The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (55 page)

He’d watched the fearsome reptiles slicking through the Nile at Aswan. No one was safe near a croc, even if it appeared to sleep as it basked on the muddy bank.

Why
not
make a god of the thing you feared most? In which case he would have numerous deities: the butcher, with his sharp knives and dull brain; the grocer, with his palette of vegetables and colorless imagination. Professionals, too—lawyers and doctors (including his brother), and all proper dames. Only artists, a few teachers, and whores were exempt from his pantheon.

A sound like claws on pavement interrupted his reverie. He lifted his lantern and shined it on the brightest objects in the cavern—Max’s hands, rending a crocodile mummy. Twisting off the legs like drumsticks and tossing them into a corner, Max broke open the torso and plunged into the gut cavity, pulling out blackened gauze.

“What in the world are you doing?” Gustave asked.

“Looking for treasure. Gold or jeweled scarabs.” He crushed a tiny crocodile underfoot and lifted a bigger one. “They’re so light,” he said, tearing off its limbs.

From each animal Max disarticulated, noxious odors rose in fresh waves. Sick to his stomach, Gustave moved to the next gallery, trailed by a guide.

Everywhere lay linen, scorched or reduced to cinders. That was part of the odor, too—burned cloth. A stockpile of small charred packets leaned against a wall. Organs? He knew the Egyptians mummified them separately. Hearts reduced to crumbs? Brains withered to walnut shells?

He decided to look for a human mummy and located two right away. But they had already been pilfered, their wrappings in disarray. After half an hour of kicking aside one crocodile mummy to find an identical one beneath it, he settled for the charred foot, still attached to the ankle, of the first mummy. This would do well enough. How could he transport an entire mummy anyway? They were as delicate as butterfly wings. Everywhere he stepped, he heard and felt them cracking. Yes, a foot made a fine memento—of the arduous climb, of trampling mummies. He returned to the first gallery.

Max was kneeling over something, his guide standing alongside, arms heaped with booty. He straightened up and wiped his brow with the filthy sleeve of his jacket.

“What do you have there?” Gustave asked.

“No scarabs, but wonderful stuff.” Max delved into the farrago of the guide’s bundle. “A crocodile mummy, of course.” He held it up briefly. “Also, a bird mummy—”

“Really? I didn’t see any birds.” He felt a tiny bit envious.

“Also a snake. And yes, here”—Max withdrew a wafer-shaped object—“a fish. And we found a cat mummy.”

Now Gustave was jealous. “Let me see it.”

Max dug it out of the pile and passed it to him. He studied the shape. The ears were missing or had been flattened in the wrapping. It could have been a loaf of rustic bread.

“These are my favorites,” Max said, sorting through a second lot arranged on the floor. He withdrew two gilded feet—
two gilded feet! That son of a bitch—
then a pair of blackened hands, and finally an entire head, its long tresses intact in an unnatural shade of red.

Was it possible the second room had been more plundered than the first? Gustave wondered. That made no sense. He must simply be unlucky. His souvenir foot was so meager by comparison.

He spied something on the floor and picked it up. “You’ve forgotten a trinket.” It lacked wrappings and felt leathery and velvety by turns. “What is it, anyway?” he asked Max.

“Give it here, and bring the lantern closer.”

Gustave watched Max turn the thing in the light. A tiny face appeared, then wings and little claws. “Ugh!” Max shivered, revolted. “A dead bat!” He flung it high in the air. For a split second, a rustling like silk rubbing on silk issued from the reaches of the ceiling.

In the next moment, bats rained on them, swooping and diving from every direction, a hail of creatures. Colliding in midair, some of them tumbled to the floor and hopped like crows. The cave echoed with their piercing whistles and squeaks. “They are attacking us,” Max cried, covering his eyes with his hands.

“No,
monsieur
, they no attack,” Joseph offered calmly. “You attack. They run away.”

Unconvinced, Max huddled on the floor.

In their panic, some bats escaped through the passage the men had entered; others fled through narrow ledge gaps. Most returned, chirping, to their sleeping nests, vanishing into the dark vault of the gallery. The air was suddenly clear. Stunned bats lay throbbing on the floor. He could see them floundering about in the shadows, like broken umbrellas.

“Little bastards,” said Max. “They scared the shit out of me.”

“Yes, they did,” remarked Gustave. He wasn’t afraid of bats, had trapped and killed stragglers in the chimneys at Croisset. “They’re only dangerous if they bite you, and they only bite when they’re rabid, which is why if one does bite—”

“Enough!” Max stood. “We should go.” He brushed off his shoulders. “Are you finished? Did you find anything worthwhile?”

Gustave showed him the foot. “For my desk.”

Max nodded, unimpressed. “I am ready to leave when you are.” He withdrew a white cloth from his pocket and gently placed his loot on it.
He had brought a cloth and yet not advised him to?
After Gustave added his mummy’s foot, Max folded the cloth and tied it up like a picnic lunch.

“You’ll need a wooden chest for all that stuff,” Gustave said.

“I have a wooden chest. Two, in fact, packed inside the trunks.” Max paused thoughtfully. “In the meantime, I shall wedge them into the camera cases if I have to.”

The climb into the cave had been wearying, and though they’d been in the grotto for only an hour, the air was execrable. Watching Max think and move so spryly, he felt asthmatic.

After securing their lanterns, they lined up and descended into the passage; Max went in front of him and Joseph behind. The second guide went last, dragging the plunder with him, out of everyone’s way.

Halfway along, Max shouted that he had made a discovery. He sounded excited, but then he was more easily excited than ten men. Another of his bothersome qualities.

The stench Gustave had first encountered assailed him anew. He gagged, regretting he hadn’t thought to cover his mouth with a rag. This odor was different from the one inside, he noticed, and far worse.

“It is so grotesque as to defy description,” Max called out, delighted, it seemed, in the very repulsion he felt. “How did we miss it on the way in? Oooo! It is ghastly!”

“What is that dreadful stink?” Gustave asked.

“This! This is the dreadful stink.” Max coughed, italicizing his words. “
Sacré nom de Dieu
, it is terrible when you get close.”

“Y’allah!”
The guide in front shouted.

“J’arrive!”
Max shouted.
“J’arrive tout de suite!”
To Gustave, more quietly, he called back, “The poor bastard is having a fit. I’m going ahead.”

Now on his knees, now on his belly, Gustave edged forward. If memory served, he was approaching the part like the neck of a bottle. Surely he’d have noticed anything freakish in such a confined space. Whatever it was, Max had missed it too. He wondered about the guides—did they know it was there?

Turning on his side, he squeezed by an especially bulbous crag. Behind it, in a cranny at an acute angle to the main passage, he saw it: the head, torso, and arms of a man wedged behind a curtain of glossy stalactites, like an actor waiting in the wings to spring onto the stage. The legless corpse without wrappings was not an ancient Egyptian but a modern one, an obvious victim of the grotto in which he had, it seemed, begun naturally to mummify, for the face was shriveled and flat as a plate. Within it, the mouth had contorted into a circle where an agonized scream had been preserved for the ages. Chills rippled through Gustave’s shoulders, into his belly.

He screamed. He gagged. He pressed his hand to his face to filter out the odor, but the sleeve of his shirt was sticky with resin. It, too, stank.

If fumes or smoke had overcome the man, where was the rest of him? A gruesome scenario took shape in his mind—a later explorer severing the legs to get them out of the way.

The eyes were half open, the sockets empty beneath the lids. He expected to see an insect crawl out, daintily place each of its legs on a clean patch of flesh, and wash itself like a fly. He stared at a stalactite to annihilate the image.

As he stole another look at the face, the tendrils of a profound dread insinuated themselves into his very being. He tried to back away, but without room to rise on all fours and crawl, he succeeded only in squirming closer. He shivered and groaned in revulsion.

Complaints beset him from behind and in front. “Go,” chided
Joseph, knocking at the soles of his shoes. “Too hot for sightseeing in this here.”

“Gustave, where are you?” Max yelled. “Say something.”

Ahead of him, the light of a lantern faded. He hadn’t wanted to carry one himself.
Abu Muknaf
, the Father of Thinness, could have doubled his girth, carried a lantern, and still slid through the shaft like a greased hog.

“I am coming to get you!” Max’s disembodied voice promised.

Joseph jerked on his left foot. “
Monsieur
, you are all right?” he asked. “Have you faint?” In his poor French it sounded like
Have you daydreamed?

He closed his eyes and silently invoked the beach at Koseir—
cool turquoise water rushing around my ankles, Rossignol sorting shells on her lap, the breeze like . . . like
. . . A black wave of tar and rot.

Max’s arms snaked toward him. He must have turned around. “Give me your hand,” he urged. “I’ll unstick you.”

“No. I shall come out by myself.” Fuck shit, fuck shit, fuck fuck fuck! he cursed under his breath. “I am only resting.”

“Resting, my eye,” Max said with a sneer. Joseph continued to push at his leg. In a moment of terrifying clairvoyance, he saw his own amputated foot on some future tourist’s desk.

“I’m trying to help you, asshole.”

“
Va te faire foutre
. I’ll be out when I’m ready.”

When Max reached for his hand, the iron lethargy that had weighed him down for days lifted all at once, as though yanked free by a pulley. “Do not touch me, I warn you,” he growled. He felt his terror altering into a new shape, like liquid left on a stovetop that suddenly solidifies into a nasty, inedible bolus.

“A couple of minutes more and you’ll be out,” Max reassured him. “Courage!”

The new shape was fury. At that moment in the stuffy shaft, Gustave struck a vein of pure hatred for his companion. He hated the way Max talked—too confidently. He hated his planning, the way he burped, the smell of him every night in the next bed. The way each
time he blew his nose, he inspected his handkerchief afterward. He
hated
that. He detested Max for being skinny and eating enormous portions without gaining a gram.

“Stop being foolish,” Max said, clawing at his hand.

“
You
are the fool,” Gustave replied, retracting his hands into knobs under his chin. “Did anyone ever tell you that you laugh like a jackal? You fuck like one, too.”

“
Calme toi
. Let me help you,
mon ami
,” Max coddled in an oily and patronizing tone that outraged him even more. He was indebted to Max for convincing his family to let him go, and for taking charge of the trip, but not enough to tolerate his acting the nursemaid.

“You and your shitty ambition,” he spat. “You fart higher than your asshole.”

“Give me your hand and
shut up
.”

“Am I disrupting your almighty schedule by pausing for two minutes?” The disgust he had felt for himself while ill was misdirected, he saw that now. In fact, he was disgusted with Max and hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. Their friendship had soured, like a marriage. Without the novelty and color of the Orient to distract them, it would have soured sooner. After eight months the bloom was off the rose, leaving only the thorns. This burst of understanding, like most knowledge, did nothing to mitigate his wrath.

“The delay is beside the point!” Max said. “You are using up the air in the tunnel. Think of the poor sods behind you and give me your hand!”

Hypocrite! Max didn’t give a shit for the other men. For all his wealth, he was not a generous person. He was a tightwad and a measly tipper. Even drunk, he’d bestir himself to calculate the tip to the last
sou
. Or
para
. Or
piastre
. Calculating, that was Max, with his industrious lists. Always thinking and planning his life, never just giving in, following the impulse wherever it led. Was that why he fucked so ceaselessly? How awful it must be to live from the neck up. The closest Max came to pleasure lasted only the few minutes he fucked, when, instead of feeling his brain, he felt his prick. Gustave was the true voluptuary; Max, no better than an aging delinquent with a bit of philosophy
under his belt. It followed that Max envied his own easy sensuality. Who wouldn’t envy a man who conjured a thousand liquid breasts while floating in the Red Sea? How had he ever trusted his opinion on
Saint Anthony
? He’d have no need of Max’s advice in the future.

It would be impossible to travel with him for another year. “You know nothing of pleasure,” he blurted. “You are a fake, pretending to be enjoying yourself when you don’t know how.”

“Move, move, move!” shouted Joseph. The guides conferred in rapid Arabic, their voices ricocheting in the passage like scattershot.

“One way or another you are coming out of this cave,
Garçon
.” Max had reached his head, and was pulling him by the occipital knot, a six-months’ growth of ponytail.

He bit him on the wrist.

“Goddamn you!” Max screamed. “
Fils de putain!
I should leave you to die in here.” He sucked noisily at his hand.

“Maybe then you’d begin to take life seriously.”

“You think I don’t take it seriously? Am I the one who is ignoring a commission that could set me on the path to the Legion of Honor?”