The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (54 page)

Flo was silent, afraid to say anything lest she give herself away.

“Gilbert is my sweetheart. He reads to me and I write to him. He likes to know how I spend my days.”

Blacked the grates, scrubbed the flags
. Why would a poet care about such banalities? Then Flo remembered that disturbing line in the diary—
but most of all, licking your boots
.

“I do remember feeling I was not in my right mind waiting outside the pub that first night, not knowing if he would speak to such as me.”

“But now you are in love.”

Trout grinned but did not answer. She stood and collected the flatware and cups.

“Thank you for the tea.” Flo was anxious to rest before dinner, a formal affair at the Hôtel d’Orient. She had had enough of Trout and especially of her unquestioned happiness.

28

CROCODILE GODS

A
fter Kenneh, Max dithered over the list of monuments remaining to be photographed. More agitated than usual, he kept adding and subtracting names. Gustave was grateful—
so
grateful!—that they’d already finished with the necropolis at Giza, the Sphinx, and the pyramids. He lacked the strength to crawl through those dark tunnels now, or scale the meter-high blocks to the apex of Cheops’s pyramid to watch the sunrise. Miss Nightingale might be viewing it at that moment. He pictured her twisting through the passageways in her blue dress, hugging a small notebook to her chest. The graffiti might not amuse her, he thought. The name of the singer
Jenny Lind
scrawled repeatedly on an arch, apparently by a fan. And on the top of the great pyramid, a certain Henri Buffard could not resist advertising his goods. Nor could Gustave wash the useless information—
Constructeur de Papier Peint, 79 rue St. Martin, Paris
—from his mind. As much as Europeans loved Egyptian antiquities, they loved defacing them more.

He glanced at Max’s list on the table between their beds.
Grotto of Samoun (Crocodiles)
had been added. Gustave had never heard of it. Perhaps Joseph had suggested it while reminding Max yet again that he had journeyed up the Nile sixty times.

He was in a foul mood. The suspicious chancre that had appeared
at Koseir was now characteristically painless, smooth, and hard as a button.
Please God
, he prayed,
let it not be pox
, though he was almost certain it was. He avoided looking at his body because next, if he were right, a rash would erupt on the palms of his hands or the soles of his feet, possibly the backs of his legs. Syphilis could mark a man almost anywhere. Perhaps this was Kuchuk Hanem’s true keepsake. He remembered the delicate blue Arabic script tattooed on her arm. He had his own translation now:
Love killed your sister and it will kill you, too, but slowly
.

He went on deck. Aided by a stiff breeze, the
cange
was skimming along with the current, sails furled. The sight of the passing shore dizzied him. It took a moment to get his legs under him.

Except for a man at the rudder, the crew was relaxing—smoking, sleeping, playing backgammon. He joined Max and Joseph chatting with Rais Ibrahim in the shade of a canvas awning.

“It is hardly worth the time to see it,” Rais Ibrahim said.

Joseph demurred. “But
messieurs
wish to take mummy home.”

Max noted Gustave’s arrival. “We’re discussing whether to visit the Grotto of Crocodiles,” he explained.

Red vest, note to God, Dacca cloth . . . mummy!
Until that instant, he’d forgotten the shopkeeper in Kenneh who’d promised to inquire about mummies. Surely the man would have tracked him down if he’d found one. The whole town knew of his return.

“How long would it take?” asked Max.

“Half a day,” Joseph said. “Perhaps one day.”

The captain pursed his lips and sighed histrionically. Accustomed to slapping his crew when they displeased him, he plainly wished to pummel Joseph for contradicting him. And just as plainly, Joseph’s opinion rested on the hope of a fat baksheesh if he succeeded in finding them mummies.

“I do want to bring a mummy home,” said Gustave from his fog. The sound of his own voice startled him, as though he were hearing it amplified through a pipe or megaphone.

“I am puzzled,” Max said. “Joseph says one thing, the guidebook and the captain another.”

“Do you have it here?” asked Gustave. “The book?” Rais Ibrahim shot him a penetrating glance.

Max removed it from his pocket and passed it to him.

The entry was brief and dripping with disdain, written, as Bouilhet liked to say, from a very high horse.
Not worth visiting
, the guidebook said, unless you wished to bring home the charred mummy of a crocodile.
Difficult climbing
also was noted. Apparently the grotto had emitted suffocating fumes for years and was highly flammable.

“Listen to this,” Gustave said. “‘Fragments of Homer and the lost orations of Hyperides of Athens were discovered there in 1845.’”

Max’s eyes widened. Gustave continued reading to himself. Nothing else valuable could have survived a fire that broke out in 1846 and burned for more than a year.

How could a fire burn for more than a year? A tiny asterisk led his eye to the bottom of the page. The grotto had heavy deposits of bitumen. Pitch. Essentially, the cave was a tar pit! That meant no photographing and no squeeze-making. “I vote for going,” he announced, closing and returning the book. “I think we should take Joseph’s advice. We both want mummies.”

“So be it,” said Max. “A search for buried treasure.”

Rais Ibrahim, also highly flammable, excused himself and sulked on the deck with his back to them, dangling his feet in the spray of the keel. The excursion would lengthen the voyage by a day, one additional day until the captain could screw his new wife. They hadn’t challenged him before. Max had been right, Gustave realized, to insist on withholding half his fee until the end, ensuring that he kept his foul moods to himself. Max usually was right about money. When Gustave paid Kuchuk Hanem twice her fee, he had disapproved, and clearly, on the second visit, Gustave did not get his money’s worth.

• • •

Rais Ibrahim had hired two guides from the village of Maabdeh as well as donkeys to ride and haul their provisions and swag. The next morning they disembarked south of Manfaloot at el-Cheguel Ghil,
where the desert and the fertile delta met, and where, Joseph said, there had once been crocodiles in the millions. These days the animals were a rarity in Middle Egypt because they had all been mummified. He and Max soon would see for themselves.

The riverbank was high, blocking completely views of the land beyond it. They ascended on their donkeys, tacking single file. It was a bright, sunny day, not yet too warm.

The top of the embankment overlooked a wide plain planted with corn, barley, and flowering fava beans, their scent sweet on the air. Between the rows, in ragged pink patches, clover bloomed, and lupine, in a scattered purple haze. In the distance Gustave spied a herd of black goats or sheep that dotted the ground like ants on a cloth. Just beneath him, on a ledge, two donkey foals gamboled, braying and tossing their gray velvet heads. He and Max smiled at each other. What a good decision to venture through lush and little-known lands!

They soon reached Maabdeh, a cluster of mud hovels surrounded by a brick wall. Pointing to it, a guide explained that it had been raised against Bedouins, who routinely pillaged the livestock and crops, and sometimes abducted women and children.

Threading along the edge of the plateau to another steep hill—five or six hundred meters, Gustave estimated—they passed a limestone outcrop with clear chisels marks. Giant blocks had been quarried willy-nilly, leaving what appeared to be a deranged staircase. No one, Joseph remarked, had worked this stone for a millennium.

As he zigzagged steadily higher, Gustave avoided looking down, observing instead his donkey’s muscles twitch under its hair coat as it leaned into the trail. Twice it faltered, terrifying him, rocks falling away in a miniature avalanche. Difficult climbing, indeed.

At the next precipice, he was mystified to see the Nile again, winding after him like a thick green serpent. His sense of direction was muddled. Max proudly pointed out Manfaloot, crowned with gray minarets, on the opposite shore, as if he had placed it there himself to further addle Gustave’s bearings.

Below lay a veritable panorama of Egyptian agriculture on another
vast plain. Or was it the one he’d seen earlier? For the first and last time, he reconsidered filing a report about the abundant crops to honor his government commission. But if he wrote one, he’d have to write several. None, then. Villages tufted with palm trees came into view, and beyond them, like a dreamscape rendered in pastels, the soft pink and lavender outline of the Arabian hills. He memorized the view. If Max had taken a photograph, it couldn’t have captured the subtle colors, the shapes as luscious as an odalisque’s curves.
An odalisque’s curves:
he liked it.

As they turned right (what direction would that be? he wondered), the guides galloped past him, shouting. He followed, lurching forward like a boy on a hobbyhorse. His mount had a ball-crushing gait, as bad as a camel.

For the third time, a rocky prominence blocked the view. Beneath it, the trail glittered miraculously, paved with crystals.

“Talc,” Max cried triumphantly. “They mined talc here, but no longer.” Had Max memorized the entire guidebook? His flaunting of details, his heedless glee, galled him.

After twenty minutes in the sparkling dust, Gustave saw a dark cleft in the rock like a gaping mouth painted black. The entrance to the grotto. “We are here,” he announced before Max could speak. “Are we not?”

“Obviously,” granted Max.

They dismounted and tied their donkeys to shrubby trees. With Joseph bringing up the rear, they entered the opening single file.

As Gustave bent into the darkness, a sickening stench assaulted him. Breathing through his mouth, he followed the back of Max’s blue jacket for three or four meters. Abruptly the tunnel enlarged, the line backed up and all seven men crowded against the slippery black wall where the crevasse ended.

“And now we enter!” cried Joseph. Before Gustave could make sense of this remark, the first guide, lantern in hand, disappeared down a smoke vent at the base of the wall. Max scrambled after him, whooping with delight.

About a meter tall, the tunnel was unpredictable, narrowing and widening as it bored through the earth. He crawled on his knees, he wiggled and slid. One vertebra at a time, he inched forward on his back, snakelike, propelling himself through the turns by digging down with his heels. Several times he scraped against treacherous spikes overhead. Had he not lost weight, he thought, he might have debrided his skin against the stone—
dégoûtant!
—or been stuck in the passage for the remainder of a short life.

The bad odor strengthened, along with the heat. Drenching sweat ran in runnels down his belly and back, his groin and armpits. In front of him, the worn-down soles of Max’s cavalry boots dragged lightly along the ground, like the feet of a marionette. Behind him, the guide shouted out encouragements in Arabic and butted him with his head.

After several insufferable minutes, the tunnel flared into a gallery where he was able to stand. He yanked out the hem of his shirt to use as a mask.

What exactly was that rank smell? Not shit. He knew the smell of shit all too well. As a child in diapers, his mother liked to recount, she had found him carefully dabbing it on himself and the walls of his room.
You were painting
, she’d said with a laugh. He begged her not to tell the story to friends, but she did, especially after baby Caroline came to live at Croisset. So, not shit. Shit didn’t frighten him, but this odor did.

Before he could see much in the cavern, Max pulled him aside. “This is why I took precautions,” he whispered, “why I told the guides no exposed candles.” He pointed to his feet. Gustave followed a wan light to the floor.

Mummies. They were standing on mummies. He recalled the drifts of dead cicadas he’d seen as a boy encrusting the streets of Rouen. He’d be thirty-two when the next swarm hatched. Four more years.

He stepped forward and heard a crunch. Then another. Then a sifting sound like rats scurrying through litter. He froze and shouted for a guide to bring his lantern.

“Many rooms like this,” Joseph said, rolling his hands to illustrate iteration. “My last
monsieur
spends five hours in the grotto and never finds the end of it.”

Pitch dripped from the ceiling, forming stalactites that hung down in ravaged partitions. Eight months and three thousand kilometers and here he was at last in the heart of the heart of ancient Egypt. Or in the heart of its death. Mummies covered the floor. They
were
the floor. It felt like standing on a stack of mattresses. Death, usually so invisible, so quick to vanish once it struck, was preserved here in a stinking pile, and he was the fortunate fellow balanced on top of it. But would he never stop noticing the stench? Shouldn’t his nose have acclimated to it by now?

He picked up a crocodile and sniffed it. The distinctive odor of active decay was unmistakable. Though the bodies had been preserved, dried to the lightness of husks, in the dampness of the cave something continued to rot. Hair? Nails? Bones? The leathery skin that remained after natron had extracted all the fluid from the flesh?

Besides the large crocs, there were pointy mummified eggs and baby crocodiles with elongated bodies and snouts easily recognizable through their bandages. All of them, he knew, were sacrifices to Sobek, the crocodile deity, to keep the real crocodiles at bay. His worshippers had not stinted. The hoard contained thousands of crocodile and human remains. Tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands, he revised, estimating the depth of the piles. Millions, if you counted all the caverns in the grotto.