The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  Emerging into the sunlight, she’d found herself standing inside a low mud parapet, looking out at a world whose existence she had not until now suspected. All around her, in rectangles of flat mud, gaggles of ducks and chickens strutted and pecked, sheets and fruits were spread out to dry, women squatted by bowls picking chaff and stones from beans, or washing clothes. Not a chimney pot to be seen.

  She’d gotten the supplies she needed from an apothecary in the Frank quarter, acquired cotton cloths and tin bowls, and set up the little room as best she could. Then she had to contemplate the aspect she’d been postponing. How to reach the children. In London, without barriers of language, it was easy enough to recruit people for any service, on the grounds of entertainment, the likelihood of a little warmth or some food offered for free. Here, she was not certain of how to begin. It occurred to her that she needed a translator. Perhaps Mustapha would agree to assist.

  She stood in the open doorway and waited for likely-­looking women to pass by. Young mothers seemed suddenly to have absented themselves entirely from the alley, although they thronged every other quarter.

  “Good morning, ladies,” she said to a pair shuffling past in what looked like black shrouds, every part of them but their eyes hidden. Even so thoroughly camouflaged, they appeared by their gait and outlines beyond the likelihood of having young children but they might, Yael supposed, be grandmothers. Habobat. She made a dabbing motion at her eyes.

  “Eye clinic,” she called after their departing backs. “For children.” Neither looked around.

  She retreated inside, sat alone in the room, listening to the sounds from outside. A quarrel broke out between two men and Yael got to her feet in alarm, wondering if she would find herself providing first aid to adults. Within minutes, the row had given way to sounds of laughter. Yael had felt confused. She’d heard more laughter since she arrived in Egypt than she believed she’d heard in her entire life.

  Returning the glass to the table, Yael became aware of a man standing by her with an expectant air. She rose and followed him through a door and into a dim, almost empty room. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw the sheikh sitting on a cushion at the far end. In front of him was a row of smaller, plainer cushions for his audience and beside him, on a stool, what appeared to be a copy of the Mohammedan holy book, the Qur’an. Behind him, on the wall, was a set of framed photographs. Yael had the impression they were of the sheikh but, distracted by the prospect of being expected to sit on the floor, on a bolster, surprised by the simplicity of the surroundings, when she had expected a grandeur to match his own, she could not be sure.

  He gestured for her to be seated and she became aware that his assistant had brought in the chair for her, placed it behind the row of cushions. Sitting down, she bowed her head. She’d understood that the sheikh did not favor eye contact.

  “Good morning, Sheikh Hamada.”

  “Welcome, Sitti. You require further assistance?”

  Yael hadn’t meant to pretend it was a social call but the bluntness of his greeting threw her off balance. She found herself answering a query he had not raised.

  “I am quite well, thank you, despite the unpleasant weather. Are you in good health? Your family?”

  “Thank God.”

  He blinked but otherwise remained motionless. Sweat trickled down her back, under her dress. She must declare her purpose.

  “I wish to start . . . That is, I have started . . . a clinic in the old town. For the children.”

  The sheikh’s beard twitched. If she had expected congratulation, she was not to be gratified. No matter. She was asking the sheikh only for his blessing, which he surely could not withhold, and more practically, his good word among the women of the neighborhood. If he seemed amenable, she might venture to inquire whether he had any candidates for the post of translator.

  Yael cleared her throat, which was dry again. “You told me yourself that the children here lack many things. I want to help them retain their sight.”

  The sheikh’s expression quickened. “You are a doctor?”

  “No. I intend to teach the mothers how to keep their children’s eyes in better condition. Talk with them about hygiene and the importance of cleanliness. Washing their children’s faces.”

  “Washing their faces,” he repeated. “Can you bring food?”

  She shook her head. “No, Sheikh Hamada. I cannot bring food.”

  He looked at her for the first time, his eyes making a brief, incurious contact. His beard was a vivid orange, freshly stained with the powdered leaf that Mustapha’s wife stained her nails with, and the rims of his eyes darkened with the antimony that they called kohl. He would have appeared a figure of fun in London, been taken for a theatrical performer or a turn at a fair. Here, he was sage. Powerful.

  Yael felt her own peculiarity more strongly than the sheikh’s. She pictured the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, remembered Belzoni as her mother had told her she’d seen him as a child, nearly seven feet tall and dressed as a mummy, wrapped head to toe in bandages, moving among the crowds, causing women to faint. Yael longed for a peppermint, extra strong, to chase away the creep of mortification that England, the idea of England, kept arousing in her. No one had warned her that when you traveled, you lost your country twice over. Physically were removed from it and mentally suffered a greater distance still.

  “What help do you seek, ma’am?”

  She leaned forward. “I want you to explain to them, Sheikh, that I can assist them. So that they will come to the clinic. I have a room in the old town, near the Gate of the Sea. I want you to tell them not to be afraid.”

  “They should not be afraid? Of foreigners? Are you sure?”

  “Not of the ones who wish to assist them. Most certainly not.”

  From the look on his face, Yael might almost have believed he disagreed with this incontrovertible truth.

  He ran the palm of his hand over his beard in an affectionate, private gesture.

  “Our people need food, Sitti. Without food, we die. And our children perish first. I cannot help you.”

  The sheikh looked past her shoulder, gave the slightest possible inclination of his head, and a man holding a tattered and thumbed piece of paper shuffled forward from outside, folded himself in one agile movement onto the cushion at his feet.

  Mustapha reappeared, his head bowed. He kissed the sheikh’s hand and backed away. The audience was at an end. Yael had no choice but to stand up and take her leave. She assumed the vague expression that she found her best camouflage in any situation, blinked and nodded, spoke cheerfully.

  “Thank you, Sheikh,” she said. “Good day to you.”

  On the other side of the gate, back in the dusty street, Yael put up the rusty black gamp she’d brought from London in case of rain and had taken to using as a parasol. The spokes were reluctant, sharp on her fingers, and as she raised the struts, a soft shower of dust descended from inside the umbrella. It drifted down, settled on her bonnet, her nose, her shoulders as, walking a couple of paces behind Mustapha, she set off for the villa.

  • • •

  Yael strolled around the garden, as was her habit in the hour before supper. The wind had dropped, but it hadn’t rained for days, and the air was humid and salty. She could hear Mustapha’s wife, talking to her children in their quarters, making a low, ongoing stream of sound like birdsong.

  The Reverend Griffinshawe considered her a potential housekeeper and no more. As a Christian and as a woman, she was beneath the sheikh’s dignity. She had thought better of him but inside their formal garb, in their self-regard, the two men were alike. Members of that same family, the brotherhood of man.

  “A plague on you,” she said aloud. “A plague on both your houses.” Yael held her head very straight as she continued around under the trees, enjoying the faint, sweet smell of earth, of blossom and wood smoke, of salt and
rotting vegetables, of what she could only call life. She would not give in. God had brought her to this place for a purpose.

  One of Suraya’s children wailed in protest at something and the baby began to cry. “Hush,” Yael heard Suraya sing out, in English. “Come to me.” She thought of Harriet’s patient teaching, the pair of them singing children’s rhymes. Of course. Yael didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it sooner. Suraya. She would help Yael to recruit the patients. She could talk with the mothers. If Mustapha agreed to it, Yael would appoint her as her assistant.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Harriet felt dreamlike. Her feet, in the same flat, laced boots that she wore in London, were treading the ground where queens had walked in beauty, where kings sported in their chariots and citizens listened to the music of drums. She was being warmed by the same sun, breathing the same air, tinged now with rose and gold.

  It was late afternoon, and after the fortnight-long voyage up the Nile, she and Louisa had disembarked from the Amon-Ra, been carried through the shallows by the crew, and set down on the shore of the village of Luxor by the ruins of a vast temple.

  Fouad splashed through the water, holding his shoes above his head, soaking his pantaloons. With a satisfied air, as if he’d conjured it himself, he waved in the direction of a brown-stone building that stood on the other side of a rough road leading along by the river.

  “Hotel, Miss Harry. Kwayis?”

  “Kwayis, Fouad. Good.”

  She smiled at him. Fouad appeared to have made the decision that although employed and paid by Louisa, it was Harriet he was there to serve. He was a faithful shadow, offering help both wanted and unwanted.

  “Lord only knows what it’ll be like,” Louisa said, raising her green glasses and peering in the direction of the hotel.

  Harriet and Louisa crossed the road and passed under an arch bearing the name Luxor Hotel, picked out in pebbles in the mortar. Inside, behind a reception desk, a man dressed in a threadbare ­dinner jacket and a lopsided white bow tie, appeared to be waiting for them. He spread his hands in welcome.

  “Salaam alaikum, mesdames.”

  “Rooms,” Louisa said, pulling off her glove, holding two fingers in the air. She pointed at herself, then Harriet. “We need two rooms.”

  The lobby was painted white with earth-colored tiles underfoot. Pushed up against one wall was a shoeshine chair in carved black ebony. With its high step and long back, it looked to Harriet like a dusty, vacated throne. The man was already unhooking keys from a board. He emerged from behind the desk and made a bow to Louisa.

  “The ladies will have the best chambers that we’re able to offer.”

  “You speak English,” said Louisa, pausing the movement of her fan. “How very fortunate.”

  “Monsieur Andreas, at your service,” he said, bowing again, turning to lead the way up the wooden stairs, past a large thermometer on the wall. “You are most welcome, madame. Follow me.”

  Minutes later, they’d taken two adjacent rooms with windows looking on to the Nile, at a long-stay rate of thirteen shillings a week, negotiated by Louisa. Fouad would be accommodated in a separate part of the hotel, a room in the garden where Egyptian servants stayed. The trunks had been hauled up the stairs, farewells made to the captain, the crew, and the French passengers of the Amon-Ra.

  Louisa departed for the neighboring room, saying she intended to rest before dinner. She kissed Harriet on the cheek and looked at her with anxious eyes.

  “You will be able to get well here, away from the wind, away from everything.”

  “I hope so, Mother.”

  Harriet closed her door behind her and surveyed a wooden bed swathed in a veil of white netting, a simple washstand, two long windows. Pulling her hair loose from its bun, she slid her book under the pillow and went to the window. Opening the wooden shutters, she leaned over and rested her elbows on the warm stone sill.

  Across the rough road, the place where the dahabeah had moored to allow Harriet and Louisa to disembark was empty. The water bore no trace of what had recently been their home. On the other side of the river, the mountains looked soft and mysterious, like a pink velvet cloth carelessly thrown down on the floor of the world. There was no sign of what was hidden in them, the painted tombs of kings and queens.

  A huge sun sank below the horizon, the color of the mountains changing before Harriet’s eyes from rose to crimson to a deep, luminous violet. She was within sight of her destination. Despite the warmth of the air, she shivered.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Eberhardt Woolfe sat on his verandah facing out over the river to the village on the east bank. In his hands, pressed to his eyes, was a pair of binoculars. He watched as a flock of swifts darkened the sky around a large tree on the far side of the Nile, the birds settling then rising, moving in concert as if magnetized by an invisible force, writing on the sky.

  His eye was caught by a flash of color behind the darkening cloud and he found himself looking at a woman leaning out from a first-floor window at the hotel. She had red hair and a pink shawl over her shoulders. A pale face rested on a pale pair of hands. The woman was perfectly still. He adjusted the focus, wanting to see her with greater clarity, but the binoculars could offer no more.

  Eberhardt wondered who she was. He tried to focus again on the darting birds; the light was too low, he couldn’t make them out. Putting down the glasses, he looked across at the far bank. The birds were reduced to specks, the woman to a fiery punctuation mark against the dark stone façade of the Luxor Hotel.

  Rubbing his eyes, Eberhardt reminded himself that he wasn’t here to look at women, at tourists, to wonder idly about making their acquaintance. He was here to excavate the tomb of the queen and record his findings. His purpose was to honor the dead, to place himself in their service. The living were not his concern and he sought no place among them.

  He rose from his chair and went inside to the large room in which he worked and spent his leisure hours, there being for him now no distinction between the two. Banging the screen door behind him, lighting the lamp on the desk, he lowered himself into the chair, feeling the ache in his shoulders. He was stiff from the day’s endeavor, from scraping at the dense wall of rubble and debris that still blocked the entrance to the tomb.

  Picking up his scalpel, he began with its sharp, silver point to scrape dried bat droppings from a scarab he had found a few days earlier. The scarab was green, made of malachite, and smaller than his thumbnail. The humble beetle had been for the ancient Egyptians the symbol of resurrection, for the way it rolled its ball of muck, mimicking the sun rising to roll across the sky each day. This one had survived some two and a half thousand years. It was crudely carved, the workmanship unremarkable. There had been shoddy workers among the scribes and craftsmen of ancient Egypt, as well as fine ones. It touched him, to realize it. He had a tenderness toward the imperfect. He reached for a brush and dusted away the specks of dirt and dust he’d dislodged from the carved lines of the beetle’s back.

  As he did so, Eberhardt saw again the white, oval face, the sideways tilt of it as it rested on the long, linked fingers. The woman had been so very still as she looked out over the river. As if, he could not help thinking, she too inhabited that space between the lands of the living and the dead.

  “Ach,” he said aloud. “Such nonsense. Be quiet now.”

  He’d gotten into the regrettable habit of talking to himself. He spoke Arabic fluently, had exchanges all day long with the workers at the site and the foreman who managed the hiring and firing, distributed the wages. He could speak with them but he couldn’t talk to them. They understood each other to a serviceable degree and no further. If he had anything important to discuss, he conversed with himself. Or sometimes with Kati.

  He put down the scarab and went to the far side of the room, to where the Bösendorfer stood, opened the lid. Pulling up his shirtsleeves, inclining
his sore back over the ivories, he lowered his fingers to the keys and heard the first notes enter the room like party guests, dancing over the air, reaching the mud ceiling and the rounded corners, drifting out through the netted door to the verandah. He closed his eyes and played on, Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved filling his head and heart and mind.

  “Kati,” he said, his voice drowned out by the music. “Where are you? Where are you now?”

  THIRTY

  The air in Luxor was dry and clean, composed mainly of sunlight, it seemed to Harriet as she inhaled it. Her chest had gradually ceased to ache and her breathing grew deeper and easier with each day that passed. Sitting in the grass-topped shelter in the hotel garden with Louisa, inhaling the scent of the jasmine that grew up the wooden supports, the muddy, underlying tang of the great river, she felt as if she might take in so much air she could float away like a balloon.

  Each morning, Arab men came to the hotel gates to offer their services as guides to the west bank. They pressed around European visitors, offering to procure donkeys on the other side, ladies’ saddles, cold water, antikis for a good price.

  Harriet and Louisa watched from where they sat on the stone terrace at the front of the hotel.

  “Why don’t we go, Mother?” Harriet said. “I’d like to.”

  Monsieur Andreas, hovering by a bed of leggy roses in the garden, cleared his throat.

  “I will find the best guide for Madame,” he said. “The very best.”

  Louisa lifted her green veil, threw it back over her hat, and smiled at him.

  “I fear it may overtax Harriet’s strength, Monsieur,” she said. “And for myself I consider visiting tombs a macabre occupation.”