The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (5 page)

“No, it will be fine.” Flo caught the worry in Selina’s voice. “They are to be married in a year’s time.”

“But you
did
refuse him,” Selina said softly, placing Flo’s hand in her own.

“Indeed.” And Fanny had hated her for it; not that she would ever have used so coarse a word. Flo loved her family, but she was unwilling to marry simply to please them. It was a painful stalemate, for her parents seemed to believe that by refusing to marry, Flo was refusing their love for her and hers for them. And Parthe? What had she felt? A woman who, at thirty, had not entertained a single proposal, and who would have been content to live vicariously through her younger sister’s successes had her sister the grace to grant her that. Why was it that all of Florence’s decisions inflicted pain on those she loved?

“Then you must not regret it now.”

“I felt I had no choice.”

“Yes, I remember your saying that.” Selina picked up her own letter as if to reread it. Flo understood this as a loving ploy on Selina’s part to allow her to sit silently if she wished. Selina never insisted on conversation. Indeed, silence was one of her greatest gifts to Flo. She understood how much strength could be gained from the simple presence of a friend. Unlike Fanny, who had always been politely
overbearing, beginning with naming her daughters after
cities
. Fanny claimed she chose “Parthenope” and “Florence” to commemorate the travels of her early married life. But Flo believed that like a benevolent witch in a fairy tale, Fanny sought to cast a spell over her two infants. She didn’t care that “Parthenope” was obscure and difficult to pronounce or that “Florence” was traditionally a man’s name. She expected her daughters to inherit enough of her own good looks and charm to convert their burdensome names into one of many fascinations for which they’d be known in society. It seemed never to have occurred to Fanny Nightingale that her daughters might be different from herself.

Florence did not want to think about Richard, though the news swarmed in her chest like bees around an intruder. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would arrange to be alone. She could go to some minor temple and find a haven in one of the inner sanctuaries where Trout wouldn’t wish to follow. Only the day before, in Kalabsha, the maid had preferred to sit beneath a tree and crochet a baby’s bed jacket rather than ponder a single antiquity.

A spit of land she’d noticed earlier alongside the boat was now much enlarged by the receding tide, rising up from the river like a misplaced island, a geological mistake. Deep channels, perhaps the very ones that had carved it, ran swiftly on every side. A surge of pity replaced the ache in her chest. How sad the little island was, orphaned from the earth of which it was a part. The riverbank altered with each annual inundation. She wondered how many years or decades or centuries must pass before it reunited with the shore.

3

DANCING THE BEE

“T
here are even more Ramses than there are kings named Louis,” Gustave observed, “though this Ramses is in a select group—he has a speaking role in the Bible.”

Max did not reply. He lifted his binoculars and scanned the horizon, where vultures floated on the updrafts in slow circles.

“It’s thought he’s the hard-hearted pharaoh of Exodus.”

Max passed him the binoculars. “It’s there, in the distance, I think. You can just make out the top of the mountain.”

It had taken a week to sail the sixty kilometers south from Derr, but now the sandstone cliff of Abu Simbel lay in the distance, a hazy golden-white prominence that pushed against the sky.

They rounded two more bends and came upon an impressive sight: a pair of temples separated by a steep ramp of sand. As the crew moored the boat at a ramshackle wooden pier, the larger temple disappeared into the perspective and the smaller one into the distance behind them. The magnificent view could only be appreciated from the far shore of the river, midway between the two. Max pointed out that he’d have to scale the opposite mountain to get both monuments in the same frame.

Followed by Joseph and two crewmen, Gustave and Max jumped
ashore and slogged up the enormous ramp, which resembled nothing so much as an artificial ski jump. As they approached the huge monument, the vista became more difficult to assimilate. Everything was so outsized.

The great rock temple at Abu Simbel, built by Ramses II, was in the middle of a mountain set back from the river. Unlike the pyramids at Giza, assembled brick by massive brick, it had been hewn from the native stone in a magnificent feat of subtraction. Inside it, Gustave had read, soared a hypostyle that dwarfed any European concert hall. There, the ancient Egyptians celebrated their rituals.

Having seen an exhibition of drawings by Napoleon’s savants, he expected to be stunned by four colossi of Ramses seated on thrones—two on either side of the temple entrance. The pharaohs would be in full regalia, brandishing the imperial flail and crook, wearing the beard of divinity and the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.

What greeted him instead was an accumulation of silt that had nearly buried the statues. Sand reached to the nose of the highest one. Farther down the slope, the figures were more exposed, until entirely visible. But the first was a toy buried in a giant’s sandbox. Gustave began to howl with laughter. The servants cowered behind him.

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,”
Max bellowed, raising his arms to the heavens. “Do these people care nothing for their own magnificent history? Can you imagine Notre Dame in such disrepair? Even the humblest village church?”

Still chuckling, Gustave said, “Perhaps we’ve come at the wrong season of the year.”

“No, effendi,” Hadji Ismael offered, “it has been this way since I am a boy.” Joseph nodded in agreement.

“My God,” Max repeated. Sighing, he regarded his boots for a time, then straightened up and planted his hands on his waist. “We shall have to dig them out.”

Gustave did not believe his ears. “What?”

“At least to their necks. They look so . . . unregal. The first photograph of Abu Simbel cannot present them to the world in this condition.”

The world? At moments like this, Max taxed Gustave’s patience. For an orphan with a fortune at his disposal and no relatives to please, he was grindingly diligent. What Gustave wouldn’t give for such freedom! Madame Flaubert doled out his portion of his father’s estate in spoonfuls. “That, my dear friend, will take forever,” he complained. “Do we even have the implements? The manpower?”

But Max was already instructing Hadji Ismael to unpack the shovels from the
cange
. “We’ll excavate the first head completely—at least
that
. I don’t care if it takes a week.” He ordered Joseph to engage laborers in the nearest village and buy the necessary provisions; also to inform the captain that they would be staying put for several days.

Prone to acrophobia, Gustave peered gingerly down. He couldn’t see the river directly beneath the temple, but in the distance, two boats glided, hugging the opposite shore. The
cange
was hidden by the declivity.

He sat on a flat outcrop. He could not engage in such work. Though he hadn’t had a nervous episode in seven months, heavy exertion could trigger one. Surely Max grasped this possibility; it was he, after all, who had persuaded Madame Flaubert, with the help of Gustave’s brother, Achille, that the balmy climate of the Orient would be salutary. But excavating? No doctor would sanction that. “I’d better start on the squeezes then,” he told Max. “I shall work in the smaller temple with Aouadallah.” The farther away from Max just now, the better.

He and Aouadallah set off on foot down the steep sand ramp, carrying their equipment with them. They passed a party of tourists camped below the temple façade. English, he guessed, from their clothing and the clipped intonations of speech ricocheting off the rocks in the dry air. The gentlemen poked with walking sticks or stood soberly gesturing under parasols, while a quartet of women sat on folding chairs at easels, busily reducing antiquity to squares of paper. He pulled up his pom-pommed hood to discourage conversation.

The small temple appeared to be a variation on the large one, with four shorter, flatter likenesses of Ramses standing rather than
seated at the entrance. He imagined the Virgin and Child raised up in multiples at the nave of a cathedral: unthinkable. It would cheapen the effect, the very sanctity of the figures. Yet four Ramses, or eight, or sixteen, perfectly suited the pharaoh’s majesty.

Aouadallah brought the water jug, brushes, and paper. Gustave had decided to try a new technique, shredding a ream of paper into bite-size pieces in a trough while Aouadallah trickled water over the tatters. For glue, he added the flour he’d nicked the night before from the galley. Together they kneaded the mixture until it was as smooth as the papier-mâché from which he and Caroline had fashioned the heads of marionettes for their childhood plays.

They began inside, at the base of an interior wall. There, clad in breastplates, pleated kilts, and intricate wigs, the ancient Egyptians waged war, issued proclamations, hunted lions and stags, and worshipped their animal gods. Royalty and slaves, animals and furnishings alike were depicted in profile, never frontally. Those at a distance were portrayed as doll-size figures floating in the ether. The art historians of the Academy had already sunk their teeth into the ancient Egyptians, pronouncing them ignorant of perspective. Arrogant cads! Shitheads! Pressing the paper mash into the crevices, he was certain of it: the inscriptions resulted not from a limited but a deliberate aesthetic. The Egyptians preferred profiles not because they were easier but because they considered them more beautiful.

He and Aouadallah worked until late in the afternoon, then packed their equipment and sat down to enjoy the sunset. As the shadows lengthened, a breeze blew down from the heights. He watched the orb of the sun hover in the western sky above the temple, a molten disk turning from yellow to copper and finally a luminous red etched by the silhouetted palms and ragged brush of the hillside. Then, like a giant eye blinking shut, it sank below the world. In the pearly dusk, they returned to the
cange
.

• • •

The Frenchmen decided to camp onshore the first night, Gustave in the open air and Max in a tent. After a supper of flat bread, tomatoes, garlic, and a salty white cheese, Gustave smoked two pipes as he sat on his blanket and stared at the sky, while Max recorded the day’s events and updated the concordance of photos in his tent. Max had high hopes for his pictorial travelogue. With photography all the rage, he said, even people who didn’t like to read would buy his book. And what, Gustave wondered, might his dear friend be writing about
him
? Nothing, probably; he doubted that Max would wish to share credit or glory with anyone. Since Max was not one to read his work aloud to friends, the book would remain a mystery until it was published.

Max gave the impression that he had already lived his life and had returned merely to perfect a few flawed performances. Nothing caught him off guard or disturbed his calm authority. Not that he was without passion. His lechery was more expansive than Gustave’s. He had had sex with women, men, adolescents, and animals. A week before at Derr, while Gustave limited himself to flirting with the whores lounging about in flimsy blue and white gowns, Max partook. He always partook. He simply fucked more. It wasn’t a question of stamina. Gustave was more discriminating.

Nevertheless, Max was an excellent—no, the
best
—brothel companion. A tall, slender fellow, all angles and little flesh, the whores had dubbed him
Abu Muknaf,
“the Father of Thinness.” He moved like a wolf—stealthily and quickly, with no wasted motion. A wolfishly cunning rationality ruled his writing, too. His philosophy was not Art for Art’s sake, but art with a lowercase
a,
for audience. Everything he wrote was undertaken with particular readers in mind. And like any good pragmatist, he was supremely
organized,
the instrument of his control being the list. He made reading lists, shopping lists, packing lists; lists of literary critics, of dramatists, of whores. Upon Max’s advice, they had brought seventy trunks to the Orient and most likely would return home with a dozen more brimming with trophies and
treasures purchased from a list. It was hard to argue with this strategy. Gustave himself sometimes made lists, though rarely wrote them down.
Dates from Derr, a monkey, a mummy . . .

They had packed up nearly all their possessions, as well as a great number of items bought for the trip. As government chargés, Max had explained, they required the finest suits and cravats, linen and silk shirts, waistcoats, the best fur felt hats and cloaks as well as four pairs of boots, two saddles, journal books, botanicals, and medicinals, all kinds of tapes, gauzes, and bandages, essence of orange to make flavored water, fifty kilos of confectioners’ sugar for same, rifles and ammunition, lye and lemon soap, drawing and painting supplies, surgical tools, sheets, coverlets, two featherbeds, grooming and smoking paraphernalia, traveling desks and drafting boards, books, enough whiskey to last two years, laudanum and opium balls in case of injury or illness, whistles, dictionaries, daggers, ceremonial swords, tricolor bunting, woolen underwear, and, of course, the photographic equipment. Max knew precisely where in the seventy trunks each item lay, though at the moment, sixty-five trunks were sweating in storage at the consul’s warehouse in Alexandria. Max was a stranger to self-doubt. He was as sure of himself as a bird is of flight.

But was he always right? Was he right, for instance, about
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
? Could both Max and Bouilhet be wrong? Gustave winced at the memory of that sickening night. He had read it to them over the course of four days. Afterward, they had rested and dined, then sauntered down the terrace with lanterns to the tenebrous banks of the Seine, its liquid fringe unraveling at their feet. “Consign it to the flames!” Max had shouted skyward, as if the stars would quake at the news. Bouilhet had been gentler. He had taken Gustave’s arm, his voice motherly. “If you do publish, only the most devoted readers will cut past the first pages. Better to wait and revise.” Though both men had sworn, like a jury, not to confer, he thought that they had, for they both offered the same objection.
Nothing happens
. Neither mentioned the strengths of the book: historical verisimilitude; the palpable depiction of the saint’s torments—he had
cried out in pain
while writing; the
precise, lyrical language; its driving rhythms. Had they at least appreciated the hellish amount of research the book entailed? No! That he’d read more than two hundred volumes and taken copious notes did not impress them. And if that were not enough to vouch for the novel’s authenticity, like his protagonist, he’d become a recluse. It was he, not Saint Anthony, who had written, “I have come to the desert in order to avoid the troubles of existence.” He had lived so exclusively indoors that his neighbors had nicknamed him “the bear of Croisset.”