Crowds begin to roam the city, their shouts filling the air as they attack any foreigners they can find: Greek and Italian merchants mostly, along with a well-known diplomat: the Venetian consul Rosetti, on his way to appear before Murad bey.
By a hair’s breadth the consul manages to escape, leaving his servants to fend off the attackers. Galloping through twisting back alleys to the centuries-old dungheaps that rise to a hundred feet outside the city gates, he hides amid the refuse all morning. Finally, necessity triumphing over dignity, he exchanges his clothes for those of a beggar picking through the trash. Thus attired, in a tattered robe thrown over rags, he makes his way to the palace.
Here, at the Qasr al-Aini, the grand divan is assembling. The heavy gates have been thrown open and first Abu Bekir Pasha, the Turkish sultan’s viceroy, enters; then the learned shayks of the Al-Azhar and their disciples (the historian Jabarti among them). Then, most important of all, the twenty-three Mameluke warlords (or beys) arrive one by one. Resplendent in finely wrought armor and mounted on magnificent Arabian horses, their appearance inspires awe. The crowd parts as the warriors ride through the gates, each followed by his trusted henchmen together with hundreds of bodyguards armed to the teeth. For in the violent, treacherous world of Mameluke politics this “news” supposedly from Alexandria—even if it is true, even if invaders have, in fact, arrived—might be nothing more than a ruse, perhaps a pretext for their venerable leader, Murad bey, to gather them together and slaughter them to a man.
Nothing is taken for granted by them—except the unquestioning loyalty of the warrior to his bey, to the warlord who bought him as a child or a youth, choosing him for his strength and his intelligence and his youthful, androgynous beauty. For until they mature, the boys are catamites as well as warriors-in-training, adding another motive for discord among the beys. They become rivals in love as well as power. The beauties among the boys are the cause of deadly clashes—abductions, assassinations—struggles that respect no boundaries, leaving a trail of blood running through mosque and palace alike.
Over this violent brotherhood the Turkish sultan rules—in name, at least. His one demand is money, tribute extorted from the toiling fellahin or the rich merchants who are beaten on the soles of their feet or covered with honey and exposed to the sun—one way or another every hidden gold para is found.
The pasha, the sultan’s viceroy, comes next in the line of command, but he is a mere figurehead. The real power rests with the man who, by force and guile, has come to command the Mamelukes, a role played for the time being by Murad bey. He will lead the warriors into battle against the French. Like the perfume he favors—a pure essence, a distillation of crushed black narcissus and jasmine—Murad bey is a pure essence of the Mameluke way of life.
He began life as a captured slave boy and is given to bragging about the high price, the thousand gold dinars he had cost. At forty-seven, Murad is a survivor of countless struggles and intrigues. He had achieved power quickly in his youth, after which he had then been taken off guard by a sudden coup and had just barely escaped death. Fleeing to the desert with a small band, he eluded capture for years, raiding, plundering, keeping up an incessant pressure. Then the day he fought for finally arrived; he returned from the barren wastes to rule in triumph.
His luxurious gardens were laid out in the desert just beyond the city, their vine-covered paths cooled by splashing fountains and redolent with jasmine and myrtle and myrrh. On pleasure boats on the Nile, he held feasts in the grand style, his Spartan figure quickly running to fat. With a library extensive even by Mameluke standards, whose libraries are second in magnificence only to their tombs, Murad is read to by a troop of sweet-voiced boys, since he himself cannot read.
Wily and boastful, known to be cruelest when he appears most mild, most dangerous when his voice becomes soft and caressing, like water running over pebbles, the fleshy Murad bey presents a complete contrast to the one rival he has not been able to subdue and with whom he has formed an uneasy partnership: the dour, ascetic Ibrahim bey. Older than Murad by some twenty years, Ibrahim is as silent as Murad is expansive, as stingy as his counterpart is extravagant. Punctilious about fast days and prayers, he is a man whom it is deadly to cross, having cast his net—an army of spies and assassins—over the land.
On important occasions, such as the grand divan that has now assembled, Murad defers to his partner in public, elaborately showing Ibrahim respect and courtesy. In fact, Murad is the one with the greater power and the one who has the final say. Still, with a dissimulation second nature in the Mameluke world, Murad allows his rival pride of place: Ibrahim is the one who speaks first and who calls himself by the loftier title, Shayk el Balad, Ruler of the Land, while Murad is merely Emir el Haj, Ruler of the Pilgrimage.
Tall and thin, hollow-cheeked from fasting, Ibrahim speaks briefly and in a voice which barely rises above a whisper. Until one of his bodyguards repeats his words, they can not be heard in the great hall. And when they are heard—“The walls of Cairo are high and thick. Let us await the French behind them”—pandemonium breaks loose. The beys reject such caution with scorn and laughter.
Accusations follow: the pasha is charged with having connived with the foreigners for his own reasons. After all, could the French have landed in Egypt without the Turkish sultan’s knowledge? The pasha denies such complicity, blaming the beys for the poor showing at Alexandria. Nothing less than treason, he claims. Recriminations fly thick and fast, it is all the historian Jabarti can do to record a part of them. One after the other, each of the beys and shayks has his say.
“. . . until finally, the shayk [Mukru’um Sa’ad] arose and cried: ‘All this is a result of negligence in managing the ports and lettings things come to such a pass that the enemy could occupy it.’
“Hearing which, Murad bey exclaimed: ‘What can we do? For whenever I want to rebuild and fortify you claim: Their intention [at Alexandria and Rosetta] is rebellion. And this is what has prevented me from acting.’
“Such were his excuses,” Jabarti sighs, “as frail as a spider’s web, for since the time of Ali bey, not only did he not pay sufficient attention to the ports but even removed what weapons and cannons were already there! Furthermore, he stopped the flow of ammunition, and furthermore . . .” etc., etc. Murad, distrustful of his own people, has left them unprepared for an attack.
Spies arrive to report on what they have seen: The French cavalry is practically nonexistent, they say. The invaders are struggling to cross the desert on foot—news which leads to more scorn and laughter. Is it not obvious that foot soldiers have no chance against the Mameluke cavalry? The foreigners are doomed, that is clear to see, and the argument becomes who will have the honor of being first to ride out and “greet” them.
And in the midst of the tumult and debate, a single voice is raised in agreement with Ibrahim’s caution, the voice of a hated foreigner who has spent the morning hiding in a dungheap! While the Venetian consul has, of course, washed and changed, word of his indignity makes the beys greet him with derision. But when the consul begins to describe this Bonaparte as a dangerous warrior, an invincible leader who has already proved his valor, laughter changes to sullen silence. Finally his words go beyond what Murad can bear. He cuts him short with curses and boasts echoed by those of the other beys who make the palace resound with their shouts.
The debate proceeds, shouts slowly dying into discrete and whispered conversations until finally, bit by bit, they piece together a plan of action. Despite their mutual distrust and internecine quarrels, they in advance divvy up the loot and the glory and the slaves which will soon be theirs.
It is late by the time that they have settled the fate of the French to their satisfaction. The capture of “Bunbarte,” the general, Murad bey claims for his own. Having finished their work, the divan is adjourned and the solemn procession rides forth from the palace: the pasha, the learned shayks, and the tall, swaggering, luxury-loving, tomb-designing, book-collecting beys
together with their bodyguards, armed to the teeth, and their beautiful pages, blue-eyed and blond and fair—boys with much the same looks their masters had when kidnapped from the Caucasus a decade or two before.
The gold and silver of their armor shine in the bonfires lit at the palace gates. And then they are gone and the fires are extinguished, leaving behind a reflective witness. The historian Jabarti notes everything, remembers everything, and is filled with foreboding as “the raven of darkness spread its black wings over the Palace of the Fountain . . .”
And over Cairo . . . and over the path that lay ahead.
FOR MANY OF the Frenchmen crossing the desert, Jabarti’s “raven” descends suddenly and during the day. The darkness begins as a sensation: a burning under the eyelids.
After which, the fierce glare of the sun becomes dimmer. The soldier experiences the blessed relief of shade as he marches through the barren land. The blindness that follows means certain death for him at this stage of the campaign. He is alone in the vast desert, his comrades have no way of helping him.
It is all they can do to keep going themselves. Marching over rocks and sand in temperatures in the 120s, their small allotment of water is used up right away by men too thirsty to restrain themselves. Many perish within the first hours of the forced march, struck down by the blistering heat and exhaustion. An officer, Belliard, will recall: “. . . a melancholy settled over us as we came to Birket [a mere twenty miles from Alexandria] for the numbers of those dying from thirst increased . . . soldiers tumbling onto the sand dunes never to rise again.”
With terrible suffering, the French crawl over the short space of earth separating Alexandria from Birket, a town which, it turns out, is nothing more than a name given to sand and rocks surrounding a dry canal. If the seasonal flood of the Nile had been higher, the troops would have found some respite.
But the Nile is low and the men are forced to march on, many soldiers leaving their provisions and ammunition behind in a desperate attempt to lighten their burdens. After all, even if they were able to eat it, hard, dry biscuit would only increase their thirst. And why should men too weary to hold a gun continue to carry loads of ammunition?
“The scorching air parched our throats,” another officer remembers, “and it was with difficulty that we moved our arms or legs or even drew breath . . .”
Yet, as the men begin their first night in the desert, General Desaix begins to speak to the disheartened men as Napoleon would: of glory. Like Napoleon, Desaix had his beginnings in the revolutionary army as a young, talented soldier with nothing to support him but his enthusiasm. From the first, he had recognized Napoleon’s superiority, recording early on in his diary, “I am persuaded that Bonaparte will achieve so immense a glory that it will reflect on his lieutenants . . . He is proud, hidden, never forgives. And he vows to follow his enemy to the end of the world.”
Now, however, Desaix is beginning to see at just what price this glory will be won. Though he tries to rouse his men with Napoleonic phrases, he is no Napoleon. He suffers with his men, reserving for himself scarcely more than they have, but he cannot make them forget their sufferings as Napoleon would have, as much with his demonic energy as by his words. Desaix cannot fill them with resolve or bring them to ecstasy with a piercing look filled with “fate.”
Napoleon is preoccupied with more mundane matters just now. If he is a demon, he is a practical one and realizes that he must leave behind a well-organized occupation at Alexandria before moving on to Cairo. When he does join the troops in a day or two, unlike Desaix, he will cross the desert quickly, on horseback and with a plentiful supply of water and wine, and a tent to retire to when the sun is at its height. Like a being from another world, he will insist on a full military review, all spit and polish, and then swoop down on the men with threats and honors, awarding medals to the brave like the emperor he will soon be—and vowing to shoot all cowards and defeatists.
If he cannot inspire the men, Desaix can, at least, give them hope—“that bedraggled daughter of fear and desire.” In another day, they will be at El Beydah, with its cisterns and its date palms and sheep, and they can begin to live off the land as they had done during the conquest of Italy.
Speeches done, Desaix turns into an army chaplain or father confessor, reading to the exhausted soldiers from Montesquieu—whose works, together with those of Voltaire and Rousseau, must take the place of prayer for the excommunicated Frenchmen.
And so it is to the rational lullaby of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws—as opposed to the old “Roman absurdities”—that the soldiers fall into a fitful sleep under the desert sky: “Laws, taken in the broadest meaning, are the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things; and in this sense, all beings have their laws. . . . the material world. . . . the beasts of the fields have their laws, man has his laws. Those who have said . . .” On and on, as the wind blows the sand over the exhausted men until reveille sounds at 2 AM. It seems to them that they have just closed their eyes and they begin to march again.
Hauling themselves and their baggage carts and whatever artillery they have managed to load onto limbers and caissons through the soft sand into which they sink up to their ankles, they try to cover as much territory as they can while it is still night. For with the sunrise, the torture begins anew.
Soldiers chase mirages, pools of blue water which appear on the horizon. The Frenchmen fling themselves into imaginary water which turns to sand again and again until, tortured by the illusion, some shoot themselves in despair.
Their feet are blistered from the fine sand which they cannot keep out of their boots. Their uniforms are absurdly heavy. Driven mad by the heat, men rip off their jackets and even their shirts, exposing fair skin to the desert sun. They leave behind a trail of splendid military attire, powder blue or dark green with gold facings, and stiff army caps with plumes of red and white . . . all borne to oblivion by the desert wind.
Hour after hour: surrounded by the everlasting sameness of the desert, the heat, the silence, the glare of the sun, the men collapsing, the monotonous rhythm of the march. The monotony is broken when it is least expected by the shock of attack. Bedouins suddenly appear from behind the dunes, shooting as they ride at full gallop, hurling javelins or thrusting their swords at the unwary, then disappearing again into the desert.
Ten, sometimes twenty fall during such raids, regretted less than the wounding or capture of the few precious animals. It is the horses and donkeys who help drag the weapons Napoleon has decided will be key to victory: the big guns, howitzers, and cannons.
To keep knowledge of them from the enemy until the very last minute, they are covered with canvas and surrounded by an elite guard as they approach El Beydah, where, Desaix fears, Murad bey might have stationed spies.
The precaution is unnecessary: El Beydah is desolate. Not a soul stirs within its mud-brick houses. Its few palms have been stripped of dates and even of branches. The two cisterns have been filled with rocks and sand.
“If the whole army does not cross the desert with the speed of lightning, it will perish . . .” Desaix writes to Napoleon, begging for medicine and provisions, sacrificing one of his precious horses for the messenger. “Our guides have misled us and fled. Do not leave us in this situation for the troops are beginning to give up.”
Meanwhile, a desperate fight breaks out around the cisterns which have been quickly cleared. From them a rivulet of muddy water flows. Those who throw themselves on the ground to drink are trampled to death by thousands struggling to get to the water. And though guns are used to restore order, before long the whole business becomes futile—the cisterns are drained dry. When he tries to calm them with promises, which even he does not believe, that food and water are just a day’s march away, Desaix is almost stoned by the angry men.
DAMANHUR, RIVER OF BLOOD, a place named for the deep red its cliffs and dunes turn in the light of the setting sun.
Here Desaix and his troops are joined by a sec
ond, and then a third division from Cairo; and then by Napoleon himself. So far he has ignored the appeals of Desaix and the other generals, waiting until now to give them his answer. They want water, medicine, provisions? They will get everything they want when they reach Cairo.
The troops need victory, Napoleon tells them during a war conference held in an old barn. That will put an end to all this whining. And a victory is just what he proposes to give them, he adds.
After this rousing speech, General Mireur rides into the desert and shoots himself, unable to endure any more suffering. His men search for him and, by nightfall, they find him, vultures leading them to his beribboned and bemedaled body. He had even donned his tricolor sash of honor before killing himself. As the sun sets and the desert turns its deep, deep red, they bury him near the cliffs at the edge of the town, medals, sash, and all. The carrion birds continue circling overhead.
It is a fitting burial place. The cliffs that look down upon the grave are covered with graffiti: curses scratched onto the rocks by other solders who have also passed this way. Greeks and Romans crossed the desert in the days when Damanhur was Hermopolis Parva, city of Hermes to the Greeks (Thoth to the Egyptians). A god thrice blessed and thrice great, Hermes Trismegistos, created a deep mystery—the neter tched, the words of the gods, breath—fleeting sound made immortal through writing.
If the exhausted French soldiers digging Mireur’s grave had not been so busy with their task, if they had had enough strength, food, and water to permit them to think of something besides drawing their next breath, they might have lingered before these scribblings on the cliffs—these epitaphs for Mireur and all their other comrades who have fallen so far.
For while the drawings etched onto the rocks are lighthearted enough—for example, a hunchbacked, pot-bellied dwarf plays on a flute; and a bald-headed old priest, censer in hand, sports with two naked girls—while the doodlings here are whimsical or even obscene, the writing, carved in Greek and Latin, sounds a different note.
The Linguist and the Emperor Page 13
