The Sacred River (20 page)

The shadow flickered past the door.

•  •  •

Laying down her handwork, Louisa strolled around the garden, oblivious to the lush proliferation of leaf and blossom, the cries of the birds. For now, at least, she could bear no more remembering.

THIRTY-TWO

At the sound of the door, Louisa cried out and sat up, her eyes staring.

“Whatever is it, Mother?” Harriet said, opening a shutter, allowing light to flood in over the wooden floor.

“Oh, Harriet. It’s you. I . . . I was dreaming.”

“Of what?”

“Nothing.”

“It must have been something.” Harriet sat on the edge of the bed and took Louisa’s hand, felt the clammy coolness of her palm.

“I was dreaming about . . . Dover. Where I lived when I was a girl.”

Louisa lay down again and closed her eyes. She looked as white as the pillow slip, her dark hair tangled.

“Are you ill, Mother?”

Louisa shook her head. “Take your breakfast without me, Harriet. I’ve got a headache.”

After breakfast, Harriet brought up a tray of tea made from mint leaves with a bowl of coarse sugar lumps, sent by Monsieur Andreas with his compliments.

“Shall I pour you a cup?” She put it down by the bed and Louisa turned her face away.

“No, thank you.”

“Can I bring you something else?”

“Rosewater,” came her mother’s voice. “I wish I had a few drops of rosewater.”

“I’ll go and look for it in the bazaar.”

Louisa opened her eyes and lifted her head. “You cannot go alone.”

“Fouad will come with me. There’s nothing to fear, Mother.”

Louisa raised a hand then let it fall back on the sheet.

“If you insist. Don’t forget your parasol.”

•  •  •

Harriet breathed in the fresh, swampy scent of the Nile. The trees by the river made a canopy, the leaves shading the dry earth underneath in a shifting, soft-edged dance. Down on the shore, half a dozen women were filling pitchers with clay cups. The women departed, the great round-bottomed jugs balanced at an angle on their heads, two brightly dressed girls following behind them with smaller pots on their heads.

Winding her scarf around her neck, Harriet stopped and looked across to the west bank. Beyond the palms and crops that ran in a strip along the other side of the water, the mountains rose implacably. Already, the heat was visible in layers over their flat tops, shimmering and otherworldly.

Up ahead, Fouad whistled. The dog strained at the leash and Harriet set off again. She was half running, keeping her eyes to the ground as she tried not to trip over tree roots or get her skirts tangled in the lead, when she ran headlong into a warm, angular body. Crying out in surprise, she fell awkwardly to the ground, dropping the lead in the dust. A hand with a silver ring on it, a dark red stone in an oval mount, reached down and took hers. It was a man’s hand, the grip dry and strong.

“Permit me to help you.”

He pulled her up and Harriet got to her feet, too winded to speak.

“
Ach
, my apologies,” he said as he let go of her hand. “I was looking over at the other side.”

“It was my fault,” she said shaking dirt from her skirt. “I was following my dog, not paying attention to where I was going.”

She recognized him immediately. He was dressed in the same pale, creased suit, wearing his fraying Panama hat. The bleached ends of his dark hair still brushed his shoulders. His face, now that at last she was able to see it, was suntanned and his eyes the color of the neem leaves over their heads. The man was younger than she’d thought, not more than thirty years old.

Papers carpeted the ground, their corners being lifted by the breeze off the water. Bending to help him gather them, picking up the last sheet, Harriet saw a drawing of hieroglyphs, a neat, precise rendering of the symbols, surrounded by writing in a language she didn’t recognize. She handed it to him.

“
Danke
,” he said, flattening the documents back into a folder, putting it under his arm. “Are you certain you’re unharmed?”

“Quite certain, thank you.”

Her chest was throbbing where his had thumped against it. The man must have the same sure sense of her physical being as she had of his. The dog raced toward them, his lead trailing in the dust, and began leaping up toward the man’s knees.

“Have we met before?” said the man, leaning down, rubbing Dash’s ears.

“I recognize you too,” Harriet said.

“You do?”

“Your piano . . . We watched it being loaded at Brindisi.”

“
Ach,
you were on board the ship. You must have cursed the delay.”

“No,” she said. “I was happy to see a piano traveling to Africa.”

“Were you really?” His eyes were alive and searching, at odds with the formality of his manner. They flickered away again, to the far bank, the pink creases of the hills. “I discovered I was unable to live without music. So I brought a piano two thousand miles. Crazy, is it not? The men almost dropped it in the river, over there.” He gestured at the west bank.

Some melancholy hung in the air about him, undispelled by the light and heat of the morning. Harriet pushed hair out of her eyes, feeling as curious about him as she had done the first time she saw him. On the steamer, she’d taken him for a European, but here he seemed neither Western nor Eastern but something in between, adapted to this place but not of it.

“Why did you take it over to that side?” she said.

“I live there.”

“In the Necropolis?” She couldn’t keep the astonishment out of her voice.

“Nearby. I am working at a site, making an excavation of a tomb.” They both looked across the water to where a lush band of emerald fringed the far side of the river like a velvet ribbon. A whistle pierced the air and Harriet brought her eyes back to the east bank. Farther along the shore, Fouad was leaning against a tree, his shoulders curved forward.

“I’m on my way to the bazaar,” Harriet said.

“Of course.” The man raised his hat. “If you’re sure you are unharmed.”

Harriet felt in her pocket, gripped her book.

“I couldn’t help seeing those hieroglyphs, on your papers,” she said. “I’ve been interested in hieroglyphs since I was a girl. I started my own Book of the Dead, in London. I was ill then, and thought I should never get well.”

Why had she told a stranger something so private? He would think her absurd.

“Is that so?”

“I wonder, I mean, might we visit the site? My mother and I?”

The man hesitated, and when he answered, his voice was abrupt.

“There is little to see. I am still working in an outer passageway.

No great finds of gold and jewels. No mummies.”

“Oh, of course.” Harriet felt herself flushing with disappointment, both at the refusal and at the man’s misunderstanding. She had never been much interested in the riches the tombs had contained. It was the hieroglyphs that were the treasure to her. “I suppose visitors must get in the way.”

“Some do.” He bent to pet Dash again and the dog wagged his tail and grinned. “
Ach
, why not?” the man said, as if he were speaking to himself. He straightened up. “You may visit if you wish, Fräulein. I’ll call for you and your mother on Friday. Can you be ready early? It is dusty over on that side and hotter, away from the river.”

“We will be ready. But you don’t know where we’re staying.”

“The Luxor Hotel, is it not?”

She nodded as he gave a little bow and went on his way.

Harriet followed Fouad through the area where the tinsmiths and coppersmiths worked, the din jangling in her ears. They continued past the open booths of tailors and shoemakers, where the ground was littered with ends of cotton and scraps of leather, and into the section given over to groceries and medicines.

Walking underneath hanging bunches of strips of gold paper that rustled strangely in the breeze, surveying heaps of dried dates and rough chunks of soap and strings of dried fish, woven baskets piled high with smooth-sided cones of powdered spices in amber and ocher and scarlet, Harriet struggled to remember what her errand was.

She could hardly believe that she had been so bold as to invite herself to a tomb. If she’d had time to consider what she was saying, she might not have dared. She had no regrets, she decided, as Fouad showed her into a little shop, its front shaded with an awning of sacking, its dusty goods displayed on a shelf along the back. Sitting cross-legged on his mud divan, the shopkeeper pressed Harriet to take tea. Emboldened by what had just passed, Harriet broke with convention for a second time.

“Tell him I will,” she said to Fouad. “I would like a cup of tea.”

As she said the words, she remembered. Rosewater. A stool was brought for her to sit on, then a boy arrived with a steaming glass on a tray. Harriet told Fouad what she wanted, he explained it to the shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper dispatched the tea boy on another errand. By the time she’d drunk the tea, Harriet was in possession of a brown bottle that, according to the label, contained cinnamon cough mixture made in Battersea. She pulled out the cork and caught the soft fragrance of roses, shook a few drops onto her hand, and rubbed them on her wrists.

“
Kwayis
, Miss Harry?”

“
Kwayis
, Fouad.”

Stepping back out into the sunlight from the dark interior, skirting around vendors who—Fouad informed her—called out that figs were the food of sultans, licorice water the refresher of kings, Harriet felt as if she was already with the ancient Egyptians, as if their descendants lived on here in Luxor, faithful to some of the old ways, as unchanging as the landscape and the sacred river itself.

THIRTY-THREE

The crew had cleared the luncheon table and the three passengers were lingering over coffee, Eyre smoking a cigar and Effie Simpson retelling the story of their wedding day while Jim nodded in confirmation. It was past the heat of the day and the breeze off the water was cool. Mrs. Simpson interrupted her reminiscing to complain of a chill and her husband went below to the cabin to retrieve her wrap.

Eyre, prompted in equal measure by the sound of a disturbance up ahead and by a desire to avoid being alone with Mrs. Simpson, rose and went to the edge of the deck. The river was in a meander and the bank on the left side loomed high overhead, a cliff of dried black mud. Heading toward them at a clip from around the bend, propelled by the water’s fast flow, was a rusty hulk, lying low in the water.

Eyre’s first impression was not of the likelihood of imminent collision, although the captain of their dahabeah was heaving on the rudder, shouting at the crew. Eyre was transfixed by the cargo of the craft that was heading straight at them. It was loaded, not with cotton bales or sugarcane but with men. Hundreds of them, packed like sheep, on an unshaded deck. There wasn’t sufficient space to allow a single one of them to lie down or even to sit. The babel that rose from the wretches on seeing the dahabeah—the screams and cries and invocations to Allah—was deafening.

Clad in the ragged robes of peasant farmers, most of the men had their wrists bound. The few free men held in their hands long whips, the
korbaj
,
or scourge of hippopotamus hide, that was offered for sale on occasion to tourists. As the shouts and beseeching cries increased in volume, the overseers began setting about the captives, lashing them across the heads and faces and backs, cursing them as sons of dogs. Profanities were the one part of the Arabic language that it had amused Eyre to pick up.

“Christ,” said Jim Simpson, standing beside Eyre, holding a lace mantilla in his large hands. “Bloody thing’s going to run into us.”

Moments later, a juddering shock ran through the timbers of the boat, sending the coffee cups skidding off the table and prompting screams from Effie Simpson. Irritated, Eyre tossed the end of his cigar into the water. The collision could mean only two things: delay and further expense.

The captain, Rais Mohammed, sprang into action, pushing the two vessels apart with his bare hands, inspecting the damage to the dahabeah, and issuing orders to the crew. His commands went unheeded. The sailors were in shouted conversation with the unfortunates on the hulk, who were still being belabored by the whips of their captors. One man had fallen overboard and was thrashing about in the water, his hands bound. His head sank and rose and sank again.