The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  Monsieur Andreas nodded, looking at Louisa, dipping his dark head up and down.

  “As Madame wishes,” he said.

  Harriet decided not to quarrel with her mother. She would find a way to get to the west bank. When she was fully recovered, she would insist on it. If Louisa refused, she would go alone, with Fouad.

  Until she could reach the Necropolis, Harriet occupied herself at the Luxor temple, a short walk from the hotel. She settled to sketching a section of wall that bore a carved depiction of a king offering two round vessels to a god. The king looked boyish, his chest bare and his profile grave and smooth under an elaborate crown. Attached to the front of his crown was his uraeus, the raised head of a cobra, ready to spit in the eyes of enemies.

  The deity to whom he offered vessels of wine wore the plumes of Amun, the hidden one, and held a scepter, or was, emblem of the power of the gods, in his left hand. In Amun’s right hand, hanging from his fingers, was an ankh, the symbol of life and breath. Amun held the ankh loosely, almost casually, as if it was a gift to be lightly given and as lightly withheld.

  Above the two figures and running down between them were vertical lines of hieroglyphs, the characters large and beautifully formed. Harriet recognized the seated woman with a single feather on her head that signified the goddess Maat, or truth. The ankh was repeated again and again on the panel of stone. Had some invisible god handed her an ankh, she wondered as she worked. Had she been given the gift of breath, of life, in this place?

  While she sketched, Fouad held the parasol over Harriet’s head, keeping curious children at bay by means of a narrowed gaze or click of his tongue. Far from Alexandria, out of the shadow of Mustapha, their dragoman appeared taller than he had, and a more effective protector. Dragoman came from a Turkish word meaning to explain and Fouad, encouraged by her interest in the life of the present as well as the past, had begun to explain all that he could to Harriet.

  “Good, Miss Harry?” he said when she raised her head and found him looking at her work.

  “Kwayis?”

  “Kwayis, Fouad,” she replied.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Harriet seemed well, which gave Louisa some peace. She was out for long hours, accompanied by Fouad, sketching at the temple. Alone in the hotel room, or continuing with her tatting in the large garden, Louisa found herself once more reliving the days of her girlhood. Through the long years of her marriage to Blundell, she’d never dared to recall that time. Now, considering the events from a distance of half a lifetime, she saw them differently.

  All the while she stood naked before him, Augustus had complained of her form. Her legs were bandy; had she had the rickets? She assured him that she had not. Her breasts were overdeveloped. Her hair made her look like a gypsy, and that, as it happened, he liked. It distinguished her from the prissy misses crowding every London salon and now being aped even by the country girls. Gypsy she was and Gypsy she should be called. But her expression was that of a frightened hare, for Christ’s sake. How was he expected to render her as a goddess when she looked like a hare? What Thetis ever chewed her own nails? Bit her lip?

  Louisa grew accustomed to the judgments. She was clothed by them, armored. Knowing he did not find her pleasing but that he wanted her presence all the same, grew angry if she was late to arrive at the door of the barn, she became bold. Looking at the paintings of other women, she informed him of her opinions, wondered that such an old man could persuade such beauties to pose for him. Sometimes, at the end of the sitting, when he laid down his brushes, he caught hold of her by her hair and drew her close.

  “Here, Gypsy. Come to me.”

  He put his nose to her neck, tightened his hands around her waist. Then released her, instructing her to put on her clothes and be gone.

  Later, when her form was complete, she had to don the red velvet robe of Thetis. It smelled of another woman’s sweat and perfume and one of the silver buttons on the front of the costume lolled on a length of twisted red thread, ready to roll away. She disliked the way the garment trailed on the floor, emphasizing her modest height. Augustus brushed off her objections. The robe concealed a number of her imperfections, he pronounced, arranging it so that it fell open to the waist. It lent her an air of mystery no woman of her age could hope to possess. Having been already naked before him, Louisa felt no shame in appearing half clothed. In the airy studio that was a world in itself, she became someone different. Her second self, the one in the picture, gave her a power over Augustus.

  In the long hours of posing for him, she felt hypnotized by the repetitive swishing of the flat sable brush over the canvas, the earthy, musky smell on the air of linseed oil, the sharp interruption of turpentine. The image forming on the canvas was and wasn’t her. This woman’s skin was made of lead white, of rose madder and Naples yellow, with cerulean blue in the shadows under her eyes; her hair was umber, the raw and the burnt, the robe orange and Chinese vermilion. In the long afternoons, he taught her the names of the pigments, made her recite them to keep herself awake. Burnt sienna, lake, ultramarine. Cobalt and cadmium. Ivory black. Ivory black was made from the burned tusks of elephants, ground up with oil. Bone char, he called it. Umber was from the Latin. Umbra. Shadow.

  Her second self was made of color, of Augustus’s sighs and squintings, his sallies toward the canvas and his steppings back from it, his under-the-breath curses, laughs, expletives, they too were in the thick, daubed texture of the picture that was taking shape on the canvas, coming to life, as if the black-haired, sullen-eyed woman might at any moment speak, or sing, or sigh. Drop her gaze. Louisa felt altered by the existence of the other woman. The painting was something born between them.

  Often, the real shadow passed over the doorway. Augustus, standing with his back to it, could not see it but Louisa could. It appeared in its full outline one day and stopped, remained motionless for a minute or more. Louisa saw what she already knew. It was the boy, standing somewhere beyond the half-open door. His shadow, thrown into the room by the afternoon sun, was elongated, taller than his father. Seeing the hang of his arms by his sides, their powerless drop, she flinched.

  “What is it?”

  Too late, Augustus turned his head. Surveyed the bright empty slant of sunlight.

  “Only look, Gypsy. Don’t see.”

  • • •

  At the end of July, when the cornfields had been cut, when the charred smell of burnt stubble hung in the air and the fields of gold were black, Augustus announced that she was to don the embellishments.

  “What are embellishments?”

  He produced a pair of what he called sandals, no more than soles and straps. Knelt down and put them on her feet, laced them up her ankles. Lying on a great carved tray, throughout the sittings, were a number of strange and beautiful objects. Louisa sometimes examined them, picking up the sheaf of peacock feathers and brushing them against her cheek, peering with one eye through the stone with a hole through its center or pricking her finger on the pointed ears of a cat carved in black basalt. At the center of the collection was a silver ornament. A ribbed, shallow bowl of a shell, of a type she had never seen on their own beach. She’d never dared to touch it.

  Augustus selected the shell, threaded it onto a fine strip of leather. He came and stood behind Louisa, so close that she felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rise. He felt with his finger for the hollow in the center of her throat, then laid the shell over the spot, tied the straps on her neck clumsily, methodically. The piece was cold on her skin, heavy, its edges smooth and rounded.

  As he turned her around, pulling her by one hand so that she faced him, she giggled.

  “It feels so strange. Not like me at all.”

  He took hold of her by both arms, his thumbs digging into her flesh.

  “It isn’t you.”

  His voice was hoarse, like stones being rubbed together. He was looking at her mouth.
She felt a shift in temperature, slight, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.

  “What do you—”

  Augustus released her arm and slid his hand inside the open robe as his mouth closed on hers. The sensation of his lips, his tongue in her mouth, was overpoweringly strange. He pulled away from her.

  “Go and lie down.”

  Walking toward the couch, Louisa felt a blossoming between her legs like a flower opening. She lay down, listening to the sound of his belt buckle. She’d known from when she first saw him on the beach that this, whatever it was, was going to happen. That she, because she loved him, was going to allow it to happen.

  The shadow flickered past the door.

  • • •

  Laying down her handwork, Louisa strolled around the garden, oblivious to the lush proliferation of leaf and blossom, the cries of the birds. For now, at least, she could bear no more remembering.

  THIRTY-TWO

  At the sound of the door, Louisa cried out and sat up, her eyes staring.

  “Whatever is it, Mother?” Harriet said, opening a shutter, allowing light to flood in over the wooden floor.

  “Oh, Harriet. It’s you. I . . . I was dreaming.”

  “Of what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It must have been something.” Harriet sat on the edge of the bed and took Louisa’s hand, felt the clammy coolness of her palm.

  “I was dreaming about . . . Dover. Where I lived when I was a girl.”

  Louisa lay down again and closed her eyes. She looked as white as the pillow slip, her dark hair tangled.

  “Are you ill, Mother?”

  Louisa shook her head. “Take your breakfast without me, Harriet. I’ve got a headache.”

  After breakfast, Harriet brought up a tray of tea made from mint leaves with a bowl of coarse sugar lumps, sent by Monsieur Andreas with his compliments.

  “Shall I pour you a cup?” She put it down by the bed and Louisa turned her face away.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Can I bring you something else?”

  “Rosewater,” came her mother’s voice. “I wish I had a few drops of rosewater.”

  “I’ll go and look for it in the bazaar.”

  Louisa opened her eyes and lifted her head. “You cannot go alone.”

  “Fouad will come with me. There’s nothing to fear, Mother.”

  Louisa raised a hand then let it fall back on the sheet.

  “If you insist. Don’t forget your parasol.”

  • • •

  Harriet breathed in the fresh, swampy scent of the Nile. The trees by the river made a canopy, the leaves shading the dry earth underneath in a shifting, soft-edged dance. Down on the shore, half a dozen women were filling pitchers with clay cups. The women departed, the great round-bottomed jugs balanced at an angle on their heads, two brightly dressed girls following behind them with smaller pots on their heads.

  Winding her scarf around her neck, Harriet stopped and looked across to the west bank. Beyond the palms and crops that ran in a strip along the other side of the water, the mountains rose implacably. Already, the heat was visible in layers over their flat tops, shimmering and otherworldly.

  Up ahead, Fouad whistled. The dog strained at the leash and Harriet set off again. She was half running, keeping her eyes to the ground as she tried not to trip over tree roots or get her skirts tangled in the lead, when she ran headlong into a warm, angular body. Crying out in surprise, she fell awkwardly to the ground, dropping the lead in the dust. A hand with a silver ring on it, a dark red stone in an oval mount, reached down and took hers. It was a man’s hand, the grip dry and strong.

  “Permit me to help you.”

  He pulled her up and Harriet got to her feet, too winded to speak.

  “Ach, my apologies,” he said as he let go of her hand. “I was looking over at the other side.”

  “It was my fault,” she said shaking dirt from her skirt. “I was following my dog, not paying attention to where I was going.”

  She recognized him immediately. He was dressed in the same pale, creased suit, wearing his fraying Panama hat. The bleached ends of his dark hair still brushed his shoulders. His face, now that at last she was able to see it, was suntanned and his eyes the color of the neem leaves over their heads. The man was younger than she’d thought, not more than thirty years old.

  Papers carpeted the ground, their corners being lifted by the breeze off the water. Bending to help him gather them, picking up the last sheet, Harriet saw a drawing of hieroglyphs, a neat, precise rendering of the symbols, surrounded by writing in a language she didn’t recognize. She handed it to him.

  “Danke,” he said, flattening the documents back into a folder, putting it under his arm. “Are you certain you’re unharmed?”

  “Quite certain, thank you.”

  Her chest was throbbing where his had thumped against it. The man must have the same sure sense of her physical being as she had of his. The dog raced toward them, his lead trailing in the dust, and began leaping up toward the man’s knees.

  “Have we met before?” said the man, leaning down, rubbing Dash’s ears.

  “I recognize you too,” Harriet said.

  “You do?”

  “Your piano . . . We watched it being loaded at Brindisi.”

  “Ach, you were on board the ship. You must have cursed the delay.”

  “No,” she said. “I was happy to see a piano traveling to Africa.”

  “Were you really?” His eyes were alive and searching, at odds with the formality of his manner. They flickered away again, to the far bank, the pink creases of the hills. “I discovered I was unable to live without music. So I brought a piano two thousand miles. Crazy, is it not? The men almost dropped it in the river, over there.” He gestured at the west bank.

  Some melancholy hung in the air about him, undispelled by the light and heat of the morning. Harriet pushed hair out of her eyes, feeling as curious about him as she had done the first time she saw him. On the steamer, she’d taken him for a European, but here he seemed neither Western nor Eastern but something in between, adapted to this place but not of it.

  “Why did you take it over to that side?” she said.

  “I live there.”

  “In the Necropolis?” She couldn’t keep the astonishment out of her voice.

  “Nearby. I am working at a site, making an excavation of a tomb.” They both looked across the water to where a lush band of emerald fringed the far side of the river like a velvet ribbon. A whistle pierced the air and Harriet brought her eyes back to the east bank. Farther along the shore, Fouad was leaning against a tree, his shoulders curved forward.

  “I’m on my way to the bazaar,” Harriet said.

  “Of course.” The man raised his hat. “If you’re sure you are unharmed.”

  Harriet felt in her pocket, gripped her book.

  “I couldn’t help seeing those hieroglyphs, on your papers,” she said. “I’ve been interested in hieroglyphs since I was a girl. I started my own Book of the Dead, in London. I was ill then, and thought I should never get well.”

  Why had she told a stranger something so private? He would think her absurd.

  “Is that so?”

  “I wonder, I mean, might we visit the site? My mother and I?”

  The man hesitated, and when he answered, his voice was abrupt.

  “There is little to see. I am still working in an outer passageway.

  No great finds of gold and jewels. No mummies.”

  “Oh, of course.” Harriet felt herself flushing with disappointment, both at the refusal and at the man’s misunderstanding. She had never been much interested in the riches the tombs had contained. It was the hieroglyphs that were the treasure to her. “I suppose visitors must get in the way.”

 
; “Some do.” He bent to pet Dash again and the dog wagged his tail and grinned. “Ach, why not?” the man said, as if he were speaking to himself. He straightened up. “You may visit if you wish, Fräulein. I’ll call for you and your mother on Friday. Can you be ready early? It is dusty over on that side and hotter, away from the river.”

  “We will be ready. But you don’t know where we’re staying.”

  “The Luxor Hotel, is it not?”

  She nodded as he gave a little bow and went on his way.

  Harriet followed Fouad through the area where the tinsmiths and coppersmiths worked, the din jangling in her ears. They continued past the open booths of tailors and shoemakers, where the ground was littered with ends of cotton and scraps of leather, and into the section given over to groceries and medicines.

  Walking underneath hanging bunches of strips of gold paper that rustled strangely in the breeze, surveying heaps of dried dates and rough chunks of soap and strings of dried fish, woven baskets piled high with smooth-sided cones of powdered spices in amber and ocher and scarlet, Harriet struggled to remember what her errand was.

  She could hardly believe that she had been so bold as to invite herself to a tomb. If she’d had time to consider what she was saying, she might not have dared. She had no regrets, she decided, as Fouad showed her into a little shop, its front shaded with an awning of sacking, its dusty goods displayed on a shelf along the back. Sitting cross-legged on his mud divan, the shopkeeper pressed Harriet to take tea. Emboldened by what had just passed, Harriet broke with convention for a second time.

  “Tell him I will,” she said to Fouad. “I would like a cup of tea.”

  As she said the words, she remembered. Rosewater. A stool was brought for her to sit on, then a boy arrived with a steaming glass on a tray. Harriet told Fouad what she wanted, he explained it to the shopkeeper, and the shopkeeper dispatched the tea boy on another errand. By the time she’d drunk the tea, Harriet was in possession of a brown bottle that, according to the label, contained cinnamon cough mixture made in Battersea. She pulled out the cork and caught the soft fragrance of roses, shook a few drops onto her hand, and rubbed them on her wrists.