The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  “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.

  Eyre turned away.

  “Can’t we get going, Rais?”

  “In good time,” said the captain. “These poor fellows are sending messages to their families, with the men.”

  “Instruct the crew to get on with their duties,” said Eyre. “I’m not paying them to act as go-betweens.”

  It was risky to get involved with natives in large numbers. He’d made that mistake on one of his previous trips, when a Scotsman attached to their party had shot a small child, mistaking it for a gazelle in the reeds. The boy had lived, but they’d been obliged to pay blood money, and even then things had almost turned ugly.

  The hulk floated on around the bend, taking its strange cargo with it. A part of the bow of the dahabeah had been damaged. Rais Mohammed began to explain the details of what had occurred, wanted to show Eyre the problem and, worse, engage him on the subject of forced labor. They were peasants, fellaheen from the south, he said, and had been rounded up like goats, taken off their own fields to be transported two hundred miles to the delta to work on someone else’s, without reward.

  Eyre cut the loquacious fellow short.

  “Just tell me, old chap, when will we be on the move again?”

  Rais Mohammed looked at him, then shrugged in the way they did when they had no idea of the answer to a question but didn’t want to admit it.

  “Tomorrow, God willing,” he said, his face dark and reserved. “We shall leave tomorrow, Mr. Soane. Or after tomorrow.”

  • • •

  In the evening, Eyre opened some red wine from the case he’d brought and began drinking it from the bottle. Jim was cleaning his guns. He sat in his shirtsleeves, humming, surrounded by greasy rags, elongated brushes, abrasive pads, and tins of stinking grease. His feet were bare on the wooden deck and his wedding ring gleamed in the light from the hurricane lamps swinging overhead. Jim’s absorption, his unself-conscious contentment, made Eyre, for a minute, loathe his old friend.

  They were awaiting the completion of the repair, the boat moored at some village in the middle of nowhere, a mile upriver from where they’d had the collision. Most of the crew had gone off to bake bread, to supply themselves for the rest of the journey. Two remained, squatting on the bank at a short distance from the dahabeah, smoking a hubble-bubble improvised from an old tin can and a length of rubber tubing. Eyre could hear the long, dying gurgle as the smoke passed through the water, the voices of the sailors murmuring in the still twilight. The captain had ordered them to stay, to make sure the khawagat, the foreigners, weren’t murdered, Eyre supposed.

  The low-slung canvas chair enforced an attitude of relaxation that he didn’t feel. Pulling himself to his feet, he began pacing the rectangle of deck. It had been a stroke of luck to learn from the Coxes that Louisa and her daughter were going south. Without the aunt, as well, which made matters easier. The aunt could get in his way, he had an instinct.

  The danger was that the Herons would leave before he ever arrived. Or, worse, pass him on their own dahabeah, traveling downstream, shouting cordial greetings across a stretch of fast-moving water. He pictured Louisa behind a pair of green glass spectacles—she would adopt them, he was certain—her white-gloved hand raised in a wave.

  Leaning on the railing, he looked upriver in the direction of Luxor. The sky on the west bank was crimson and vermilion and madder, brighter and more luminous than even gouache had ever been; if he depicted the sunset as it was, no one would believe it.

  He resumed pacing, holding the bottle in one hand. He would tackle Rais Mohammed when the fellow returned from the village. They would leave in the morning, repair done or not done, and whether or not there was any wind. If the crew had to tow the dahabeah all the way to Luxor, then so be it.

  Taking another swig, putting down the bottle, Eyre climbed down the companionway to the cabin and brought out his paintbox from the overhead cupboard. He felt easier as he returned to the deck. In the few minutes he’d been in the cabin, it had shifted from dusk to night. Darkness fell quickly in Egypt. The moon was up, bright and almost full; he could see the turbans of the two sailors moving like two great white poppies as they squatted at the top of the bank, the pipe finished and the smell of roasting coffee beans drifting on the air. The fellows lived for the duration of the voyage on tobacco and coffee, with a ration of hard bread and dried dates. When the wind dropped, they were capable of pulling the dahabeah all day and all night. Eyre felt a grudging admiration for them.

  Sitting in one of the yellow pools of light shed by the storm lamps, he opened out the tiered lid of his paintbox and began removing metal tubes, china water saucers, brushes and scrapers and bottles of turpentine and poppy oil, arranging them in a circle around him on the wooden deck. He set about cleaning the saucers, arranging the colors, considering which hues he would need for the complexion of Miss He
ron, so white it was nearly blue. He would prepare the canvas with zinc white. It would pass the time until they arrived.

  Eyre pictured the girl in his mind’s eye. She was not in any way his type, insofar as he had one. His tastes, he liked to think, were catholic. He’d felt irritated when Mrs. Sarah Cox had told him the girl longed to see him. Mrs. Cox had showed him the words, apparently written in Miss Heron’s own handwriting, under a London address, which he’d memorized.

  He intended to seduce her. He would take her body and her heart, then abandon her. Louisa would taste the bitterness of seeing someone she loved destroyed. The symmetry of it pleased him. He felt in his pocket for his cigar case, then thought better of it and let it remain where it was. He was running low. There was a danger that he would be reduced to smoking local tobacco.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Twenty or more women sat cross-legged on a swept earthen floor, their backs bent, sandals piled in a heap at the door. In front of them, at a rough wooden table, stood Suraya. Her veil was thrown back off her head, her arms submerged to the elbows in a basin of water. In her wet hands, glistening with Pears soap, was a white china doll with blue glass eyes.

  Suraya lathered its rounded cheeks and nose, drew her thumbs over its eyes in a gentle, fluid movement, talking all the time in a singsong monologue that required no answer, that seemed by its rhythms to be its own justification, a bath of words as clean and slippery as the bubbles on the water.

  Sitting on the only chair, her arms hanging loose by her sides, her fingers still wrinkled and waterlogged, Yael watched. She’d cleaned the faces and hands of two dozen or more real infants, swabbed their eyes with zinc lotion purchased at the Otto Huber apothecary in the rue Chérif Pacha, spoken at least a few words with each of their mothers, through Suraya. The connection between dirt and disease was unknown to these women. It was God’s will, they declared, through Suraya, that their children should live or die. They feared that keeping the children clean would bring the evil eye on them. Yael thanked God she wasn’t a Mohammedan. God’s will was all very well but one could not accept the death of a child. Not without a fight.

  Mustapha had not only agreed to the suggestion that Suraya could help, he had thrown himself into it. He set about teaching English to his wife and Arabic to Yael. The three of them sat together in the evenings after dark, under the mulberry trees. It was simple teaching, based on drawing pictures, pointing at things around them. The Arabic was harsh in the throat, some sounds impossible to pronounce. Mustapha made Yael repeat words many times over. He considered his own language, it occurred to Yael after the first of these lessons, the primary one. English was to him the supplementary tongue. After quelling her initial indignation at this misplaced idea, she applied herself more diligently to the pronunciations.

  Soon, Yael could say more than the few words she’d picked up without trying. She was able to ask after people’s health and explain that she did not take sugar in her tea, or want a carriage ride today. She could express that food was good or bad, hot or cold, and that she was thirsty or hungry or content. That yes, the eggs, the day, the city of Alexandria—Iskandariya—were indeed kwayis. Good. Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. She liked the musical sound of that word, the richness of it, ever on the lips of the impoverished Egyptians. Best of all she liked the greeting. Salaam alaikum. Peace be upon you. They were fine words, Yael thought, with which to begin any encounter.

  Suraya let out another stream of communication, which sounded as if it were a question. The women sat with their veils held in their teeth and their breasts out for their babies. Some appeared to listen, some talked with each other. One volunteered what Yael took to be an answer to the question. She hoped it was the right answer. The right question.

  Even when the first of the ladies had ventured inside the clinic, the problem had remained of how to teach them. It was futile to simply clean the children’s eyes; the mothers had to learn how to do it themselves, morning and night. She’d spent hours with Suraya, trying to explain how things were done in London, how the same measures could be used here.

  The women weren’t easy to convince. It was dawning on Yael that they had their own ideas, which they held as firmly as she held hers; they didn’t, of course, have any means of understanding that they were wrong and she was right. It was God’s will, they informed her, through Suraya, if their children contracted eye disease. Failed to thrive. Died. Yael wished she could explain to the mothers about the Christian God, who wanted all his children to prosper and flourish, who brought the promise of life everlasting to all who believed in him.

  “Nonsense,” she said theatrically, in response to their fatalism. “Mere superstition. Balderdash. Preposterous.”

  Yael’s initial method of communication—speaking in the most prosaic English, clearly and loudly, patiently repeating phrases about the link between ill health and grime—had proved not to work. Since she could not be understood even by Suraya when she strayed away from the most basic utterances, Yael had taken to performing as if she were onstage, in a pantomime, declaiming with large gestures and polysyllabic words whose vehemence seemed to communicate itself to the women even if their meaning was obscure.

  “Poppycock,” she shouted, flinging her arms in the air, taking in the faces of the assembled crowd. “Ludicrous tittle-tattle. Old wives’ tales. Humbug.”

  There seemed to be no end to the vocabulary for describing erroneous thought and speech. Perhaps because there had been so much of it, throughout time. Humbug and obfuscation were as common to England as rain, she was beginning to think. It was a sadness, the way distance from one’s own country diminished it.

  Three little girls had crept away from their mothers and were hovering close to Suraya’s knees, eyeing the doll. Suraya reached down and patted each of their heads with a wet hand, then continued with the washing of the doll’s face. Its blue eyes remained unflinchingly open as the soap ran over them.

  The day after Yael’s visit to Sheikh Hamada, she had opened up the clinic again, determined to do what she could to bring people in herself. The little room had filled up shortly after she unlocked the door. The sheikh had given the word, Suraya told Yael later. The women informed her that he had advised their husbands that wives should attend and bring their children.

  He had told her he would not help and then had helped anyway. Yael puzzled over it as she surveyed a table covered with gifts that the women had brought. Speckled hens’ eggs; a bunch of limp, lacy green leaves that seemed to be some form of parsley; beads of hardened tree resin, to be burned on charcoal; flowers of different hues and shapes. It touched her that these poor women should make offerings to her. She would pass them on to Suraya, who would know what to do with them.

  Yael shifted on the wooden chair, looked again at the assembled women, their faces rapt, their hardworking feet drawn up beneath them. Suraya had concluded the instruction. The doll lay on its back on the table, next to the bowl, its head wrapped for modesty in a cloth. The mothers were getting to their feet and retrieving their sandals, covering their faces and stepping out through the wooden door to the alley beyond. If even one of the infants went through his or her life with sight, rather than blinded, their efforts would have been worthwhile.

  One woman stayed behind, positioning herself in front of Yael. She had a child on her hip and two more clinging to the skirts of a ragged black robe; the girls were so close in size that Yael had taken them at first for twins and then, while washing their faces, decided that they were not. The mother looked not more than sixteen or seventeen, thin-faced, with a silver ring running through one side of her nose. She broke into a stream of speech, directed at Yael, waving her free hand.

  The speech sounded accusatory. Yael shifted her chair backward. “What is she saying, Suraya?”

  Suraya put her head to one side and rubbed her belly. “No money. Hungry.”

  Nothing Yael could not have seen with he
r own eyes, without benefit of language.

  “What is her name?”

  “Um Fatima,” said Suraya. “Husband prison.”

  Yael looked up at the woman. She had a duty to help but she wouldn’t give her money. She did not dare.

  “Codswallop!” she announced with a smile, banging the side of her hand on the table for emphasis, as she had seen Mr. Dickens do during a reading of his works. “Tripe! God save the Queen. Give her the eggs, Suraya, and the herbs. Tell her I will get some rations for her. Next time. Give her the flowers as well.”

  The baby sent up a thin cry that sounded like the mewing of a kitten. Getting to her feet, collecting the umbrella, Yael thought of the Europeans on their knees under the scented cedar rafters, praying to a God of love. Saw in her mind the blue velvet collection pouch being passed from hand to hand and resolved to return to St. Mark’s on Sunday. She would see Reverend Griffinshawe and plead with him again to support the clinic. The sheikh was right. What use was soap without food.

  Yael felt a sudden longing to be out of the small room and back at home. By which she meant, she understood with some surprise, not a wallpapered, picture-adorned, fire-warmed house in St. John’s Wood but a sparsely furnished villa in the Frank quarter of a North African port.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The man rode ahead on a bay horse, trotting around a thicket of acacia trees. Sitting sidesaddle, her head wrapped in a new orange scarf she’d acquired on the voyage down the Nile, from a woman with twins at her breasts, Harriet followed on a donkey. Sweat was streaming into her eyes; her lips stung from the dry heat. The donkey boy walked behind, cudgeling the creature every few moments, and behind him a small girl with a full, squelching water skin on her back ran after them in her bare feet.