The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (8 page)

From a closer stance, it was even more incredible that the colossi had once formed part of the undifferentiated mountain they flanked. In a niche above the entrance—at perhaps three times life size—sat another splendid pharaoh wearing the traditional kilt and bearing the orb of the sun on his head. Ramses, she guessed, this one in the guise of his namesake, the sun god Ra.

Leaning against the shin of the headless Ramses (it must have been twenty feet from his sandal to his knee!), she felt small and yet more significant—like a jewel—the opposite of the diminution imposed by Chartres and Westminster Abbey. They had humbled her.
Karnak, two weeks earlier, had been terrifying, the immense columns pressing in, threatening to crush her. She had felt overshadowed in every way. But Abu Simbel filled her with an awe that lifted her up and enlarged her. Paradoxically, the very enormity of the figures was comforting instead of intimidating.
Sublime,
she whispered aloud to no one in particular, gazing up at the serenely composed faces looming above her. Two tourists were creeping down from a niche in the rock alongside the shoulder of the southernmost colossus, and she determined to perch there before exploring the interior.

“Paolo,” she said, pointing up to a stone platform, “do you think someone could help me climb up there?”

The guide muttered to one of the crew and shouted back to her. “Brava, Signorella Nightingale. Why not?”

The crewman preceded her, a coil of rope for her to grasp wound around his shoulder. He helped her from foothold to ledge to handhold, and within moments, she was sitting alongside Ramses. Later, she thought, she’d maneuver down to the great ruler’s lap, to seek firsthand succor at his glorious breast.

She contemplated the two identical faces receding to her left in perfect alignment. The duplication was soothing. Here is Ramses, and here again, and again. By repeating that serene visage, the ancient sculptors had managed to convey the experience of time itself—of its passage—in a way that spoke not to death and decay but eternity.

Ramses’s eyes were far too big, she noticed. Nothing was in strict proportion. Yet these anatomical distortions made the figures more expressive of pure spirit than any other relics she’d seen. It was difficult to imagine that men had built these grand and godly objects. Not beautiful, certainly not realistic in the way of art as she’d always understood it, this was a whole world for which she had no language, only what stirred in her heart.

Above the four Osiridae—statues of Ramses in the guise of Osiris—a relief of yet another Ramses held a statuette in his hand. Was this an offering to or a gift from his divinity? And what did it
symbolize? From its central location, she adjudged it important. Another detail to look up in Herr Bunsen’s book.

Selina and Charles were picnicking near the next Ramses, sharing a cup of local beer, when Flo climbed down and signaled her intention to enter the temple. Selina waved back, smiling, and lifted her cup in a toast. Flo was so grateful to the Bracebridges. They were more than loving family friends—angels, really. A year ago she had accompanied them to Italy and learned what easygoing companions they were. The first day in Rome she’d returned to the hotel expecting a reprimand for having spent the whole day lying on her back in the Sistine Chapel, but they hadn’t even missed her. No, their focus, too, was on books and art and politics—and on one another’s ailments—all of which left them delightfully permissive and absentminded.

Because sand had blocked all but about three feet of the temple’s doorway, she had to crawl into the magnificence on all fours—properly humbling, she thought. Her guide followed at a discreet distance. As soon as she was snug inside, she’d send him back.

Still on all fours, she found herself atop an interior sand ramp, this one the height of a double flight of stairs and illuminated by sunlight slanting through the impacted entrance. She scooted down on her bottom to the stone floor of a cavern suffused with twilight. Egypt was not only captivating, it was also glorious fun.

Eight Osiridae stood against as many pillars, their arms crossed upon their chests, the crook and flail in either hand to signify dominion over living and departed souls.

The trapped air, dim light, and thick mountain walls created a strange stillness and warmth, as if she had descended into the bowels of the earth. Near her foot, a scarab beetle careered over a tiny hillock of sand. The guide lighted her oil lamp and she continued into a second hall, and then a smaller chamber aglow with trickles of light from an invisible source high in the ceiling. Four more statues of Osiris supported the roof. Lowering herself against one of them, she shooed the guide away. When he hesitated, she shouted “Go back!”
and was startled to hear the chamber echo her words in a diminishing chorus. He retreated to the opposite wall and knelt, head down, to give her the privacy she demanded. Clearly he had instructions not to leave her alone under any circumstances.

She opened her bag, removed her diary, and came across a recent entry:
I had been feeling melancholy when we reached Aswan, but the sheer excitement brought me round. Riding up the rapids was one of the most delightful moments of my life—a moment that lasted four and a half hours!
They’d navigated the cataracts with difficulty, she, Charles, and Trout on board for the thrilling ordeal while Selina continued overland by donkey.
Six times the dahabiyah jutted out of the water like a vessel about to sink and was hauled by the main force of more than a hundred men up the granite rocks. . . . With unerring aim ropes were thrown from the poop to men on the rocks standing in the attitude of the Apollo Belvedere, their keen eyes glistening with eagerness. . . . I expected them to be dashed to pieces at every moment.

Describing a thing was nearly as exhilarating as the thing itself. She smiled to herself, then uncapped her pen and smoothed a blank page.

Now, at Abu Simbel, I feel nothing but comfort, as if in the presence of God. I am as moved by the Egyptian ideas of the afterlife as by our Christian ones. Further, it seems to me that the Egyptian beliefs are not so different in mechanism than the story of Christ’s resurrection. Bunsen points out that in the original mythology, only the sun-god Ra journeyed to the afterlife. Each night, when he died in the west, he traveled through the underworld on an infernal river divided into twelve rooms, one for each hour of the night. Emerging each morning at sunrise, he assured the continuation of the world. For the next hundred generations, only the pharaohs joined Ra, sailing to the Field of Reeds. But after a thousand generations (about 200
B.C
.), everyone in the kingdom of Egypt could journey to the golden dawn of eternal life. The
similarities with Christian belief are striking: the passage through the twelve rooms of the night was, like the crucifixion, the earthly death. Jesus, like the pharaoh, was divine and the first man to attain heaven. If we accept Him, then like the Egyptians who worshipped Ra and Osiris, we receive the gift of eternal life.

She closed her eyes and sat dragging her fingers through the sand. Writing her thoughts had always been calming, a way to weather her deepest storms and sort out her feelings. In fact, after Selina Brace-bridge and Mary Clarke, she thought of her diary as her best friend. She called it
Lavie,
which was short for
La Vie de Florence Rossignol,
begun as a French assignment when she was seven.
Lavie
was also the record of her struggles—with Parthe, with Fanny, and with herself.

J’aime Mme. Gale, ma bonne d’enfants,
was the first sentence she’d written in it.
I love my nurse, Mrs. Gale.
And then—she recalled this as clearly as if the words had left her pen twenty minutes rather than twenty years ago—“In English her name means a storm, but Mrs. Gale is
“une femme très calme, très placide.”
Writing in French made her feel adult and sophisticated, and she attacked it with relish.
Je suis née le 12 mai, en l’année 1820. My mother, whom I love, is called Fanny, and my Father (also very loved) is William Edward Nightingale. Everybody calls him WEN.
She handed the copybook in weekly to the governess, who returned it with corrections in red ink: accents and apostrophes, spelling errors, failure to match case, gender, or number. There were never any comments on the facts or Flo’s effusive declarations of affection.

When she wrote about her first serious illness,
Lavie
seemed to come to life, to take on the characteristics of an intimate. Flo had had the whooping cough and had to be isolated, Parthe banished downstairs to prevent contagion. Flo had enjoyed having the bed to herself, being alone.
“J’aime être seule,”
she’d written in her careful French,
“complêtement seule.”
On her first trip to London, where she had gone for a wedding, she described the soldiers’ band playing at
the Court of St. James’s Palace and wandering with Fanny through the shining aisles of the best shops. Her dearest relative, WEN’s little sister, Aunt Mai, was to be married to Sam, Fanny’s baby brother. Flo watched Aunt Mai join hands with Uncle Sam, swear her undying love, and kiss him, too long and too hard, with everyone looking on.
I blushed,
Flo had confided in print. She nearly cried when the young couple drove off in their coach. That, she informed
Lavie,
was marriage. People went away. She was never going to do it, never leave the people she loved.

The people she loved
. . . She closed her eyes. Who did not, it turned out, love her as she wished them to. Instead, they had plans for her based not on her talents and desires but on what
they
wanted and what was proper.

The familiar feeling of loneliness, of incipient hopelessness, gripped her—a queasiness in the chest she knew too well.
Lavie
held that story, too—of the first time she had known despair.

It began with unexpected criticism from Fanny soon after she began the diary. Florence was bright, her mother conceded, there was no disputing that; she conquered her academics with ease, and charmed people with engaging conversation. But she was unkind to Parthe. Flo could scarcely believe Fanny thought such a thing! Was it Flo’s fault if Parthe were duller, shyer, and less able-bodied? If she was more inclined to doodle on her sketch pad than declaim memorized passages in Father’s library? Invariably, docile Parthe cried in frustration while Flo remained dry-eyed. She knew that the gifts and talents with which she’d been blessed (and Parthe, alas, had not) could not be shared by force of will, presuming Flo even had the will to do so. Which she did not.

Not believing that she was a troublemaker, Flo latched on to the flattery instead of the censure in Fanny’s critique. She had social graces! She was a brilliant conversationalist with a sunny disposition. Buoyed by this praise, a few days later she had written a letter to her Aunt Anne without clearing it first with Fanny. Her mother flew into a tantrum. “I hope you have got safe to your journey’s end,” Florence had written. “And I do hope you saw the eclipse of the moon on the
day you went. Papa says that you were blind boobies if you did not watch it for a whole hour, as we did.”

The next week Fanny began to inquire about an addition to the household staff.

• • •

Flo’s right foot was numb, she realized. She changed position.

It had taken years for her to grasp what Fanny had intended in hiring Miss Christie, that she had another motive beyond educating her girls: to rein Florence in, to instill in her humility and doubt where there had been too many high spirits, too much confidence, a native arrogance that made her impertinent. But at the time, Flo had been excited at the prospect of a governess. She had imagined long romps through the woods and parklands, and hours spent pasting album pages with pressed flowers and leaves, bird feathers and butterflies. She would ride her pony more than ever under Miss Christie’s supervision. Miss Christie would teach her chess, so that eventually she could play with WEN.

Before Miss Christie arrived, Fanny warned the girls not to speak unless spoken to, under any conditions. “That is intended for
you,
Florence,” she had added. “I want no outbursts. If you think of something to say, I want you to turn your tongue in your mouth seven times before you speak.” Flo had felt her face redden to be singled out for reprimand.

When the girls were called to the sitting room where Miss Christie and Fanny had taken tea, Flo was immediately hopeful. For one thing, Miss Christie looked too young to be a grown-up. Though she had overheard Fanny tell WEN that Miss Christie was almost twenty-one, she could have passed for fourteen. Flo liked her looks, too. She was tall in comparison to Fanny, neatly got up in a navy gabardine bodice and skirt, with blue canvas gloves and a straw hat with a single feather. She nodded at Flo and Parthe, who curtsied as Fanny introduced them. “Good day,” Miss Christie said, smiling.

“Good day to you,” the girls chimed in unison.

Miss Christie listed the subjects she could teach. She’d begin, she said, with the absolute fundamentals, which, Flo was surprised to learn, had nothing to do with numbers or spelling and everything to do with being quiet, paying strict attention, and doing exactly what Miss Christie bid. She handed her references to Fanny in two sealed envelopes.

Scanning them, Fanny seemed pleased. “Of course the girls will call you Miss Christie, but I hope you don’t mind if I shall call you Sarah.”

“I’d be honored,” said Miss Christie, her cheeks turning pink.

“Thank you for coming. I am quite satisfied that you will fit the bill. You may begin as soon as you can move in. Shall we say on Thursday?” Fanny turned to her daughters. “Girls, do you want to ask Miss Christie anything?”

Parthe shook her head, suddenly shy, while Flo popped off the couch and placed herself directly in front of the new governess. “What’s your favorite game?”