I stroked my hand across Octavia’s cheek. Everything about her was so exotic. She was everything the ski-slope-nosed-blondes I normally dated were not. I decided then that Salah had a point; maybe they were pumped out on an Upper East Side factory line. Octavia was unique in every way.
As we walked past the souvenir shops that lined the path to Abu Simbel, Octavia suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled my thumb back teasingly until I fell to my knees in mock pain. All the storeowners came out and laughed.
“Buy something, darling,” she said. “The shop owners look so forlorn.”
“What do you want?” I asked, eyeing up the tourist crap displayed outside every shop. “You can have whatever you want from these Ali Baba caves. Name your jewels,” I insisted, gesturing expansively at the bric-a-brac.
“I think you should get that stick that turns into a stool in case I want to sit down,” she suggested, and so I bought four so Salah and Rosie could join us.
I was so glad I did because when we finally reached the monuments on the banks of Lake Nassar, we parked ourselves on them and soaked up the scene—along with the water in our bottles. In front of us was an aqua lake, behind us, the enormous pink edifice dedicated to Rameses II and his wife Nefertari. The walls of the temple were covered with images of Rameses smiting his enemies.
Mohammed left the others and joined us. Since our chariot race, we’d become his favorites. He pointed at the 167-foot-high figures carved in the rock.
“Imagine what the traders and invaders from Africa thought when they sailed up the Nile and saw this wall,” Mohammed mused.
“Terror?” I suggested. “There’s a lot of violence depicted.”
“Yes. They would have been terrified of the kingdom they were entering and afraid of the mighty power of this great king. In the words of a great Englishman, they would crap their trousers.”
Salah and I spat our water with laughter.
“Yes, but darling, who’s that lovely woman with him?” Octavia asked.
“That his first wife. The most beautiful woman of Egypt ever lived. She very good woman. Very kind, very beautiful, very powerful and great. Rameses love her. She gave him sons. There is a poem we see in Luxor about her. Rameses II call her, the One for Whom the Sun Shines.” That perked me up.
“Darling, I thought that was me,” Octavia teased.
“Darling, it is you,” Mohammed humored her. “The sun, it only shines for Octavia.”
“There is a poem Rameses wrote for Nefertari,” Mohammad said, and he recited the poem in Arabic. Salah was about to translate but I threw him a warning look. Salah smiled knowingly. I might not speak Arabic but I was pretty sure it was still sappy and totally the sort of thing I would want to say to Octavia. I was determined to get that and give it to her. Unlike Salah, writing poetry wasn’t my thing.
“What does it mean in English?” Octavia asked.
“Ahh,” Mohammed said, reading my pleading look. “That would be telling, Octavia. Even a bright girl like you can’t know everything.”
“You are the wisest tour guide any of us could have wished for, Mohammed,” she said.
After that, we went into the temple complex itself, where men in turbans and galabias guarded giant ankh keys to open the chambers. They, in turn, were guarded by soldiers with AK-47s. Salah gave them some baksheesh on Mohammed’s instructions so that we could go into some of the secret chambers tourists weren’t allowed into. Mohammed told us stories about this great Pharaoh who had ruled over Egypt for most of his ninety-six years of life. He explained the triumphs of his battles in Syria, which were depicted in detail on the walls.
“Darling, he was mad keen on winning wars, wasn’t he?” Octavia remarked.
Mohammed laughed. “Yes, darling, he was mad keen.”
When we returned into the blazing desert sun, Mr. Bell was giving his own talk to the others. “It is a magnificent monument to a venerated leader of the ancient Egyptians and with the pink desert contrasted spectacularly with the azure blue of the lake, it makes a most impressive spectacle. More impressive than the Pyramids of Giza, according to many.” Hearing this short guy with a water bottle stuck in the crown of his straw hat, crapping on about magnificence, made us all crack up.
I spent the next ten minutes taking shots of the monument. I got a fantastic one of the soldiers with the gatekeeper and more shots of their boots and the butts of AK-47s in the sand.
Soon our small group wandered off alone again into another temple. I don’t think I was the only one in a pensive mood. It was hard not to focus on the fact that tomorrow we would all be going back to our real lives. As if reading my mind, I got an e-mail from my dad confirming he’d pick me up at JFK Airport.
The next temple we entered was full of couples fooling around in the semidarkness, which Mohammed wasn’t too happy about. He used his stick to chase them out, saying they were being disrespectful of the temple. I was no better, though, because on the way back I ended up selling my iPod for the same price I’d paid for it in New York to the guy we’d bought the stools from. Still, you only live once.
Back at the airport, Octavia turned to me. “I think we should buy Mohammed something to remember us by,” Octavia suggested as we waited for our flight back to Aswan.
“I know,” Salah said. “Let’s get the shop to embroider ‘blah, blah, blah’ in hieroglyphs on a T-shirt.”
“Bloody blah, blah, blah,” Octavia corrected.
Once we were on the plane, I approached Mohammed and asked him to write out a copy of the poem he’d recited at Abu Simbel. It said:
My love is unique. No one can rival her, for she
is the most beautiful girl alive. Just by passing,
she has stolen my heart.
Back at the boat, I copied it onto a postcard of the Great Sphinx and put it in a package that I planned to send to Octavia at her school in England. I added the sand I’d pocketed and the stone sphinx from the Valley of the Kings and Queens. On the bottom, I etched the answer to my riddle. I was hoping that it would be waiting for her back in London when she returned.
Chapter 22
Octavia
It was tres, tres Romeo and Juliet on the Nile.
“Nigel, you look ever so cross,” I told him when we were back on the Nefertiti.
“Into the lobby! All of you! Now!” he roared.
Given we were already there, it all seemed a bit melodramatic, but then that’s the way with teachers.
The staff nervously handed out the usual cold flannels and cups of ice water as Nigel and Carol stood silently to the side, waiting for the ritual to be dispensed with.
“Right. I want all of you to march up onto the deck in single file this very moment.”
A few of the group obeyed wordlessly, but most ignored his suggestion and began to make our way to our cabins.
It was about then that Carol screamed, “Do what Nigel says!”
“Yes! On the deck now. That’s an order!” barked Nigel.
“What’s this all about, Nigel?” Mr. Bell asked after his ears had stopped ringing.
“You’ll see soon enough,” Nigel warned darkly.
When we had all filed out onto the deck, Nigel was standing by the piano, which for some reason was out there. Everyone was listening while he ranted, with all the hand movements of a general. When people lose their sense of proportion, I find it best to give them space. In Nigel’s case, I suspected it might take some time before he regained his composure, so I grabbed a towel and quietly slid myself onto a sun lounger at the back.
I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Sam looked at me and shrugged. Rosie gave me a warning look and shook her head, but I wasn’t to be deterred from my task of sun worship on our last day in Egypt.
“And what do you think you’re up to, madam?” Nigel demanded of me as I settled on my towel. “Come here this instant and stand here with the rest of the group.”
Carol was calmer. She explained, “Yes, Octavia, this i
s very important. You see, Nigel and I were both too tired after our ordeal with the police yesterday to come upstairs until just before you came back. And instead of relaxing in the sun, we discovered this, a piano out here! The captain says that it’s been damaged, and we’re not leaving until the guilty party confesses to how it got out here.”
“Well, as I wasn’t even—” I was about to say “on the boat” but luckily Sam cut me off with a look.
“—capable of moving a piano. So, it couldn’t possibly have been Octavia.” Sam added before I shot off my mouth about spending the night with him at the hotel in town.
“Exactly,” I agreed gratefully.
“Will no one own up to what happened to the piano?” Carol asked. Her question was met with silence.
“In that case,” said Nigel, “I have decided to put you all under cruise arrest. That means that apart from lunch, dinner, and breakfast tomorrow, you will all be locked in your cabins until we depart for our respective flights.”
I always knew that Nigel was a funny little man, but at that moment, I feared he might be seriously certifiable.
“Darling, I’m sure all that arrest business was most unsettling, but if you play in the mud and buy drugs, you have to expect to get dirty,” I said playfully. “Mohammed explained that buying hashish is a very serious crime in Egypt.”
“For the last time, I did not play in the mud!” Nigel blustered. “I was manhandled over the side of the boat by hooligans.” He had begun to foam at the mouth and it was hard to resist an urge to take a tissue to him.
Mohammed entered the discussion. “Nigel, I have warned you the buying of hashish in our country is a serious matter. When in Egypt you should do as the Egyptian do and act respectably,” he explained.
“I think Mohammed has a fearfully good point. You should try and be more Egyptian and respectful of others,” I said.
Sam came over and stood beside me and put his finger to my lips. “This is our last night—let’s not rile the teachers.”
American boys really do worry too much. I turned to him and kissed him lightly on the mouth. That was when Carol blew her whistle.
“Right, missy! That’s it. Into your cabin! Now! You can have your meals in your room. You will be released not a moment before the bus to the airport tomorrow morning.”
Sam turned on her. “Carol! You can’t do that! This is our last night together.”
“Yes, and you’re not my teacher anyway!” I added.
“Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do, young man,” she yelled deafening the entire populace of the Nile. It is shameful the way teachers have such a lack of respect for other people’s pleasure. And anyhow, how dare she speak to my boyfriend like that.
“I don’t want to have to call the police and have you arrested again, Carol,” I warned her, but my teasing was muffled by Rosie, who put her hand over my mouth to shut me up. “Quiet, Octavia! Seriously, do you want to get us all grounded? This is our last night!”
Unfortunately, Rosie’s reasoning was too late to save me from myself. “Right, that’s it!” Nigel exploded. “I’ve had enough of your impertinence. I said get down to your cabin! And I mean. NOW!” he roared.
I felt awful. Sam, Salah, and all the others began pleading with the teachers. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears and listened to the drumbeat of guilt in my head. Maybe Ferris Bueller was wrong—what if you could go too far?
Suddenly I felt my sun lounger being lifted. I looked down. I was being carried through the bar and downstairs to my room by the bar staff. It’s true that I felt just like Cleopatra, which I enjoyed. But my pleasure was short lived as I heard the awful sound of the key locking my door from the outside. My freedom was over.
After watching a bit of television, I had the bright idea of e-mailing the staff on my BlackBerry. I asked them to call the police on Nigel for imprisoning me, which amused them greatly. But seriously, I couldn’t find much to be happy about. I watched miserably as we moved out of Aswan and began sailing back to Luxor. I wondered what Sam was doing. He probably hated me now.
Later, Carol turned up with a tray of lunch and was very sweet.
“I’m sorry about all this. I know it’s your last night and if you ask me, Nigel’s gone a little bit overboard. I think he just feels he owes it to your parents to discipline you.”
Sensing her weakness I tried to work on her. “Papa and Mumsy will die when they hear I was locked in a cabin on a cruise.”
I felt I’d rattled her a bit because she put down the tray on my desk, sat on Rosie’s bed, and looked into her hands. “He is being a bit dictatorial,” she conceded.
“A bit! He’s Mussolini! That’s what we call him at school,” I lied.
I could see she was concerned now because she was biting her lip, and I began to hope. I don’t think Carol was a big fan of fascist girl-imprisoners. “Eat your lunch and maybe he’ll allow you up for dinner,” she suggested. Then she left me and locked the door. It was awful.
Rosie joined me about an hour later. By then the hatefulness of my situation really hit me and I started to cry. This cruise-arrest business meant that Sam and I wouldn’t be able to have any time together ever, ever, ever again.
Rosie was crying too. We held one another and sobbed about the injustice of it all as the banks of the Nile slipped passed. Then Sam texted me, and Salah texted her, and then we realized there was an actual phone in our room. They’re called land lines.
You know those old-fashioned ones with cords that you used to see in films? Anyway, we used them to call the boys in their room because that was free. They were as shocked as we were to discover how romantic cord phones are. You can cradle them against your neck while you lie in bed and the signal is beyond wonderful.
Salah even called the boat’s gift shop and managed to arrange for Mohammed’s hieroglyphic BLOODY BLAH, BLAH, BLAH T-shirt to be printed. Perhaps he wasn’t such a grump after all, I told Rosie. “No one could accuse him of being a selfish boy, when in a time of great hardship and distress he is able to think of others.” The gift shop assured Salah that the T-shirt would be ready for collection that evening before dinner.
Rosie and I tried to get the most out of our solitary confinement by showering, doing our hair and nails and chatting to Salah and Sam for the next few hours until we were eventually released for dinner. But, even then, the boys had to sit on one side of the room and the girls on the other.
I point-blank refused to accept this hideously evil and hypocritical ruling when all the teachers were happily mingling with the opposite gender. I made a point of sitting down beside Sam.
Rosie followed suit and seated herself by Salah, and a mass rebellion of reseating began to take place, with Nigel going la-la and Carol trying to reason with us. Both were ignored and Mohammed warned Nigel that his behavior was not acceptable in Egypt, a land that could trace a sophisticated civilization back thousands of years. That put Nigel in his place.
Hateful, hateful, hateful Nigel.
“Darling, I can’t bear this,” I told Sam as our starters were brought in.
“Have mine,” he offered, switching plates. He is the dearest, daftest boy in all the world and I gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“I meant this being our last night,” I explained.
“I know you did,” he replied with a smile, then gave me an Eskimo kiss.
Rosie giggled and Salah held her hand. We had to grab our happiness where we could. It was all very Romeo and Juliet on the Nile.
“Sam and I have a plan,” Salah told us, leaning back in his seat.
“Be at your window at nine o’clock,” Sam whispered into my ear. Honestly, boys are like cryptic crosswords.
I didn’t get to unravel what on earth he meant because that was when Ahmed brought in the T-shirt we’d ordered.
“I think you should do the honors,” Salah told me, which made me feel, I don’t know. Special?
I stood on my chair and called for quiet.
“I’d like to make a toast to a great man!” I began, tapping my glass with a fork.
Everyone stopped eating and chatting—apart from Nigel, who had an apoplectic fit and told me to get down or he’d send me to my room without any supper. Carol told him to shush.
Anyway, I ignored him. “We’ve only known Mohammed for a short time, but in that time he has taught us all about ancient Egypt and brought the gods and goddesses to life for us.”
The jocks all started to cheer and a chorus of “Mo-ham-med” went around the room and everyone stood on their chairs.
“Mohammed,” I called above the growing din. “Please come to the podium—well, stand up on my chair anyway.” I stood on the table.
He came over, his Indiana Jones hat proudly on his head as he sheepishly climbed onto my chair.
“We girls of Queens and boys of Bowers would like to present you with a memento of our affection.” I held the T-shirt with the hieroglyphics on the front up to the crowd. Then I turned it around where the words BLOODY BLAH! BLAH! BLAH! were emblazoned in English and Arabic on the back. Everyone, especially the teachers, applauded. I thought Mr. Bell and the others would break their hands with all their clapping. Ms. Doyle even blew her whistle and whooped!
Mohammed put the T-shirt on over his other shirt and touched his heart with his hand and gave us a little bow.
Nigel then made his own speech and said he was very proud that we students had got so much out of our trip. But not proud enough to release us from prison apparently, because the next thing we knew, we were headed back to our cabins for lockdown.
Chapter 23
Salah
Sam was right. Egypt was totally crazy! And I finally saw why he loved crazy. Because with crazy, magic happens.
I’d hatched a plan to see Rosie while I was lying in bed, pissed off with Nigel and Carol. This was our last night! I kind of felt responsible for the cabin arrest as it was me who’d organized moving the piano onto the deck and I should have been the one to have it put back where it belonged.
True Love, the Sphinx, and Other Unsolvable Riddles Page 14
