The Mistress of Nothing (13 page)

“Good!” she replied.

There was confusion in the village over Mr. Taylor’s arrival; gossip traveled quickly through the warm Nile air. Mustafa Agha was convinced that my Lady’s cousin, whom he had heard referred to as the son of my Lady’s uncle, must be her long-lost husband at last come to reclaim his wife. My Lady was greatly amused by this as Mr. Taylor was not much beyond twenty-five years of age, and she quelled this rumor quickly. Mustafa Agha and Sheikh Yusuf both appeared at the door of the French House one afternoon; Mr. Taylor had set off on an expedition to the Valley of the Kings, and my Lady had decided against joining him. The two men must have watched him go. I could see they had something pressing they wanted to say to her.

I ushered them into the salon.
“Sitti
Duff Gordon,” Sheikh Yusuf said, bowing. He was blushing and now seemed unable to speak; I wondered what on earth he had come to say.

Mustafa Agha stepped forward, clearing his throat. “Madam,” he said, “forgive me.”

“What is it, Mustafa?” my Lady said.

“Setting sail with a man who is not your husband,” he replied, his tone both apologetic and serious, “unaccompanied …”

“I see,” said my Lady. “He is my cousin, Mustafa, a young man of high standing, and I assure you …”

Omar stepped forward. “If I may, my Lady?”

She raised her eyebrows and nodded.

He turned to Sheikh Yusuf and Mustafa Agha, and a long conversation about the propriety of the situation and the manners and customs of English people took place. Omar went so far as to take the men down to the river for a tour of the boat, where they were shown that Omar’s cabin was situated between Mr. Taylor’s and my Lady’s (and next to mine). He assured them that my Lady would come to no harm and face no embarrassment, and they went away, mollified. When he returned to the house he informed my Lady that all was well.

“Thank you, Omar,” she said, “you have restored my reputation.”

“They were very concerned, my Lady,” Omar replied. “And they were very keen to have a look at that boat.”

When word got out of my Lady’s imminent departure, there was a great fuss in the village. My Lady and I reassured everyone that we would return to Luxor soon; women whose children’s lives we had saved brought presents of bread and eggs down to the
dahabieh
for our journey and our send-off was quite ludicrously sentimental and grand. As the boat pulled away from the riverbank the villagers fired their weapons—hunting guns and rifles—into the air and Omar responded with Sir Alick’s old horse pistols that my Lady had packed in England and since forgotten about. My Lady and I both shrieked, ducked, and, too late, covered our ears.

“We’ll be back in less than two weeks,” my Lady called to Mustafa Agha, who was seated on his horse amidst the crowd.

“We will find it hard to continue without you,” Mustafa Agha replied.

I was glad of the idea of change, getting away from Luxor for a brief spell, reimmersing myself in that floating life on the Nile. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be free of the land, free of the house and its attendant responsibilities, the village and our ever-increasing involvement in village life. From the moment we embarked, the temperature soared and by the second day out the thermometer on the
dahabieh
registered 110 degrees. The heat turned the day on its head; Mr. Taylor and most of the crew slept all day, and the boat came to life at night when the temperature dropped enough to allow languid attempts at conversation.
“Omar cooks the meals amphibiously,”
my Lady read aloud the letter she was writing to Sir Alick,
“bathing between every meal. The silence of noon with the white heat glowing on the river which flows like liquid tin, and the silent Nubian rough boats floating down without a ripple, is magnificent and really awful.
”

At Esna we entered the temple through a huge portico that had been partially dug out, a narrow set of mud steps leading down into the gloom; once my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness I could make out the enormous columns on either side, carved and painted, though it was too dark to see any detail or color. While Omar sat with my Lady at the bottom of the stairs—the temple was dank and damp-smelling but wonderfully cool—I paced out the length of the excavated portico: three rows of six columns, each column as big as a house, or so it felt to me. The roof of the portico pressed down from overhead, as though threatening to collapse in on top of us. At the far end, dirt and rubble were heaped up high, blocking access to the temple itself. “Hallo!” I turned and called towards the light at the entrance, and my words felt flat and muffled by the great weight of stone all around.
“Ahlen!”
I heard my Lady reply, and I made my way back to them, feeling both relieved at going towards the light and gleeful at having ventured inside the ancient, still buried, ruin on my own.

“Do you think this is what lies beneath our house in Luxor, my Lady?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Sally,” she replied, “but when the house collapses in on itself, I’m sure we’ll find out.”

After accompanying my Lady and Mr. Taylor to the boat, Omar and I made our way to the village—like Luxor, a tumbledown affair in the midst of the equally tumbledown temple—to buy supplies for our journey, sugar, tobacco, charcoal, but discovered that, this far south, goods for travelers were not available in summer. Indeed, we had seen no other foreign travelers on our journey thus far. The villagers treated us as though we were migrating birds who had returned during the wrong season; they looked at me with round eyes, their mouths falling open in amazement when they heard my Arabic. As we walked back to the
dahabieh,
we ducked beneath the long swaths of blue linen that had been dyed and hung out to dry on lines that crisscrossed above the street. By now it was nearly ten in the morning and it was as though the temperature rose a degree with every step we took.

From Esna we sailed down to Edfu, where the roof of the great old temple was crowded with mud huts and the people who lived in them. I persisted with my sightseeing, though I left it until the evening, and only Omar would agree to accompany me, more out of kindness than any other motivation; I tried to persuade him to let me go on my own, but he would not hear of it. I wandered through the temple in the brief Egyptian twilight while he sat on a broken-down column and fanned himself; I could hear the bats beginning to come out, and I could hear Omar panting in the heat, and together the two sounds were reassuring.

At Aswan there were traders from Darfur passing through in the opposite direction, bringing with them animal skins and Ethiopian slaves to sell down the Nile, also bringing with them a taste of Nubia, of an Africa at which the rest of Egypt only hinted; Omar was able to trade with them for supplies. We passed a group of young female slaves sitting beneath a palm tree cooking maize cakes on a small fire.

“If you want,” Omar said, “we could purchase one of these girls in exchange for a couple of handkerchiefs or a loaf of bread.”

I shook my head. I suspected he was teasing me.

“Then you wouldn’t have to work at all,” he said.

“Are you suggesting I don’t work hard enough?”

“No,” he said, laughing; and when he laughed I could not help but laugh as well and I slipped on the stony footpath. Omar took my hand on the pretense of steadying me, but he was careful to let go of it well before we came in view of our
dahabieh.

The next day Omar arranged the hire of donkeys to transport our party the short distance up the river to Philae. We left Aswan in the night and reached the ferryman at dawn; he agreed to take us across the river and to tend the donkeys while we remained on the island overnight. We set up camp in the temple itself; we had passed this way the year before but had not stayed for more than a few hours. “This is where Isis found the heart of her dead husband, Osiris,” my Lady explained to me, though I knew this already; the God of the Underworld, Osiris, was killed by his brother, Seth, who scattered his dismembered body throughout Egypt; Isis roamed the country to find and re-member his body. The home of his heart was a special place, and the island temple at Philae one of the most serene in all of Egypt. My Lady and I decided to make our beds in the Osiris chamber, where it was dark and felt as though it should be cool, though of course it was not, and Mr. Taylor and his Coptic tailor set up home at the foot of the great temple pylons. During the day my Lady and I did not do much more than nap in the shade and take turns to bathe in the Nile in the tentlike awning that Omar and the crew had become adept at rigging up for our privacy. Mr. Taylor spent most of the day in or near the water; my Lady came upon him in the afternoon, asleep, his head anchored by a scarf and hat tied to a conveniently placed rock, the rest of his body floating. At night the stars came out and the enormous basalt rocks in the cataract just beyond the island hissed and whispered as they cooled in the light breeze. But it remained hot as an oven in the Osiris chamber, so after tossing and turning on our mats for a while, my Lady and I gave ourselves up to the night and went outside and lay down between the columns of the temple. From there the view was dreamy and the stars cast a light that was deceptively cool and watery, and the tall palms on the far side of the river waved gracefully.

“Have you ever seen such a … ,” my Lady said, her voice trailing off.

“No,” I replied, “nor ever imagined I would find myself in such a place.” After a while my Lady lay down to sleep, but I sat up, my arms wrapped around my knees. Omar came over from where he’d positioned himself to sleep, just outside the Osiris chamber, on guard duty (though we’d stepped over him when we came outside and he hadn’t stirred), and together we watched as the dawn broke, a deep crimson, ever-widening slash across the sky. We sat side by side, without touching, without speaking, but it was as though we were in one another’s arms all night.

In the morning my Lady bathed in Omar’s bathing contraption and then walked down to inspect the colonnade. She sat on a rock looking up the Nile at the First Cataract, and beyond that, in the invisible distance, Nubia. When I arrived to fetch her for breakfast she said, “We’ll go farther up the Nile once again, Sally, another time.”

Despite the beauty of the night I had a woolly head and was beginning to feel unwell. When we got back to the temple, where Omar was preparing our breakfast, I suddenly felt a terrible sensation of dizziness: I couldn’t stop myself from crying out. Omar rushed towards me and everything went blank.

I woke again after a few minutes to find I was lying in the shade on mats and cushions with the Coptic tailor standing over me, fanning vigorously. Omar was hovering with a cup of water. My Lady was seated nearby. I tried to sit up, embarrassed to be the focus of so much attention, but had to lie back down once again.

“It’s the heat,” my Lady said, “and the fatigue from not sleeping, and the cucumber we had for supper last night. Don’t worry, Omar.”

“But she’s never unwell,” Omar said, and I could hear he was anxious.

“You’re right,” said my Lady, laughing, “it’s usually me. We’ll nurse Sally well, you and me, after all she has done for me.”

“Stop talking as though I’m not here,” I said. “I can still hear.” Incapacity made me bad-tempered.

I forced myself to sit up. My head was aching. “Stop that,” I said to the Copt, who had kept up his manic fanning. “Stop that now, and go away.” I lay down once again with my feet—what had happened to my shoes?—and hands in bowls of water that Omar had fetched from the Nile, but then had to sit up and put my head between my knees. Omar fussed and both my Lady and I were annoyed by his attentions; I was out of sorts with the world and myself and I could see that she was annoyed at not being the center of attention, and even more annoyed with herself for feeling that way. Of course I should have been afraid that she would guess at my condition, but I was not. I had come to rely on the fact that she trusted me. But now I knew I would need to be more careful.

THAT EVENING WE CROSSED BACK OVER THE NILE TO WHERE OUR
donkeys were waiting and made the journey to Aswan through the night. We were all pleased to get back on board the
dahabieh
and planned to make our way downriver to Luxor quickly.

Beyond Aswan we moored the boat in the early evening so my Lady could bathe in the river; Omar and the
reis
rigged up the tent-awning and my Lady submerged herself in the water, sighing with relief. “You should come and join me, Sally,” she called out, but I couldn’t summon the energy, even though I knew the water would cool me. I was at the back of the boat on a divan in the shade. It was peaceful; my Lady paddled, Omar pottered, I dozed, and the crew went about their business.

Then Omar came upon the Coptic tailor on his tiptoes peeping at my Lady through a gap in the awning. He let out an almighty roar.
“Kelb!”
he shouted.
“Ya ibn el kelb!
Dog! Son of a dog!” And he called to the
reis
and his crew to come. “Should I cut his throat?” Omar asked. “He has defiled my noble Lady with his pig’s eyes. I will cut your throat and then drown you!” he shouted.

The sailors had grabbed hold of the Copt and were half strangling him already, when my Lady, still in the water at the side of the
dahabieh,
raised her voice in protest: “He does not deserve to die for this … ,” she paused, “trivial crime.” Omar shouted out his protest, but she raised her voice once again: “In the scope of things, this is unimportant.” And, in fact, to my amazement, I could hear she was struggling not to laugh. When I asked her why later, she said, “So audacious. The little tailor. Who’d have thought he’d have it in him to peep at me that way?” But at the time she allowed the crew to lead the tailor away. Omar helped her out of the water, his dignity as well as hers restored. I accompanied my Lady to her cabin; we chatted about nothing in an effort to block out the noise as the Copt was beaten.

Our journey home after that was quick, only stopping to obtain supplies. Omar had to bribe the
nazir
at Edfu to sell him some charcoal; we had had no means to brew tea or cook for several days. When we arrived back in Luxor we were greeted like returning heroes. Mustafa Agha came bearing a stack of letters from England for my Lady and two for me from my sister, Ellen. Sheikh Yusuf was there, beaming with pleasure at seeing his assiduous student once again, Mohammed had made fresh loaves of bread with the new season’s wheat, the gardener had distributed flowers throughout the house, and little Ahmed, fully recovered from the contagion, a child of the village now that he was parentless, rushed around and around wildly, catching our hands in order to cover them with swift kisses. “The French House,” my Lady said, as we reached the front door, “this is our home now, and what a homecoming!”