A passenger slipping ashore under cover of darkness, a watcher in the night, a wind full of menace?
I return to my cabin to freshen up for an excursion ashore, wondering what other curious things await me in the uncanny land of the Nile.
2
The night before we anchored, Herr Von Reich, a gentleman from Vienna, invited me to join him on an excursion to the city’s native bazaar our first day in Port Said, where, he assures me, I will find the mysterious and unimaginable, along with everything under the sun to buy, from rings to rugs and “even a camel if the captain will let you bring it aboard.”
Accompanying us will be Lord and Lady Warton, a British couple who have business ties with Von Reich, an engineer and inventor who once worked in Egypt.
There are sounds of discord when I’m back on deck to meet my companions at the accommodation ladder. Arab boatmen below are shoving and shouting at each other in a mad haste to be the rowboat closest to the platform that passengers step off of at the bottom of the stairway.
Von Reich grins down at the chaos. “We need only one boat and there are six warring to serve us. Lord Warton and I will clear the way with our canes. You ladies should keep your umbrellas handy.”
Both men carry Penang lawyers, thick walking sticks with bulbous, leaded heads.
As I follow the two men down the nearly vertical, narrow stairway on the side of the ship, Lady Warton, coming behind me, says, “You’ll find that a sharp blow from a cudgel is the language these natives best understand.”
I glance back at the cost of nearly losing my footing, and make a gasp instead of a retort. Having been formally introduced to the woman only last night, and in light of their generous acceptance of my presence, it would be ill-mannered for me to point out that a stick beats more ugliness into a person than it ever beats out.
The steep stairway sways and scrapes against the side of the ship and I hold on tight, wishing I was wearing trousers instead of a long dress that makes it likely I will take a neck-breaking tumble. For sure, it was an inconsiderate man who made up the rule that only men can wear pants.
At the bottom platform I bite my lip as the canes swing right and left to drive back all but one boat. Lady Warton lashes out at a grabbing hand with her umbrella, but I have no intention of using mine in such a rude manner against fellow human beings. It’s obvious that rowing passengers ashore is the only way these boatmen have of earning their bread and it’s a small loaf at that.
Having been a factory girl living hand-to-mouth until I was eighteen because I had been forced to leave high school due to a heart condition, my sympathies lie with the poor wretches.*
Von Reich and Lord Warton board a boat to assist us ladies and I step aside so Lady Warton can go on first. Swells lift the platform and I step back, reaching for the support of the railing when a boatman on the other side grabs my arm and I am literally dragged into his rocking boat. It happens so quickly I only get out a “Well!” after I’m seated.
Von Reich shouts, “We’ll see you on shore, Nellie,” and I give a brave little laugh and hold on to the sides of the boat for dear life, finding myself a prisoner of four Arab rowers who are naked except for loincloths.
This is an adventure, I tell myself, a mantra I repeat when it appears I am going to hell in a handbasket and have no control over the situation.
I smile at the man who had dragged me aboard. “Get me to shore dry and I shall be very grateful.”
He unleashes a long statement in Arabic and I just smile and nod. I have no clue as to what he is saying, but I am sure he understands and is agreeable to my needs. I wish I could tell him how sorry I am that my companions found it necessary to administer the cane so freely and lavishly, and that I marvel at their stubborn persistence even while cringing under the blows.
I am reflecting upon the unkind attitude I heard expressed aboard the Victoria by Europeans and Americans about people of less fortunate nations when I realize the rowers have stopped rowing and we are rising and rocking in swells a hundred feet from shore.
The man I had spoken to gives me a nasty smirk, holds out his hand, and says in perfect English, “More money or you swim.”
I stare at him—gape at him—thoughts and emotions convulsing in my head like the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope. Manhandled, kidnapped, and now I’m threatened and blackmailed by people I sympathize with.
Rising in the unsteady boat, I raise my umbrella and tell the ungrateful devil, “Get me to shore!”
3
Safely ensconced in an open carriage with my companions as the sun’s oppressive heat beats down on us, we make our way along a narrow, unpaved Port Said roadway alive with people and animals, the swirl of dust, and noise from every quarter—a street symphony punctuated with the bray of donkeys, the shouts of street vendors, and the glee of children.
Two- and three-story buildings, with large enclosed balconies that project out far enough to shade the crowded passages below, shoulder both sides of the street. The balcony windows, made of wood tarnished by time, are latticed with lovely Eastern motifs.
The uncommon sights, sounds, and smells wrinkle Lady Warton’s nose but are a feast for the eyes of a young woman from Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534.
My companions busy themselves talking about the strategic importance of the Suez Canal while I smile in wonder as a cloud of pigeons on a terrace above take wing as a black-veiled woman walks among them like a magician releasing an entire flock.
We pass a train of camels carrying firewood, kicking up dust on an old man with hard years etched on his face sitting cross-legged on the curb, loaves of flat bread for sale lined up on newspapers beside him; a fat merchant wearing a red Turkish fez and straddling a small donkey clutches a metal box tightly to his chest as a fierce Saracen with a wicked-looking curved sword clears the way in front of him.
The streets are alive and the people have a strange flavor to me: servants—slaves, Von Reich says, despite the pretense of slavery being illegal—get up from sleeping on the ground outside of houses and go inside to work; men and women are clothed from head to foot in long, loose-fitting cloaklike garments. Girls without veils and women with their faces hidden go to a nearby well to draw water and carry it back in clay pots balanced on their heads; a little boy leads a cow with a rope from house to house, milking the cow into jars brought out by householders. The milk boy carries a stuffed toy calf to fool the cow into giving milk.
“Would a cow really believe a stuffed toy is her child?” I ask Von Reich, our expert on everything Egyptian. He had spent a year advising the government on an engineering matter.
“Perhaps not in America, but in Egypt, who knows? In this strange land, where it is said that the sphinx rises on moonless nights and runs across the desert like a jackal, and mummies dead thousands of years rise from their tombs, the unexplainable is not always unimaginable.”
We rumble by a line of men balancing bulging goatskin bags on wood poles across their shoulders.
“Public water carriers,” Von Reich says.
Their bodies are skeletal, as if the hot desert sun had melted away all their flesh except for a layer of skin as rough as papyrus. Though they’re not in shackles, they remind me of a chain gang. “How do they survive such hard work in this brutal heat?”
“Necessity.”
My companions for the day appear to be strange bedfellows not only to me, but to each other. The Viennese inventor is relaxed and amiable, even a bit of a bonhomie, while the British peer and his wife appear aloof, standoffish to the point of snobbishness, but I suppose they have a common ground in business. Von Reich has told me he is traveling with the Wartons to Hong Kong and on to Washington, D.C., on a business matter concerning an explosive he has patented.
The Austrian introduced himself to me while I was walking on the deck the first morning at sea after we left Italy.
A dapper gentleman with well-cut clothes and a starched mannerism, Von Reich is bu
ilt broad with a closely shaven head and a gold monocle custom manufactured to fit comfortably and securely in his right eye; a flamboyant mustache with long curved ends that resemble the handlebars of a bicycle defies gravity with the help of a generous application of wax. His style of dress and mustache is very much in vogue with men of wealth and position and those who imitate such models of success.
It always amazes me to what great lengths men go in order to portray a certain look. And they say women are vain.
I was secretly amused when after several overtures on board toward me in his blunt, Central European manner—approaches that my mother would have deemed cheeky—I asked if Frau Von Reich will be joining him en route.
After assuring me rather stiffly, “Frau Von Reich is faithfully awaiting my return,” he broke out laughing and told me that the only Frau in his family is his mother.
He certainly is a handsome figure of a man, but a shipboard flirtation is not in the stars for me. As I tell myself each morning, I have rivers to cross, mountains to climb, castle walls to storm, dragons to fight … and in this case, pulling a man along would slow me down.
After I refused an invitation for a walk on the deck and a libation afterward, his ardor cooled significantly.
However, when he told me that he was going with friends to the bazaar, I boldly hinted that I would be delighted to join him. Cheeky of me, indeed, but I am cabling my experiences back to New York and it will provide local color.
Kids swarm across the street, causing our carriage to stop. A bike rider wearing an Arabic robe with a closely drawn hood quickly swerves to avoid them. His front wheel catches in a deep pothole and both man and bike go down hard.
“I hope he’s okay,” I blurt out.
“What does it matter if one of these lazy natives is bruised?” Lady Warton asks.
Charming woman. Her husband refers to her as Eleanor, but she is Lady Warton to me, Eleanor being much too sweet for the woman’s sour personality.
As the bike rider gets up, his hood parts to show the side of his brown face, but oddly enough a flash of pale white skin above the boot on his right leg is also exposed. Rather than the sandals that the Egyptians prefer for their hot climate, the bike rider’s footwear appears to be the same type of brown boots I’ve seen on British soldiers.
Brown face, white legs, army boots. How odd is that?
I start to share the observation with my companions when a racket erupts that sounds like the hounds of hell have broken out of their cage.
“Good gracious!” Lady Warton snaps. “What is that horrid noise?”
“Hopefully it’s not trouble with the Mahdi,” Von Reich says.
“What’s the Mahdi?” I ask.
“A fanatical group who have unleashed a jihad, a holy war, to drive the British and other Europeans from Egypt and to kill Egyptians who consort with them. The name actually refers to a Muslim messiah, a Christ-like figure who will return to Earth during the End Days to rid the world of evil.”
I recall reading about the movement. “Are they the fanatics who defeated a British army several years ago?”
“Actually, it was a British general leading an Egyptian army that was overwhelmed by vastly superior forces. Cutting off the head of Chinese Gordon, the general, and mounting it on a pike fired the movement. Had the self-proclaimed Mahdi not died of typhus, he may well have continued down the Nile, driving Europeans and the Egyptians who tolerate them into the sea.”
“Is there any danger to tourists?”
“There have been incidents of violence against foreigners but we will be safe.” He pads his chest near his heart. “Lord Warton and I are armed.”
Wonderful. After battling rowboat pirates who threaten to cast me into the sea, I have been dropped into a hornet’s nest of murderous terrorists.
“The Egyptian government’s rather ineffective, isn’t it?” I ask. “Under British control?”
“Yes, the government went broke and couldn’t pay its debts. However, the real interest of other nations isn’t Egypt herself, but the Suez Canal. The country that controls it can put an economic stranglehold over other countries.”
“Britannica rules the seas,” Lord Warton says, “and that little ditch scratched into the sand is a strategic route to India and the Far East.”
A mounted company of Egyptian cavalrymen with British officers trot by, heading in the direction of the noise.
“What do you think is going on?” I ask Von Reich.
“Noise can mean a celebration or trouble. This sounds like trouble.”
“Our troops can handle any situation,” Lord Warton says.
I didn’t point out to him that the troops were Egyptian; only the officers were British.
The clamor grows louder and our carriage driver pulls off the road as a large crowd of men comes up the street shouting a repeated phrase. The Arabic words mean nothing to me, but it’s the same violent tone I once heard from a mob that had gathered after strike breakers left union men dead that frightens me.
A squad of foot soldiers led by a British sergeant double-times smartly into place near us and our male companions leave us to speak to the noncom as the crowd gets closer.
Perhaps a hundred men are in the crowd, no women, though a number of children are prancing along. Most of the men are wearing the djellabah, a loose-fitting hooded robe that is the universal male attire unless one is working in the water or at the beach.
It doesn’t strike me as an organized demonstration, at least not in the sense of people in a parade, but more of a crowd that was sparked into action spontaneously.
Egyptian horse soldiers with British officers, perhaps the ones we saw earlier, are in single file on both sides of the advancing crowd, acting rather like cowboys herding cattle.
Time to return to the ship, I think. Too inhibited to show a yellow streak, I keep it to myself as our gentlemen return with the British sergeant.
“Sergeant O’Malley says we will be safe this close to his troops,” the British peer tells us.
The sergeant touches the rim of his pith helmet with the tip of his finger in greeting. “Don’t worry, ladies, we won’t let the rabble get out of hand.”
“What are they shouting about?” I ask.
“The Father of Terror,” Von Reich says.
“The Father of Terror?”
“That’s correct, madam,” the sergeant says. “That’s what they call the Great Sphinx. Seems a tree told them that the sphinx was going to get up from where it’s squatting at Giza next to the pyramids to drive us demon foreigners from Egypt.”
It occurs to me that the bike rider I saw might be a British spy on the lookout for troublemakers.
Sergeant O’Malley busies himself lining up his men to assist in crowd control while our driver gets our carriage off to the side of the road.
“Trees talking!” scoffs Lady Warton, sounding personally offended, as if they were talking behind her back. “What will these ignorant people imagine next?”
She appears wedded to hats with netted veils and wears them even on the ship. I assume she has facial blemishes she doesn’t wish to share with the world or wishes to protect her skin from sun damage.
Something about my expression causes the woman to direct her ire at me. “Young woman, I suppose you believe in talking trees.”
I smile sweetly. “Well, I was thinking that not far from here God spoke to Moses from a burning bush and commanded him to lead his people from Egypt.”
Von Reich doesn’t say a word but it is easy to see that his jaws are clamped tight to keep a laugh from exploding.
4
Our carriage is pulling up to the arched stone entrance to the bazaar when a man on a bike passes us.
“Isn’t that the same man who took the spill?” I ask.
Von Reich shakes his head. “I really can’t say.”
“Has the same boots,” I mutter, more to myself.
“Shall we enter the Den of Thieves, ladies?” Von Reich
asks as we step down from the carriage.
He had described the marketplace as a caravansary, a place where camel caravans stop to drop off and take on loads. I expected a sprawling dirt field with camels, tents, and a bit of dung underfoot.
Instead, passing through the gate we go back in time, not to the ancient Land of the Pharaohs, but to medieval Baghdad of the Arabian Nights, to Ali Baba who spoke the magical “Open sesame” to steal the treasure of the Forty Thieves, and to the mystifying Arab quarters called casbahs.
The bazaar is dark and twisted, mysterious, and puzzling, all at the same time; an exotic blend of people, merchandise, and animals that plays out as if it is planned by an artist for his canvas. Rather than a world of organized shops, it is a menagerie of tiny cubbyholes crammed with merchandise pouring out like horns of plenty, some selling spaces so small they are no more than cupboards.
The passageways, scarcely wide enough for two people walking abreast, are covered with canopies of Nile reeds, turning the walkways dark and shadowy even in daylight. The muted light, and hooded robes and turbans add to the mystique and the fathomless mysteries of this culture that has lived along the Nile for thousands of years.
People press up against walls to keep from being trampled as donkeys and camels laden with goods force their way through the walkways, yet no one seems to be bothered. The chaos is organized.
The atmosphere is spellbinding as a contortionist prances along with us, twisting his limbs in impossible positions, while a tumbler makes great leaps in the air, jumping, bouncing, and rolling like a rubber ball. As with the camels, people simply move out of their path.
I catch the pungent scent of spiced Turkish tobacco from an open-air café where men wearing the ubiquitous hooded robes drink muddy Turkish coffee and mint tea from tiny glass cups and share water pipes called hookahs.
The Illusion of Murder Page 2