Napoleon's Pyramids

by William Dietrich

  ‘What would a slave know?’

  I regarded her. She was watching our conversation without understanding but her eyes were wide, bright, and intelligent. ‘She’s had learning of some kind.’

  Well, talk of fate always intrigued him. ‘Her luck, then, and my own, that you’re the one to find her. Tell her that I have killed her master in battle and thus have become her new master. And that I, Napoleon, award her care to my American ally – you.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Victory is sometimes more untidy than battle. An assault can be simplicity itself; administration an entangling nightmare. So it was in Alexandria. Bonaparte quickly accepted the surrender of ruling sultan Mohammed el-Koraim and swiftly unloaded the rest of his troops, artillery, and horses. The soldiers and scientists rejoiced for five minutes upon reaching dry land, and then immediately began grumbling about the lack of shelter, shortage of good water, and confusion of supply. The heat was palpable, a weight one pushed against, and dust covered everything with fine powder. There were three hundred French casualties and more than a thousand Alexandrian dead and wounded, with no adequate hospital for either group. The wounded Europeans were tucked into mosques or confiscated palaces, the comfort of their regal surroundings marred by pain, heat, and buzzing flies. The Egyptian injured were left to take care of themselves. Many died.

  Meanwhile, the transports were sent back to France and the battleships placed in defensive anchorage at nearby Abukir Bay. The invaders still feared the reappearance of Nelson’s fleet.

  Most debarking soldiers found themselves either camping in the city’s squares or in the dunes outside. Officers were luckier, appropriating the finer homes. Talma and I shared, with several officers, the home I’d helped capture from Astiza’s master. Once the slave woman had recovered her senses she seemed to accept her new situation with odd equanimity, studying me out of the corner of her eye as if trying to decide if I was entirely a calamity or perhaps some new opportunity. It was she who took some coins, bartered with neighbours, and found us food, even while murmuring about our ignorance of Egyptian ways and barbaric habits. As if acquiescing to destiny, she adopted us as we’d adopted her. She was dutiful but wary, obedient but resigned, watchful but skittish. I was intrigued by her, as I am by too many women. Franklin had the same weakness and so, indeed, did the entire army: there were hundreds of wives, mistresses, and enterprising prostitutes. Once on land, the French women discarded their male disguises for dresses that displayed more of their charms, much to the horror of the Egyptians. The females also turned out to be at least as tough as their men, enduring the primitive conditions with less complaint than the soldiers. The Arab men regarded them with fear and fascination.

  To keep his troops occupied, Napoleon sent some marching southeast toward the Nile by land, a seemingly simple sojourn of sixty miles. Yet this first step toward the capital at Cairo proved cruel, because what had been promised to be rich delta farmland was stunted at this end of the dry season, just before the Nile flood. Some wells were dry. Others had been poisoned or filled with stone. Villages were mud brick and thatch, and farmers tried to hoard their few scrawny goats or chickens. The troops initially thought the peasants exceedingly ignorant because they’d disdain French money and yet reluctantly trade food and water for the soldiers’ buttons. Only later did we learn that the peasants expected their ruling Mamelukes to win, and that while a French coin would signal collaboration with the Christians, a button would be assumed to have been cut from European dead.

  Their stifling march could be tracked by its pillar of dust. The heat exceeded one hundred degrees and some soldiers, depressed and crazed by thirst, committed suicide.

  Things were not quite so grim for those of us back in Alexandria. Thousands of bottles of wine were unloaded alongside the tack of infantry rations, and bright dress uniforms filled the streets like an aviary of tropical birds, rainbow plumage highlighted by epaulettes, braid, frogging, and stripes. The dragoons and fusiliers were in green coats, the officers were wrapped at the waist with brilliant red sashes, the chasseurs had upright tricolour cockades, and the carabiniers boasted plumes of scarlet. I began to learn something about armies. Some branches took their name from their weapons, such as the light musket called a fusil that had originally equipped the fusiliers, the grenades apportioned to the heavy infantry called grenadiers, and the short carbines distributed to the blue-clad carabiniers. The chasseurs, or chasers, were light troops equipped for rapid action. The red-jacketed hussars were light cavalry or scouts, who took their name from cousin units in central Europe. The dragoons were heavy cavalry who wore helmets to ward off sabre strokes.

  The general plan of battle was for light infantry to disrupt and confuse the enemy as artillery pounded, until a line or column of heavy infantry with massed firepower could deliver the decisive blow to break the opposing formation. Cavalry would then swoop in to finish the destruction. In practice, the tasks of these units sometimes blurred together, and in Egypt the French army’s task was simplified by the Mameluke reliance on cavalry and the French shortage of same.

  Added to the French force was the Legion of Malta, recruited when that island was taken, and Arab mercenaries like Achmed bin Sadr. Napoleon already had plans to enlist a company of Mamelukes, once he had defeated them, and to organise a camel corps of Egyptian Christians.

  The land force totalled thirty-four thousand, of which twenty-eight thousand were infantry and three thousand each were cavalry and artillery. There was an acute shortage of horses that would be remedied in Egypt only slowly and with difficulty. Bonaparte did unload 171 cannon, ranging from twenty-four-pounder siege guns to light field pieces capable of getting off up to three shots per minute, but again, the lack of horses limited how many he could immediately bring along. Rank-and-file infantry were even more ill equipped, suffering in the heat from heavy 1777 muskets, leather backpacks, blue Alpine wool uniforms, and bicorne hats. The dragoons boiled in their brass helmets, and military collars became stiff with salt. We savants were not as rigidly dressed – our jackets could come off – but we were equally dazed by the heat, gasping like landed fish. Except when travelling, I went without the garment that had given me the nickname ‘green coat’ (as well as ‘the Franklin man’) from the soldiers. One of Bonaparte’s first orders was to secure enough cotton for new uniforms, but they wouldn’t be ready for months and, when they were, proved too cold for winter.

  The city itself was a disappointment, as I’ve said. It seemed half-empty, and half-ruined. There was no treasure, little shade, and no Ottoman temptresses. The richest and most beautiful Arab women were cloistered out of sight or had escaped to Cairo. Those few who did appear were usually shrouded head to foot like Inquisition priests, peering at the world over the brim of veils or through tiny slit-holes in their hoods. In contrast, peasant women were immodestly dressed – some of the poor showed their breasts as casually as their feet – but looked scrawny, dusty, and diseased. Talma’s promise of lush harems and exotic dancing girls seemed a cruel joke.

  Nor had my companion found any miracle cures yet. He announced he was succumbing to new fevers within hours of debarking, and disappeared into the souk seeking drugs. What he returned with were quack remedies. A man who gagged at red meat gamely tried such ancient Egyptian medicines as worm’s blood, ass’s dung, pounded garlic, mother’s milk, hog’s tooth, tortoise brain, and snake venom.

  ‘Talma, all you’re getting is a case of the runs,’ I lectured.

  ‘It’s purging my system. My druggist told me of Egyptian priests a thousand years old. He looks venerable himself.’

  ‘I asked and he’s forty. The heat and his poisons have wrinkled him like a raisin.’

  ‘I’m sure he was joking. He told me that when the cramps go away, I’ll have the vigour of a sixteen-year-old.’

  ‘And the sense, apparently.’

  Talma was newly flush with money. Though a civilian, his role as journalist made him essentially an adjunct o
f the army, and he’d written an account of our assault so flattering that I scarcely recognised it. Bonaparte’s chief of staff, Berthier, had accordingly quietly slipped him some extra pay as reward. But I saw little in Alexandria’s markets worth buying. The souk was hot, shadowy, swarming with flies, and poorly stocked after our capture of the city. Even so, through shrewd bargaining, the wily merchants fleeced our bored soldiers more thoroughly than their own city had been pillaged. They learnt clumsy French with astonishing rapidity. ‘Come, look my stall, monsieur! Here is what you want! Not you want? Then I know you need!’

  Astiza was a happy exception to our disillusion. Picked out of the rubble and given a chance to clean herself, she wrought a wondrous transformation. Neither as fair as the fierce Mamelukes nor as dark as common Egyptians, her features, bearing, and complexion were simply Mediterranean: skin of sun-polished olive, hair jet but streaked with strands of copper, lavish in its thickness, eyes almond shaped and liquid, her gaze demure, her hands and ankles fine, her breasts high, waist thin, hips transfixing. An enchantress, in other words, a Cleopatra, and I relished my luck until she made clear she viewed her rescue as dubious, and me with distrust.

  ‘You’re a plague of barbarians,’ she announced. ‘You’re the kind of men who belong nowhere, and thus go everywhere, disrupting the lives of sensible people.’

  ‘We’re here to help you.’

  ‘Did I ask for your help, at the point of a gun? Did Egypt ask to be invaded, to be investigated, to be saved?’

  ‘It’s oppressed,’ I argued. ‘It invited rescue by being backward.’

  ‘Backward to whom? My people were in palaces when yours were in huts. What about your own home?’

  ‘I have no home, really.’

  ‘No parents?’

  ‘Deceased.’

  ‘No wife?’

  ‘Unattached.’ I grinned, fetchingly.

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder. No country?’

  ‘I’ve always liked travel and had a chance to visit France when I was still a youth. I finished growing up there with a famous man named Benjamin Franklin. I like America, my native land, but I have wanderlust. Besides, wives want to nest.’

  She looked at me with pity. ‘It’s not natural, how you spend your life.’

  ‘It is if you like adventure.’ I decided to change the subject. ‘What’s that interesting necklace you wear?’

  ‘An eye of Horus, homeless one.’

  ‘Eye of who?’

  ‘Horus is the hawk god who lost his eye battling the evil Seth.’ Now I remembered! Something to do with resurrection, brother-and-sister sex, and this Horus as the incestuous result. Scandalous stuff. ‘As Egypt battles your Napoleon, so did Horus battle darkness. The amulet is good luck.’

  I smiled. ‘Does that mean it’s lucky you now belong to me?’

  ‘Or lucky that I live long enough to see you all go away.’

  She cooked us dishes I couldn’t name – lamb with chickpeas and lentils, it tasted like – serving it with such grim duty that I was tempted to adopt one of the stray dogs to test each meal for poison. Yet the food was surprisingly good and she refused to take any pay. ‘If I’m caught with your coins I’ll be beheaded, once the Mamelukes kill you all.’

  Nor did her services extend into the evenings, even though coastal Egyptian nights can be as cool as the days are hot.

  ‘In New England we bundle together to ward off the chill,’ I informed her that first evening. ‘You’re welcome to come closer if you’d like.’

  ‘If not for the invasion of our house by all your officers, we wouldn’t even be in the same room.’

  ‘Because of the teachings of the Prophet?’

  ‘My teachings come from an Egyptian goddess, not the Mameluke women-haters who rule my country. And you’re not my husband, you’re my captor. Besides, all of you smell of pig.’

  I sniffed, somewhat discouraged. ‘So you’re not Muslim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor Jewish or Coptic Christian or Greek Catholic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And who is this goddess?’

  ‘One you’ve never heard of.’

  ‘Tell me. I’m here to learn.’

  ‘Then understand what a blind man could see. Egyptians have lived on this land for ten thousand years, not asking, or needing, anything new. We’ve had a dozen conquerors, and not one has brought us as much contentment as we originally had. Hundreds of generations of restless men like you have only made things worse, not better.’ She’d say little more, since she considered me too ignorant to comprehend her faith and too kind to beat anything out of her. Instead she complied with my orders while carrying herself like a duchess. ‘Egypt is the only ancient land in which women had rights equal to men,’ she claimed, meanwhile remaining impervious to wit and charm.

  It baffled me, frankly.

  Bonaparte was having equal trouble winning over the population. He issued a proclamation of some length. I can give a sense of its tone, and his political instincts, by quoting its start:

  In the name of God, the clement and the merciful. There is no divinity save Allah, He has no son and shares His power with no one.

  In the name of the French Republic, founded on liberty and equality, the commander-in-chief Bonaparte lets it be known that the beys who govern Egypt have insulted the French nation and oppressed French merchants long enough: the hour of their punishment has come.

  For too many years the Mameluke gang of slaves, purchased in Georgia and the Caucasus, has tyrannised the most beautiful region of the world. But Almighty God, who rules the Universe, has decreed that their reign shall come to an end.

  People of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Answer back to those imposters that I have come to restore to you your rights and to punish the usurpers; that I worship God more than the Mamelukes do and that I respect His Prophet Muhammad and the admirable Koran …

  ‘Quite a religious beginning,’ I remarked as Dolomieu read this with mocking drama.

  ‘Especially for a man who believes completely in the utility of religion and not at all about the reality of God,’ the geologist replied. ‘If the Egyptians swallow this load of stable dung, they deserve to be conquered.’

  A later clause in the proclamation got more to the point:

  All villages that take up arms against the army will be burnt to the ground.

  Napoleon’s religious entreaties soon came to naught. Word reached Alexandria that the mullahs of Cairo had declared all of us to be infidels. So much for revolutionary liberalism and the unity of religion! A contract for three hundred horses and five hundred camels that had been negotiated with local sheikhs immediately evaporated, and sniping and harassment increased. The seduction of Egypt was going to prove more difficult than Bonaparte had hoped. Most of his cavalry would march the early stages of his advance on Cairo carrying their saddles on their heads, and he would learn much in this campaign about the importance of logistics and supply.

  Meanwhile, the people of Alexandria were disarmed and ordered to wear the tricolour cockade. The few who complied looked ridiculous. Talma, however, wrote that the population was joyful at their liberation from their Mameluke masters.

  ‘How can you mail such rubbish back to France?’ I said. ‘Half the population has fled, the city is pockmarked with cannonball holes, and its economy has collapsed.’

  ‘I’m talking about the spirit, not the body. Their hearts are uplifted.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘Bonaparte. Our benefactor, and our only source of orders to get back home.’

  It was on my third night in Alexandria that I realised I hadn’t left my pursuers behind at the Toulon coach.

  It had been hard enough to get to sleep. Word was starting to filter back of atrocities committed by the Bedouin on any soldier caught alone from his unit. These desert tribesmen roamed the Arabian and Libyan Deserts like pirates roam the sea, preying indiscriminately on
merchants, pilgrims, and army stragglers. Mounted on camels and able to retreat back into the waste, they were beyond the reach of our army. They would kill or capture the unwary. Men were raped, burnt, castrated, or staked out to die in the desert. I’ve always been cursed with a vivid imagination for such things and I could envision all too clearly how throats might be cut while troops slept. Scorpions were slipped into boots and backpacks. Snakes were concealed between jars of food. Carcasses were thrown into tempting wells. Supply was a tangle, the scientists were restless and grumpy, and Astiza remained as reserved as a nun in a barracks. Moving in the heat was like dragging a heavy sled. What madness had I enlisted in? I’d made no progress in deciphering what the medallion might mean, seeing nothing like it in Alexandria. So I brooded, troubled and dissatisfied, until I was finally exhausted enough to drift off.

  I came awake with a jolt. Someone or something had landed on top of me! I was groping for a weapon when I recognised the scent of cloves and jasmine. Astiza? Had she changed her mind? She was straddling me, a silken thigh locked on either side of my chest, and even in my sleepy stupor my first thought was, Ah, this is more like it. The warm squeeze of her legs began to awaken all parts of me, and her tumble of hair and enchanting torso were delectably silhouetted in the dark. Then the moon moved from a cloud and enough light sifted in our grilled window to see that her arms were high over her head, holding something bright and sharp.

  It was my tomahawk.

  She swung.

  I twisted in terror but she had me pinned. The blade whistled by my ear and there was a sharp thunk as it bit the wooden floor, joined by a hiss. Something warm and alive slapped the top of my head. She freed the tomahawk and chopped again, and again, the blade thunking next to my ear. I stayed paralysed as something leathery kept writhing against my crown. Finally it was still.