The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (21 page)

Flo had spent most of that winter at Clarkey’s, equally charmed by Messrs. Mohl and Fauriel, who, having discovered the depth of her education, undertook lively exchanges with her. Being at Mary’s was like being back in Father’s library, a place where Flo did not have to demur, where she could express her opinions and display her intellect rather than hide it.

It was Clarkey’s idea of
amitié amoureuse
—chaste love—that made her friendships with men possible, she explained to Flo that year. There was no earthly reason, Clarkey argued, why men and women could not be loving friends rather than succumb to marriage, with its insuperable desolations and duties. Clarkey was not opposed to marriage so much as beyond it. She was madly in love with Claude Fauriel, with whom she’d spent every evening for the past eleven years. Still, she did not intend to marry him or anyone else. She encouraged Flo to pursue her interests and, like Mary, avoid the matrimonial bed. It felt to Flo as if a strong-willed woman from the George Sand novels she relished had come to life and befriended her.

• • •

Just before Flo left for the day’s excursion, Joseph brought her a second letter. She was in a rush, but went below and read it quickly, delighted by the speed of Gustave’s reply, and by his warmth, which seemed to transfer directly from the paper. His observations about the Copts were provocative and new, especially their view of Jesus as purely a god, not a man. Since the Copts were the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, she wondered if the idea of a divine man derived from the worship of pharaohs like Ramses the Great.

She tucked the letter inside her diary. Not surprisingly, Selina did not inquire about details when Flo reported that he had written and all was well.

Flo drifted the rest of the day, revisiting the temples while Selina sketched them from different vantages. Selina excelled with a pencil and watercolors, capturing the essence of things with a few assured strokes, conveying bulk and gravity as surely as if her paper bulged with sand and granite where her marks divided the dun surface. Flo had no talent for art.

But she
did
have talents, she reminded herself, just not ordinary ones. Her big ideas and flair for organization were unseemly, especially coming from a woman—which was why the future loomed not like a sunny path but a brick wall. What
could
she do with her life? Continue teaching the boys at the Ragged School when she returned home? Or would Fanny deny her that, too? Once, she had brought to Embley three boys with grimy hands and knickers—sniveling boys with chopped hair and nostrils rimmed in black who shrieked and stampeded up the stairs to her room, where she read to them. Fanny had reacted as though intruders had absconded with the silver plate and Limoges. Later, she’d sent the upstairs maid to scrub the woodwork and furniture, as if poverty were a contagious disease. How could her younger daughter, she demanded at dinner, bring rabble into their home? Home being the sanctum sanctorum to Fanny, more venerated than a cathedral. WEN had laughed off the shouting, as if they were in a cartoon out of
Punch.
He refused to take sides, saying he could not abide displays of temper. He hated it when the servants
had to fix their eyes on the floorboards. He had retreated to the library, after which Parthe promptly swooned in the parlor, claiming a headache. Fanny’s furor had lasted for two full days, doubled, she claimed, by her daughters, the one inexplicably delicate, the other incorrigibly stubborn.

• • •

They sailed for Philae midweek, catching a fair wind. Flo relaxed. She sat on deck and watched the verdant border on either side reappear as narrow fields of corn and barley waving in sinuous patterns. The Nubian Desert carpeted the high cliffs with sand on either side, the river threading between them like a winding column of mercury. After the halting upriver sail, the boat skimmed the water, pulled powerfully along by the current’s twisting green ropes. Against the rocky banks, the river flung airborne sprays of lace, while the damp sails drying in the sunny air smelled fresh and bright as a laundry line. Sometimes the wind and current were so strong, the crew had to furl them.

The second day, spotting sand spilling from the heights in golden waterfalls, they weighed anchor so that she and Selina—Trout wasn’t interested—could feel the dry droplets sift through their fingers. They climbed up the cliff on a goat path. The unceasing wind had swept the desert plateau into a thicker version of the river, its currents frozen in great furrows and dips, a swirled sea of figured ridges stretching to the horizon.

When they set sail from Abu Simbel, the Frenchmen were still moored at the small temple. There were no farewells and no more chance encounters, no more letters or notes. She had decided it was best—more dignified and less chancy—not to write again, to wait for the reunion in Philae. Besides, she liked his letter about the patriarchs so much that she could not imagine he would ever write her a better one. She set aside her hope, locked into a compartment in her mind. She did not reread his letter after the day it arrived, when she had read it four times. Though its existence was a small comfort, she was
cautious not to daydream about him. She did not want to risk disappointment. Besides, what would she dream? Surely not of marriage or a tryst. All she knew was that she wanted to be standing alongside him again, chatting and joking.

She distracted herself with the extensive library she’d brought to Egypt, her beloved dead languages—Latin, Greek, and now Hebrew, which she was teaching herself so she could read the Old Testament in the original. Dead languages were comforting: because they never altered, you could master them completely. Since they were no longer spoken, they were not part of the social fabric that so chafed her, not part of the insincerity, hypocrisy, and deceit with which living languages teemed. A thousand years of obsolescence had purified them as surely as if they had been cooked down to their essence over a slow flame. The words meant exactly what the dictionaries said and nothing more, nothing newer, nothing sub rosa. They were orderly, neatly contained in vocabulary lists she could tick off, in verb conjugations, tenses, and moods to memorize, declensions of nouns to recite that made a singsongy poetry. And there was no shortage of texts. A cornucopia waited in her cabin: Hesiod and Ovid; Sophocles; Pliny the Elder; Tacitus; and Sappho, poor Sappho, torn to shreds. And Epictetus and Claudian; Livy; Pindar. All of them fixed forever, unamendable as yesterday.

And though she knew it was evil, she was again in thrall to her awful
dreaming
—to fantasies of her own storied greatness—which she despised and felt obliged to confess to her diary. Though a vapid solution, dreaming countered her despair. Oh, the French was superior:
desespoir,
the sound more beautiful, more expressive of the feeling, the final syllable—des-es-
poir
—mimicking the sound of her life’s breath leaking out, attenuating into the void . . .

Except to answer direct questions, Trout had retreated into a cordial standoff based in silence. Having brought enough wool to clothe a flock of sheared sheep, she crocheted constantly, her hook stabbing into the skeins with the avidity of a hungry bird. Growing arms and a collar, a bed jacket accumulated in her lap; a baby blanket was also
in the offing or perhaps it was a coverlet for her room at home. In the evening, she read her Bible.

The rift opened a deep old wound in Flo, which began to fester, setting her mind on a familiar path of disgust—with the upper classes, of which she was a guilt-ridden if alien member, and with herself for her inability to transcend her privilege, and her unwillingness to renounce it. She did not know which was worse: being thwarted by her family or the guilt of knowing what a burden she was to them. She always had to protect them from her own unhappiness.

If her desire to care for the sick were monstrous, then
she
was monstrous. There was no middle ground. Those who cooked the fowl or grew the corn? Do not look at them. They are not like us. Which is why she spent so much of her free time going back and forth to Wellow along the muddy path from Embley, reminding herself that they were
exactly
like her. In Wellow, when old Mrs. Crane suffered, she would rub her limbs by the hour and the old woman spoke to her as if to a daughter. But there was no muddy path between her and Trout. She hardly had a language in which to communicate with her. It was laughable to think she could help the world’s unfortunates when she could not deal with a lone maidservant.

And so it was that as they neared the island of Philae on the fourth day, a black mood enveloped Flo, so dark and bottomless that even dreaming provided no respite. She wanted only to sleep.

12

LAMENTATION AT PHILAE

O
n a bright morning in late March, the
cange
drifted, sails furled, toward Philae. Gustave had glimpsed the island, an outcropping of red and black granite no bigger than the place des Vosges, when they had sailed past it, going upriver, but they hadn’t stopped. Joseph had insisted that the proper approach was from the south, as the priests of Isis and Osiris had intended their suppliants to behold it.

When it seemed they had gone too far north, the captain thundered a command and the crew rowed furiously across the current toward the southern tip. There Gustave set eyes on the ancient quay with its grand submerged staircase. The crew moored the boat. He watched as the rope smeared the green slurry of algae on the north face of the stone piling.

Wearing his slippers on his hands, he sloshed up underwater steps the color of splotched limes. Midway, there entered his mind the vivid image of Cleopatra disembarking in splendor, her gold-trimmed, Tyrian purple robes deflating like the fins and tails of an ornamental carp as they dragged through the graduated shallows. Surely there would have been pomp and circumstance when the queen paid homage to the gods. For a musical flourish, he clapped the slippers together.

Ashore, he wrung out his djellaba, which was sopping wet from
the waist down. The approach to the temple of Isis was either across open ground or through two long colonnades; he chose the easternmost colonnade. Max, being more nimble, soon outpaced him on the western side, while Joseph, bare-chested under his red vest and wearing his usual Turkish trousers, paused to light a pipe at the top of the stairs.

Walking in the slashed shade of the columns, Gustave heard the cataracts downriver at Aswan. The miles between softened the roar to calming ambient refreshment, like a hotel fountain. Philae, he wrote in his head: the orchestra section of the Nile’s concert hall, best seats to hear the liquid tympany of the rapids, but still distant enough that one could think and converse.

The island was enchanting. Gusts rattled the palm trees sprouting from the rocks at odd angles. Light filtering through the forests of columns wove a luminous tapestry that hung in the air, turning and changing by the moment like a rotating pane of glass. He could not have dreamed up a more quintessentially Oriental paradise. Only dancing girls and music were missing—preferably harps and flutes to ricochet among the ruins. An occasional birdcall and the subdued ground dither of lizards and insects broke the silence. “No one lives here!” he shouted into the golden air.

Trailing pipe smoke, Joseph hurried toward him, a rare sight. Usually he moved at the pace set by the slow clock of the pyramids and the colossi, to whom a millennium was but a forward tick, the imagined blink of a stone eye.

Max stood fingering the hieroglyphs on one of the pylons of the temple to Isis. He threw his arm around Gustave’s shoulder. “Yes, O Sheik Mustache. Amazing to see a holy place so totally abandoned.” Somewhat out of breath, Joseph added, “They say the last priest he die in anno 500. The peoples stay away, afraid for ghosts.”

Gustave leaned against a fallen pillar and scanned the view. He was standing in a painted postcard, the sky hand-tinted cerulean for added grandeur. Philae was almost too beautiful to be real. A profusion of chapels and temples—sacred, Joseph had said, to Egyptians,
Greeks, Romans, and early Christians alike—conveyed a wealth of choices, like so many stuffed chairs invitingly angled in a room. Everywhere columns of varied vintages drew his eyes upward, testaments to orderliness and stability. Of all Egyptian sites, Philae was the most human in scale, as casual and unimposing as a rambling country estate lapsed into dereliction.

Max stepped back from the pylon and framed it with his thumbs and forefingers. “A perfect time of day for photographs,” he announced. “I’m going back for my equipment. Perhaps you’ll pose for me,
Garçon,
at one of the temples?”

Gustave pivoted, pointed his rump in Max’s direction, and pretended to fart. Max ignored him, loping back to the boat with Joseph following. The Father of Thinness moved with the deftness of one who had grown up negotiating rocky scapes instead of Parisian pavement, as if he had hooves instead of feet. He’d have made an excellent goatherd.

Gustave struck out for the interior, following a promenade of lotus-topped pillars, the gritty earth crunching beneath his leather carpet slippers. In moments he found a trove of columns with basreliefs still polychromed in the jewel tones the Egyptians favored: gold and turquoise, green, orange, marine blues, and red—red for blood and evil, he recalled. Antiquity and beauty had not deterred graffiti artists in the past thousand years. Signatures in Greek and Latin and what he took to be demotic, the common man’s hieroglyphics, provided chilling proof that a Constantine, Junonius, and Theodora had once lived and graved a small eternity in the sandstone. He, on the contrary, had no desire to leave tailings of himself in the Orient, but rather to take tokens of it home.
A monkey, six meters of Dacca cloth . . . maybe a mummy . . . a red vest. . . .

Though surely the painted pillars had once had a roof, Gustave preferred them as they were, with ceilings made of weather. He liked the turn of phrase. The gods were in charge of rolling out a sky to match the human drama below. At the moment, distinct puffs like dumplings floated in blue soup.