by Susan Daitch
One evening Ryder fell asleep, nodding out over topographical charts of the Nile delta. He was woken by another gentleman, a fellow Possumist named Archer F. Hilliard, who needed to study the maps. He was annoyed a fellow club member had been so careless as to allow his head with its indifferently pomaded hair to fall on valuable and much needed documents. Though younger, Archer had accordion-like chins that collapsed in displeasure, and he ahemmed into them loudly. Disheveled Ryder, kept up by two children, slumbered on, oblivious, but Archer summoned a stronger fellow and together they lifted the sleeping man and carried him to a couch. In the process, Ryder woke with a jolt. Tall, rangy, not overly powerful, he struggled with his aristocratic bearers even though he himself was only half-conscious. Ryder succeeded in knocking them to the ground, and Archer Hilliard, despite his initial irritation, was impressed. He had heard a bit about Ryder Congreaves, an oddball in a club that had its share of oddballs.
Archer Fairfax Hilliard had the cash and a passion for the Orient, but like Ryder, he was looking for a ledge from which he could stand at a height in order to peer in on the festivities he felt shut out of. He offered his hand to the colonial with some reservations. Ryder grasped it, nonetheless. Every hand, including Edna’s, that had been offered to him since he arrived on these shores, had been extended with reservations made plain.
Archer slouched in a chair, long hands steepled over his chest, looking like Lytton Strachey, even down to his reddish-brown beard. He planned to leave for Egypt and needed a companion. Did Ryder speak Arabic? He did, but Ryder didn’t want to go to Egypt. He had debts that were growing more urgent, and had been studying Farsi more recently. When he said this, Archer unsteepled his hands, and for a moment became more animated. A man had spoken at the club about a lost city is eastern Persia. It had gone off the map, but had once been a real city with kings, armies, gods, temples, courts, markets, coffee houses. It had streets and squares, a language, and laws. Walls you could lean against. Doors you could pass through and come out of again. The city had been protected by battlements and towers of unprecedented height from which guards could spy invaders approaching from great distances. Even if the exact location of the city had been lost, or temporarily misplaced, the man had said he would bet half his fortune it did exist, and whoever was able to find it would see with his own eyes marvels and riches that were unimaginable and indescribable.
Another man argued that this city could not ever have existed. He had traveled on camel-back throughout the region, fought in hand-to-hand combat against Baluchi marauders, of which there are many, and they are both artful and cunning in the extreme. The mountains and plains of the region compose an empty, barren place. There’s no viable metropolis either above or below ground and never was, he claimed. Why? How could he be so sure? No water, no springs, rivers or effluvia, Archer ticked off one, two, three, four fingers, exist or ever have existed in amounts adequate to support the lush life the speaker hinted had once thrived there. Indeed temperatures are severe both at the hot and cold ends of the spectrum, and this has always been so. The challenger said he would state for an absolute fact that the existence of the so-called phantom city was a hoax. Any exploratory party would engage in a very risky enterprise with no guarantee of reward, a reward based only on the say-so of a man who had never set foot outside of the British Isles. The name of the city was Suolucidir. Ryder had heard the name, he thought, but he knew nothing about it. His Oxford professor, the Rawlinson protégé, had occasionally referenced places Ryder neglected to write down or think very much about.
One drizzly late afternoon Ryder saw a veiled woman in Camberwell, and he followed her for a few blocks until she abruptly turned around. She might have been Persian or Kurdish, he couldn’t say for certain. Perhaps her father traded her, sold her to a merchant traveling west, and like Pocahontas in Queen Elizabeth’s court, or the Taino Columbus brought to Ferdinand and Isabella, she found herself in London. He pretended to look at a post box, check his watch, turn up his collar against the rain. Only the woman’s eyes were visible, yet they held him spellbound, or so he would later say. He imagined her long black dress was ever so slightly transparent, like a gauzy black fog, and he could see the shape of her body through it. A long rope-like braid fell out of the back of her veil where a knot must have come undone. Later that day he wrote to the Rawlinson protégé; he was ready to travel to the land he’d studied for so long, but first he was going to Egypt where he’d been offered a position.
Archer would never follow a woman in the street, and though the debate about Suolucidir piqued his interest, he had long planned a trip to Ghiza. They were to excavate a site he’d identified as having some potential, where there were likely to be older pyramids of marl and slate, easier to unmask than limestone structures. They were due to leave in a month. By now Archer had been paying Ryder’s bills, and the relief caused Ryder to trust him more than he should have. Now he had no choice but to go. Edna had only met Archer Hilliard once. He made it clear to her that as far as he was concerned, she was no more than a turnstile Ryder had to pass through in order to move on to a more exalted life. Edna found him repulsive.
His beard, she said to Ryder, is the color of bloody shite. What woman would want to touch someone like that? The answer, Ryder knew, was none, but he ignored her. He put off telling Edna he was leaving for Egypt until a few days before they were to sail.
“I have a job,” he said pushing the employment pages back towards her. “I’ll send for you as soon as possible, as soon as we set up camp.”
Edna wiped banana mush from Ryder II’s mouth while her husband described the easiness of life in Cairo.
“You’ll have plenty of servants. Our Alicia can go to a lycée, have her own personal maid, live like a princess.” He looked at a spot on the wall where the paper was bubbling slightly. A man in silhouette tipped his top hat to a woman in a flouncy dress, but the tiny tears in the peeling paper severed some of their limbs. The bowing couple were repeated hundreds of times around the room, but Ryder couldn’t take his eyes off the amputees. “You need only pack summer clothes, though the nights, I’m told, can be chilly.”
Edna nodded, expecting she should plan to vacate their flat in two months’ time. She still believed him completely. His parents could just as well be sent their tea from Egypt.
By attaching himself to Hilliard, Ryder gained entry into places where Edna couldn’t quite follow. She would have been the one to find firewood in Sasketoon, water in the outback of New South Wales, fix the boat in the Falklands, and never complain about the tedium or hardships of the journey, but those weren’t the kinds of places that interested Ryder. He was convinced Edna wouldn’t know what to wear, what to say, couldn’t remember names, would botch pronunciation of any syllable not native to the English language. He began to side with Archer. Achieving social distance from Edna was even easier when corroborated by actual distance. By the time they reached Genoa, though he wrote, she was no longer in his thoughts much at all.
Ghiza
They took rooms at Le Pharaon Royale. Ryder knocked on Hilliard’s door as planned for their first outing, a trip to a souk. When the door opened Hilliard stood before him clothed in long robes, his skin dyed brown from walnut juice in the manner of Sir Richard Burton. Ryder lost his breath in a loud paaugh sound, cigarette jettisoned from mouth in a spray of spit. After an initial bug-eyed second, he decided the best course was to ignore the costume and say nothing. Archer’s pale blue eyes stood out against his dyed skin. He expected some kind of response, but Ryder only looked away. Archer interpreted the silence as respect and awe in the face of a benefactor’s radical choice, embracing the culture of their hosts. They left the hotel like potentate and interpreter, or so Hilliard believed. Hilliard had only a smattering of Farsi and Arabic phrases, his speech roughly the equivalent of a memorized Edwardian guidebook, but from the moment he set foot in Alexandria, and for remainder of his life, Hilliard wore a Sikh turban and a Saudi dishdasha.
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br /> Keeping his lips tightly pressed together Ryder guided his wealthy colleague through wide boulevards, and ever narrowing streets to a series of alleyways. Stalls tumbled one after the next selling oranges, branches of yellow dates, rosewater, jasmine oil, incense, olives, carpets, silver lanterns, and low tables made of inlaid wood. Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Armenians were all alike to both of them. Ryder didn’t know how to translate Hilliard’s giddiness in front of men in red aprons selling sherbet who held out all kinds of brightly colored sweets. When they argued about buying a green turban, a sign the wearer had been to Mecca, Ryder pushed further ahead, deeper into the souk. It was like shopping with a child. You haven’t been to Mecca, you can’t wear it. Why not? No one will ever know. Archer watched the top of Ryder’s cane tapping his shoulder, bobbling above the kefiyas and fezzes that surrounded him, and he struggled to keep up with him, though he wasn’t finished with looking around. Should Archer lose sight of his friend he very well might never be seen again. He remembered they were in a part of the city that was unmapped and unmappable, but he felt buoyant and at home. Archer believed traders looked at him with welcoming expressions. Phrases intended to induce him to buy this knife or that basket of amber he read as a series of signs between brothers. He nodded and smiled at them in a way he would never have smiled at merchants in London, especially those hawking wares on the street.
“You see, they think I’m one of them.” Hilliard grinned from ear to ear as he caught up with his interpreter and escort.
Ryder felt sweat roll down the backs of his ears, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief embroidered, E.C.
“Did you hear me?” Hilliard put a concerned hand on Ryder’s shoulder, which only exasperated Ryder more. He was the one who’d lived in Africa. He could stand the heat and dust. He shrugged the hand away.
“They,” Ryder jabbed his cane in the general direction of any and all men in the souk, “see you and think they’ve got a Wally gone native. They’ll cheat you out of your shirt.”
“I’m not wearing a shirt.”
Ryder squinted into the distance as if he’d never seen Archer before.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s you who look ridiculous. Do you see anyone else in a helmet and riding pants?” Hilliard had begun to speak English with an Arabic accent.
Ryder was reminded of the inky newsprint pages Edna pushed at him across the table and how much he needed this job. Ryder transferred the moneybag from the folds of Archer’s dishdasha and made him hang it around his neck. Hilliard felt Ryder’s brusque hands searching his body, and stood very still, convinced that though he felt slightly humiliated in a way he couldn’t quite swallow, it was really Ryder who suffered more humiliation.
Ryder recalled a lesson from school about orchids whose petals and scent mimicked that of female wasps. Male wasps were duped into believing they courted females of their own kind, when in fact all they were buzzing around was an orchid. In frustration at their betrayal, they will fly to another “wasp” orchid, thinking it’s a real female, only to be duped once again. This is a fantastic trick for the flower. It gets pollinated. The subterfuge is a disaster in the long run, you would think, for the future of the wasp population, and ultimately bad for the orchids, too. If the wasps die out from continually mistaking an orchid for a female insect, soon there will be no more neatly evolved wasp-parroting orchids either, yet both seem to thrive. It was a mystery, and Ryder had a feeling he and Hilliard had a similar symbiotic relationship, Hilliard dressing up, masquerading, and Congreaves taking his cues, going along with it because of his debts.
Hilliard didn’t like the idea of money around his neck like a belled cat, but said nothing. A cluster of Bedouins at first eyed them with suspicion, then turned their backs on the pair. The women’s faces were tattooed with indigo, and their lips were completely blue.
“I don’t see any other Europeans here,” Archer breathed deeply. “I’m really in my element. I feel as if I’ve lived here all my life.”
Hilliard pointed at a pair of Ethiopians in striped robes, gold necklaces around their necks, thick bracelets spanned their arms. He asked Ryder if they were slaves. In a letter to Edna written that first night Ryder wondered if his patron felt he was reliving scenes found in Tales from the Arabian Nights and The Blue Fairy Book all rolled into one.
Ryder’s life in Cairo and Ghiza was very regimented. He was scrupulous in his work and at first wrote regularly to Edna. Dressed in white he would ride out from his house in Cairo, cross the Nile, and carry on to the excavation site six miles away in Ghiza. Unlike Hilliard, Ryder made a point of preferring horses to camels. In the evening he would return to socialize with other Britons who, for whatever reasons, found themselves in Cairo before the outbreak of the Great War. He watched crocodiles swim alongside his dahabeeyah as he floated down the Nile and warned Hilliard when a hand dangled over the edge. Once again he saw the animals of his childhood, but he wrote with contempt about the Ghizan and Cairene workers he employed.
Archer didn’t often spend time at the site, but one afternoon he arranged for a driver to take him out to Ghiza where Ryder was already at work. At first Congreaves spoke of ordinary things: the heat and dust, the price of shipping winches, gears, pulleys, and quality of local rope. He didn’t feel comfortable with Archer on the site. Hilliard squatted under a palm drawing a map in the sand with a stick. The hired diggers had been working in silence, even the sounds of picks, shovels, brushes, and camel bells were muted in the desert. Hilliard erased the topographical sand map with his foot.
Just as the map was being erased they heard the hollow sound of axe shattering dried clay, and Ryder turned to find a digger had unearthed, then accidentally cracked open a canopic jar. Mummified intestines or other three-thousand-year-old organs were instantly exposed to the heat of desert air. It was the most amazing object he had found to date, and now it was shattered. Ryder went berserk. Desiccated strips of tissue, not even recognizable as much more than ancient shed snake skin, were pulverized. Plumb lines and pick axes went flying. At first the man cowered, but he could tell others weren’t cowering at all, and then something shifted, and in a ripple of attention, everyone turned to look at Ryder. Their gaze wasn’t a display of passive voyeuristm, watching someone get angry in a spectacle of out-of-control rage, and Hilliard standing a few feet away from Ryder, became very aware there were only two of them, and all the Egyptians held objects that could inflict quite a bit of damage. Hilliard ordered the scattered equipment collected. Speaking in Arabic, Ryder hurled a final insult at the man, who shuffled off.
Hilliard tried to appease Congreaves, to calm him down and, not for the first time, block his explosions, though his patience with his translator was growing thin. Ryder felt chastised and humiliated, but he relied on Archer. Without him he would be bankrupt, adrift, and he knew it.
When he wrote to Edna about the event, he complained about Archer’s presence: he was a distraction, he made the men anxious. He used the word detestable. Edna couldn’t imagine the connection between the use of the word detestable and the fellow so taken in by the Crystal Palace, one who stood so timidly at the threshold, hat in hand.
In their relationship to their own history, the letter went on, Egyptians were like lizards who ate their own tails. Ryder envisioned finding the tomb of an unknown king or queen, not just full of untold treasures, but containing unfamiliar writing or ancient mechanical devices that only he could reanimate. His unhatched schemes grew increasingly grandiose, as if a crown floated just over his scalp, and if he tilted his head a certain way and reached up fast he could grab it. Then he, too, would be knighted and treated everywhere and by everyone, from his London landlord to the Cairo embassy, as someone who should be listened to. People would stop in their tracks to hear him describe how just under that outcropping of rock or hill of sand, round the next bend in the Nile he followed a trail of amber fragments to the temple of the child queen who ruled before Amenhotep, before Ramses or Tu
tankhamen.
Then his letters became few and far between. Edna thought Archer had finally poisoned Ryder against her. In response, she wrote back to him constantly, filling page after page, detailing the lives of their children down to the most insignificant minutiae about them, making almost daily trips to the post office, as if she could flood him with the brass tacks of their everyday life to bring him back to it. Letters back were short and colorless.
Esme
Esme Canonbury, fine-boned and aggressive, turned heads with her clipped accent, sarcastic tone that made you feel included in the gibe, looking down at troglodytes below, bobbed brown hair, and a taste for what was taken to be harem clothes, but were really filmy trousers and long silk vests of her own devising. She was married to the cultural chargé d’affaires at the Consulate. Esme and Ryder met at an embassy event Hilliard had persuaded him to attend, telling him to leave off your charts and maps; it will be great fun, really. In a sea of swirling white dresses, men in uniform, and Egyptian bearers serving sherbet, lime tea with ginger, soda and gin, Ryder’s height and discomfort stood out. Despite his stoop, leaving London had transformed him.
“Your Archie is worth a fortune, but he’s going to end up in an Alexandrian jail if he doesn’t watch out, honestly.” No one had ever spoken so directly about Ryder’s colleague and patron. No one had ever said Archer would end up dead in an alley. Once, Ryder had found Hilliard holding a tortoise-shell cigarette case, not his own, staring at the panorama of Cairo visible from his hotel balcony. Hilliard’s eyes were red-rimmed, he was oblivious to Congreaves’ entrance, and so he quickly left the room before Archer turned around. Ryder preferred not to embarrass, and he preferred not to know. It wasn’t his place. He himself rarely spoke about Edna, folded her letters into pockets, never read them in front of Hilliard. Esme put one hand on his shoulder for balance as she bent over to fix a strap on her shoe.
