattress. You can sit or lie in this contrivance. Be advised: tight fastening is essential, if initially uncomfortable. You will soon accustom yourselves to the confined space and enjoy it like swaddled babes.

Florence withdrew a six-inch ruler from the desk and began her facsimile, copying directly from the Murray book, one of the forty-some volumes she carried with her. As always, when she wrote, her surroundings vanished, as did her body and the sensation of time passing. She was, therefore, surprised when she looked up from drawing to see that her maid was no longer resting on the opposite divan. Trout’s backside, encased in floral chintz like a cushion one might find plumped up in the corner of a horsehair sofa, filled the narrow passageway that led from the sleeping quarters to the stairs. She appeared to be inspecting the floor.