The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (170 page)

He dared not look directly at his audience during this performance, but van Hoek was spying on the dragoons through an oar-lock, and reported that they’d witnessed most of it. They did not have much leisure for spying, though. The river was at its highest now, filling its channel and frequently spilling out into surrounding countryside, and so the galleot did not have to work her way around shallows as she would have in other seasons. Yet the current was gentle and she could easily make seven miles an hour upstream. Jack had been expecting a desert, and he could tell one was out there somewhere from the way everything collected a film of yellow dust.
But Egypt, seen from here, was as moist and fertile as Holland. And as crowded. Even in the most remote stretches they were never out of sight of several dwellings. They passed villages a few times an hour, and large towns several times a day. For as far as they could see to both sides of the river, the flat countryside was covered with golden fields of corn and rice, and veined with wandering lines of darker green: the countless water-courses of the Delta, lined, and frequently choked, with reeds and rushes as high as a man’s head. Palm trees grew in picket-lines along waterways, and towns were belted with orchards of figs, citrus, and cassia.

All of it was scenery to the Cabal, and an obstacle course to the French riders. They fell behind the galleot when they had to swing wide around river-bends and flooded fields, then caught up when they found a way to cut across one of the river’s vast meanders. Fortunately for them they had left Rosetta trailing strings of fresh horses; and Egypt, like most of the Turks’ empire, was a settled and orderly country. Traveling along her high-roads was not as easy as in England, but it was easier than in France, and so they were able to keep pace during the day. This gave Moseh, Jack, and the others confidence that the four who’d gone ahead—Nyazi’s group—had reached Cairo without difficulty.

At night the wind fell. Rather than attempting to row through the dark, and perhaps run aground or stray into some backwater, the
raïs
simply tied the galleot to a palm tree along the riverbank and then organized the Cabal into watches. The dragoons actually served as an outlying guard-post, as they were not keen to see the galleot’s cargo fall into the hands of some local Ali Baba and his forty thieves.

In the middle of the second day, the wind failed and the
raïs
sent a dozen slaves ashore to pull the galleot by ropes—which was why they had not released all of the slaves in Rosetta. In this way they came, late in the afternoon, to the place where the Nile diverged into its two great branches: the one that they had just navigated, and another that ran to Damietta. Here, as night fell on the second day, they tied the galleot up again, and bided during the hours of darkness. Jack stood an early morning watch, then climbed into a hammock on the quarterdeck and fell asleep in the open air.

When he awoke, the sun was rising, the ship was under way, and he could see a strange terrain of angular mountains off to the west. Sitting up for a better look, he recognized them as Pyramids. When he had got his fill of gawking at those—which took a good long while—he turned around to face the rising sun and gazed across the Nile into the Mother of the World.

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill,
and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack’s mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed. Fortunately there were many such matters to occupy him: the Nile here was at least as big as the Danube at Vienna, and its course was crowded with boats laden with grain that had been brought down out of Upper Egypt. The captains of those boats had been shooting cataracts and beating back crocodiles for weeks, and were in no particular mood to make way for the unwieldy galleot. Many enemies were made as they worked their way in to the east bank of the river and made the galleot fast to a quay.

Almost immediately they were engulfed in camels, which is never pleasant, and rarely desirable—especially when they are being ridden and led by fierce-looking armed men. Jack thought they were under assault by wild nomads until he began noticing that all of them looked like Nyazi, and many were smiling. Then he heard Jeronimo bellowing in Spanish, “If I had a copper for every fly that swarms on you, beast, I’d buy the Spanish Empire! You smell worse than Vera Cruz in the springtime, and there is more filth clinging to your body than most animals shit in a year. Truly you must have sprung fully formed from a heap of manure, as flies and Popes do—may God have mercy on my soul for saying that! Jack Shaftoe is there smiling at me, thinking that you, camel, and I are well matched for each other—later I’ll make him your wife perhaps and you can take him out into the desert and do with him what you will.”

Dappa and Vrej were off seeing to other matters, but shortly Jack caught sight of Nyazi. He had had a joyous reunion with his clan-members. Jack was glad he had not been there to endure it.

Nasr al-Ghuráb now unchained all of the galley-slaves at once—some two score of them—and told them that they could go now into Cairo, and never come back; or they could join in with the Cabal, and never leave it; but these were their only two choices. Within moments, all but four of them had vanished. Those who remained were a Nubian eunuch, a Hindoo, the Turk who had been at the head of Monsieur Arlanc’s oar, and an Irishman named Padraig Tallow. The first three had somehow made the calculation that their chances were better with the Cabal, while Padraig (Jack suspected) just wanted to see how it would all come out. Monsieur Arlanc was offered the same choice as the others, and to Jack’s delight he elected to throw his lot in with the Cabal.

They all got busy pulling the gold-crates out of the galleot and loading them onto the camels, which took no more than half an
hour. The
raïs,
accompanied by van Hoek, Jeronimo (who’d had enough of camels), the Turk, the Nubian, and several of Nyazi’s clansmen (who wanted to see what it was like to ride on a boat), cast off the galleot’s lines and took her downriver, heading for an isle in midstream a few miles distant where boats were bought and sold. The camel-caravan meanwhile formed up and prepared to move out.

S
OME OF THOSE GALLEY-SLAVES,
as they had considered the choice that they’d been given, had asked searching questions about the Plan. The most frequently heard was: “Why do you not simply ride out of town with your treasure? Why bother waiting for this Investor—who has made obvious his intention to cheat you?” Jack was not unsympathetic to this line of questioning. But in the end he had to agree with Moseh and Nasr al-Ghuráb, who answered by pointing with their chins across the Nile, toward the city that the Turks had built up there, called El Giza. It had mosque-domes, leafy gardens, baths, and houses of pleasure. But, too, it had dungeons, and high walls with iron hooks on them, and a
Champs de Mars
where thousands of Janissaries drilled with muskets and lances. There would be judges in there, too, and some of them would probably be sympathetic to a French Duke who complained that he was being robbed by a rabble of slaves.

The Turkish authorities had already been alerted by a couple of exhausted French dragoons who had galloped up on half-dead horses as the camels were being loaded. So as the caravan left the Nile behind and began winding through the 2,400 wards and quarters of Cairo, it was carefully followed by Janissaries, not to mention hundreds of beggars, Vagabonds, pedlars, courtesans, and curious boys.

Now Cairo was a sort of accomplice in everything that happened there. It was large enough to engulf any army, and wise enough to comprehend any Plan, and old enough to’ve outlived whole races, nations, and religions. So nothing could really happen there without the city’s consent. Nyazi’s caravan, three dozen horses and camels strong, armed to the teeth, laden with tons of gold, was nothing here. The train of men and animals was frequently chopped into halves, thirds, and smaller bits by yet stranger processions that burst out from narrow ways and cut across it: gangs of masked women running and ululating, columns of Dervishes in high conical hats pounding on drums, wrapped corpses being paraded around atop stilts, squadrons of Janissaries in green and red. Every so often they would stumble upon a
shavush
in his emerald-green, ankle-length robe, red boots, white leather cap, and stupendous moustache. Then every camel in the procession had to be made to kneel, every
man had to dismount, until he had wandered past; and as long as they had stopped, Vagabonds would run up and spray rose-water at them and demand money for it.

Even if Jack had not known, when he’d disembarked from the galleot, that Egypt was the world’s oldest country, he’d have figured it out after an hour’s slow progress through Cairo’s streets. He could see it in the faces of the people, who were a mixture of every race Jack had ever heard about, and some he hadn’t. Every face told as many tales as a whole galley full of oar-slaves. Likewise their houses, which were made partly of stone, partly of timbers so old and gnarled they looked petrified, and mostly of bricks, hand-made and rudely baked, some looking as if they might bear the hand-prints of Moses himself. As many buildings were being torn down, as built up; which only stood to reason, as all the space had been claimed, and there was nothing to do but shift the available materials from one site to another, much as the Nile continually built and dissolved the sand-bars of the Delta by pushing grains of sand from place to place according to its whim. Even the Pyramids had had a gnawed look about their corners, as if people had been using them for quarries.

After hours of working deeper into the city they reached the Khan el-Khalili: a shambolic market, bigger in itself than all but a few European cities. Nyazi bade Jack take his shoes off and led him into an ancient mosque and up a steep spiral staircase that was dark and cool as a natural cave. Finally they stepped out on the roof and Jack looked out upon the city. The river was too far away to be seen from here and so what he saw was a million dusty flat rooves piled with bales, barrels, bundles, mounds, and household detritus. Each roof had its own peculiar height, and the lower ones seemed in danger of becoming buried.

Cairo was like the bottom of a vast pit whence the inhabitants had been madly trying to escape for thousands of years, and the only way out was to dig up clay, quarry limestone, and tear down empty houses and defenseless monuments, and pile the proceeds ever higher. Who had lately been winning the race could be judged by whose roof was highest. The losers could not keep pace with their neighbors, or even with the drifting dust that assiduously covered anything that failed to move, and so gradually sank from sight. Jack had the phant’sy that he could go into any house in Cairo, descend into the cellar, and find an entire house buried beneath, and yet another house beneath that one, and so on, miles down. Never had the preachers’ line “He will come to judge the quick and the dead” been so clear to Jack; for here in this Bible-land, Quick and Dead
were the only two categories, and the distinction between them the only Judgment that mattered.

So he drew comfort from being in the Khan el-Khalili, which appeared to be the quickest part of the city. The caravan wound through market-streets devoted to every good imaginable, from slaves to butter to live cobras, and eventually reached a place that, Jack thought, must be the dead center of the entire metropolis. It was a yard, or perhaps an alley: a rectangle of dirt, a bow-shot in length, but not above five yards in width, hemmed in by four-and five-storey buildings. Above, a narrow aperture provided light, but something translucent had been thrown across between the parapets of the buildings: caravan-tents and tarpaulins, Jack suspected. These formed a continuous roof overhead, letting in dusty light but sealing the place off from eavesdroppers. The surrounding buildings were astonishingly quiet—the quietest place in Cairo—and they smelled of hay. Ships coming down the Nile had replenished the place with food for the horses and camels that were stabled here.

“This is where it began,” remarked Nyazi. “This was the seed.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“A hundred generations ago, some men like me camped here—” stomping the dirt with one sandal “—for the night with their camels, and in time the camp put down roots, and became a caravanserai. The market of Khan el-Khalili grew up around it, and Cairo around
it.
But you see the caravanserai remains, and still we come here to sell our camels.”

“It is a good place to meet the Duke,” Moseh said. “The Plan was sound all along. For, according to what Nyazi has said, not a single day has gone by in this place, since the very beginning of the world, when silver and gold have not passed from hand to hand here. Its presence was not dictated by any king, nor was it prophesied by any creed; it emerged of its own accord, and endures regardless of what the Sultan in Constantinople or the Sun King in Paris might prefer.”

The ground floors of the caravanserai’s buildings had high ceilings so that without having to duck, or doff their turbans, men could ride camels into them, and that was just what the clan of Nyazi did.
That night, Nasr al-Ghuráb came back with his contingent, and with Dappa and Vrej, whom they hadn’t seen since Rosetta.

“Truly the forkings and wanderings of the Nile are as unknowable as the streets of Cairo,” said Dappa, blinking his eyes in amazement, “but Vrej found an Armenian coffee-trader, no more than five minutes’ walk from this place, who knew all about the way to Mocha. You go downstream to the great fork, and take the Damietta branch, and after a few miles there is a village on the right bank where a water-course strays off eastwards. In time that stream goes all the way to the Red Sea.”