Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  I said in astonishment, "You'll travel without Onkeir?"

  He nodded. "I must." Opening up his sack of coins he emptied them on the floor. Seated cross-legged he picked out the two gold rings and said, "One of these goes to Onkeir, as promised in our contract. As for the other, it will take that much for you and Onkeir to go to Cairo by train." Pointing to the pile of Maria Theresa thalers he added, "And this much to see me travel second-class rail to Sennar." The pile had grown ominously small and separating what was left he added, "This will buy me food on the way, and a camel to cross into Abyssinia and recapture my gold from the earth."

  "Jared, that's not much!"

  He smiled. "That, love, is why it's time we leave this blessed place. We can only thank God for the railway opening up so far south, except that trains cost a hell of a lot of money."

  "Jared, I want to go with you."

  He shook his head. "I have nightmares, Caressa, about what could happen to you. These are rough times in the Sudan."

  "I'm not inexperienced."

  He smiled. "That I grant you, but I don't know what I'll meet with, nothing that a rifle can't handle but worrying about you being with me could stay my hand."

  We argued fiercely about this for long hours, but he had me at a disadvantage: I might have acquired a small knowledge of a small part of the Sahara but I knew nothing of Nubia or the Sudan, or the few miles of Abyssinia that Jared would have to cross to reach his cairn. That was his knowledge, and I could not fight his calm and steady assertions that it was no place for a woman. Ultimately I had to accept this: the gold for our life in Scotland lay a month away and he could travel faster if he traveled alone.

  And so it was that Onkeir, Jared and I, with Ismael as our guide, set out one day in the full heat of summer, for it was Ismael who knew the trail over the Dush Pass that would lead us across the desert to Esna and the railway. It was a punishing climb out of the depression and over the pass, and once we reached its peak it was to meet with savage winds and deep gullies that needed care in crossing, but cairns marked the trail, as well as potsherds and animal bones, and we moved on, leaning against the wind. After two days the trail divided and we headed to the northeast across a waterless plateau toward the Nile.

  We reached Esna all too soon, for if the journey had been hard, what lay ahead was harder. We set up our tent outside the town and the next morning Jared made travel arrangements, trading one gold ring for the tickets that would separate us, and giving the other to Onkeir. I was now so tense with dread that of Esna I would remember only a town where men wore fat red turbans—Jared said they were Gubts, or Coptic Christians—but I would remember with haunting clarity our last night together in the tent that had been our home.

  In the morning Jared silently packed money, rifles, ammunition, food and medicine kit into a sheepskin, rolled it up, tied it and laced it to his shoulders. There was a last ride on the camels when Ismael delivered us to the railway before the setting out on his return trip to El Hagar. Jared's train to the south would arrive an hour later than ours, and so we three stood numbly by the rail tracks and watched the train for Luxor and Cairo move inexorably toward us. It was now that I gave Jared the only object of value that I thought I owned: as the train came to a stop I slipped Jacob's old compass into his hand.

  "To bring you back," I said.

  "I'll need no compass for that," he said roughly, and I saw the pain in his eyes, and certainly there were tears in mine.

  "Allah Kereem, " said Onkeir.

  "Inch 'Allah, " Jared said, and thus we parted.

  19

  After living in the desert with its great silences and its solitude Cairo was an assault on the senses that almost stupefied me. Certainly it frightened me and I clung to Onkeir lest I lose him in the crowds. There was such noise it appeared that everyone must shout in the streets, while below this sounded the rumble of trains and omnibuses and a blowing of loud horns; a string of camels made its way past us braying pitifully; there were horse-drawn arabas here, too, as in Tripoli, but preceded by runners shouting, "Make way! Make way!" It seemed a gray city to me from the houses and mosques that we passed, and it was hot. Only the cry of the muezzin was familiar.

  Many times Onkeir stopped to ask directions until we reached a broader street with a few ragged palms. "Hi-nehk, " he said, pointing. "Amreekehnee Qunsuleeya. "

  The Consulate .. . American. Terrified, 1 shrugged off my ragged barracan and smoothed my new baggy trousers and gandoura, tidied my headscarf and said, "Onkeir, what do you think I—"

  But Onkeir had vanished into the crowds and was nowhere to be seen. I nearly wept, made fragile by his disappearance, by the noise and by the strangeness of it all. Suffice to say that upon entering the Consulate I was regarded with horror and told to leave at once—until I spoke more words in English, clearly startling the man who had received me. Following this I was directed to a hard wooden bench in a hallway and told to wait until someone was free to hear me. After an hour I progressed to a room where a young man sat behind a desk; he looked friendly, and if my clothes disconcerted him he suppressed his reactions and rose to shake my hand. He was clearly baffled, though, when I told him in English that I had come as an American and as a Distressed Citizen, but with a promissory note from Jared until he arrived in Cairo to pay my expenses.

  "Promissory note? American? You have proof, of course, of your citizenship?" he said pleasantly.

  I handed him the promissory note and explained that I had no proof or identification. "Which is why I'm a Distressed Citizen," I pointed out.

  He laid Jared's note on his desk without looking at it, and his attitude was suddenly very official and not so friendly. "You must understand that we have very rigid laws," he said stiffly. "If you have no passport, no papers, no documents, no identification—" After a glance at my face he picked up his pen and added, "Shall we begin with your name, please?"

  Struggling to be helpful I told him my name.

  "Caressa Bowman," he repeated, frowning. "Bowman? Is that Boman or Bowman?"

  "B-o-w-m-a-n," I assured him.

  "And you said Caressa?"

  I wondered if he was hard of hearing; certainly he seemed to be puzzled by my name. After he'd sat and stared at me, his scowl deepening, he said, "It has a familiar ring, you see, it—good God!" he gasped. "You're Caressa Bowman?"

  Since I had already told him so I saw no point in replying.

  "But I know you," he cried. "At least my sister— But you were killed in the desert, in Tripolitania, in the Fezzan. Three years ago, surely?"

  Before I could sort this out he said, "We made inquiries for months—but Tripoli reported you dead, both you and your husband. My sister cried for days." He sat back and stared at me incredulously. "You must think me suddenly mad but my name's Bill Stanhope, does the name Stanhope mean anything to you?"

  "Stanhope ..." I said slowly, because it seemed so long ago, "I once had a friend Isabelle Stanhope. We met on the Valeria, sailing from Marseille, at least I think it was the Valeria, and—"

  His eyes had widened in amazement. "You just walked in here, not mentioning this—resurrected from the dead after all this time? It didn't occur to you—my God!" he said.

  "Well, you see," I told him, "I've known I wasn't dead. Is Isabelle well?"

  He laughed. "She's right here in Cairo." He shook his head dazedly. "You're going to be the talk of the city when this news gets out. You'll stay with us, of course— Isabelle's keeping house for me and a marvel at giving parties."

  I said, "Oh no, I only want—my friend will soon be—"

  He cut me off. "Of course you'll be Isabelle's guest and mine; I can't wait to see her face when she hears you're alive." He smiled at me boyishly. "I do wonder—yes, I think Rogers will want to interview you, and Damien ought to be told about you, too."

  I was tired and I was bewildered, but for the next several hours I was made much of, interviewed by one man, queried and interrogated by another, and my years in
the desert reduced to facts with no shape to them and then consigned to paper. What they learned I don't know but for myself I teamed that this was June 14, 1914 and I was therefore twenty years old and would be twenty-one in a few months. Isabelle was summoned and arrived breathlessly to end the interrogations at last. "I can't believe it!" she repeated over and over again, half-laughing, half-crying. "You're alive, Caressa, you're alive!"

  I thought, How untouched she looks, and for just a moment this collision of worlds left me dizzy, and then she hugged and kissed me, which I found very brave of her because I was certainly dirty and she was elegant and clean and smelled of lavender.

  "What you must have gone through!" she cried, but seeing her brother frown warningly, she added, "But now it's time to forget it all. Oh do let me take her home now, may I?"

  And now there began a time of loneliness more searing than any that I'd experienced in the past. Half of me remained, still, in the desert and all of me waited for Jared and yet I must talk, smile and conceal every thought; I must also learn to eat again with a knife, fork and spoon, to wear skirts and to sleep under a ceiling that hid the stars and pressed down on me hard.

  How kind Isabelle was. She had not changed, she was as generous as I remembered her, as vivacious and as lovely, but it was I who had changed. Through her eyes I could see the Caressa I'd been so long ago, and that girl was a stranger to me. But Isabelle saw no change, I was still the sixteen-year-old confidante for whom she'd hoped to give a ball, and to this was added the attraction of my being heroine-of-the-moment. She moved between pity for me, and admiration of my endurance, but there was also envy of the attention the newspapers were giving me and awe at the invitations that it inspired.

  What was bleakest of all was my realization that I couldn't speak to her of Jared. There was no intimacy between us, although fortunately she didn't see this, for I understood soon enough how different a world I'd entered, full of rules and mores I'd forgotten or never known. I saw that Isabelle would be appalled—revolted, even—if she learned that I had lived with a man to whom I wasn't married; in her eyes I would be labeled a fallen woman and no circumstances could forgive this. Hating myself for doing so, I reduced Jared to a friend—as indeed he was—who had rescued me from the desert and had seen to it that I reached Cairo while he proceeded to Abyssinia before joining me in two months.

  I was completely out of my element and I knew it; worse, I had been robbed of choice. I had expected the uncomplicated status of Distressed Citizen, I had assumed that Jared's promissory note would be honored and that I would be given a modest stipend for lodging and meals in a small room, from which I would emerge to explore the life of a city that I would later show to Jared. Above all, I had expected privacy. 1 don't think it ever occurred to Isabelle or to her brother that I didn't want to be their guest; they had no imagination. Whatever had happened in my years since the massacre was not to be talked about, and if at times I grew edgy or my thoughts wandered elsewhere, Isabelle took great pains to be forgiving.

  Mercifully Cairo's interest in me was short-lived; I was replaced after two weeks by news of the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo, and the ensuing ultimatums and accusations between the countries in Europe occupied the front pages of the newspapers, which was a great relief to me because the pace of Isabelle's social life was more than enough stress to handle.

  It was during my second week with her that I found one person to whom I could talk, who guessed my feelings and skillfully drew them out of me, thus giving evidence of becoming a friend. I met him in my borrowed finery at the ball that inevitably Isabelle gave for me, both to show me off, she said gaily, and to introduce me to Society. I had been aware of the man watching me while I was introduced to an endless number of people, all of whom regarded me with much curiosity as they congratulated me on my survival. 1 noticed the man because of his stillness, which was conspicuous among so many people who twittered like sparrows, although a few struck me as more like vultures. I had not been introduced to him but he was waiting for me at the punch bowl, a tall gray man in his fifties, and so distinguished-looking that I assumed him to be at least a consul or an ambassador.

  Studying me, he said with a clipped British accent, "Your smile doesn't reach your eyes, Mrs. Bowman. Are you really to be congratulated at being among us or should sympathy be extended instead?" When I hesitated he said, "When you stop smiling you impress me as rather miserable."

  I did not deny this, I merely looked at him appraisingly.

  "You've not acquired the art of flirtation, Mrs. Bowman?"

  "I've had no experience of it," I told him. "Nor of small talk either."

  "No wonder you're miserable." He took my arm and led me to one of the alcoves set into the hall. "Half the people in this room have empty heads, but I confess I'd give a sovereign to know what your thoughts are this evening."

  I was tempted to ask for the sovereign. "In Seguedine I was bought with four of them but my thoughts are my own."

  "Exactly," he said, nodding, "so I will ask only for your company. I wonder if you'd do me the honor of having tea with me tomorrow at Shepheard's? I think you'd enjoy seeing the hotel and watching Cairo pass by its terrace."

  The suddenness of this took me aback. I said bluntly, "I don't know either you or your name."

  He smiled faintly at this. "Quite. But I think Isabelle will vouch for me, I'll just have a word with her. I'm Linton Teal."

  "Sir Linton Teal," Isabelle said later in an awed voice. "Rich as Midas, Caressa, and a baronet. He's a collector—of magnificent things even museums can't afford to own, and rumor has it that in London he has three Rembrandts. Oh, you must have tea with him, Caressa."

  I did not see why I must, but at least he seemed kind and more discerning than anyone I'd met, and it was in this manner that I met Sir Linton Teal and had tea with him on the following afternoon.

  Shepheard's Hotel was a colossal building with jutting cornices and a great dome on top, but its interior nearly overwhelmed me since I had not yet adjusted to rich foods, either. The extravagance of it! It became a blur of opulence, of gold and pearl inlay and mosaics and Persian rugs and chandeliers, potted palms and everyone looking as rich as Sir Linton, whereas I was in a dress of Isabelle's, tucked and basted to fit, and my skin was a dark unfashionable brown. I felt better once we gained the terrace, and more comfortable still when we were seated in wicker chairs with lemonade, tea and macaroons in front of us, for here I could look out on the people in the street. It was like the front-row seat at a theater: a troop of Egyptian soldiers passed by in their blue and white uniforms; there was a flash of scarlet and two British soldiers rode by on donkeys; next came a string of complacent-looking camels led by a scruffy little man. There were men with trays of turquoises, and vendors selling stuffed crocodiles, and every other passerby seemed to be a woman bundled into black with only one eye showing to prove that she was inside.

  When Sir Linton offered me another macaroon I returned my attention to him. "Tell me, Mrs. Bowman," he said with a smile, "I am frankly curious—impertinent, perhaps, as well—but after such astonishing experiences your reactions interest me. How does it feel to come back from the dead?"

  I said again, patiently, "But you see I wasn't dead— except to other people."

  He nodded appreciatively. "Quite—so I'll rephrase that. What, then, is it like to not know from one day to the next whether you'll continue living or be still alive the next week or next month?"

  I said dryly, "Stimulating."

  "Ah ..." he murmured. "Yes, I see. But in what way?"

  I realized he was serious, that he was not making idle conversation but really wanted to know. "Well," I said, "looking back is not the same as it was at the time, is it? Sometimes there was—well, much despair. Sometimes hopelessness, sometimes fear, sometimes," I acknowledged, "the utter joy of another day."

  "Joy," he repeated in an odd voice as if this was a word new to him. "But you were—you surely couldn't have man
aged entirely alone?"

  I smiled. "There was first of all Bakuli for a very long time."

  "Bakuli ..." For some reason he looked pleased. 'Tell me about Bakuli."

  And so I told him, finding him easy to talk to, and I began to appreciate this man, or to be grateful to him for listening, and in spite of his air of remoteness—or perhaps because of it—he listened well. Actually I think I felt a little sorry for him; I gained the impression that in some strange way the juices of life had been sucked out of him a long time ago, leaving only curiosity and intellect, for there was something bloodless about him, about his pallor and his parchmentlike skin, as if he had spent his years indoors—perhaps collectors did—and I sensed that what I had to say interested him because my life had been so very different from his. And so we talked—or I talked, answering many questions, until the tea grew cold.

  As we rose to leave, "Have you seen the pyramids of Ghizeh yet?" he asked. "Perhaps I could entice you and Isabelle to visit them with me tomorrow ... ?"

  When I next saw him alone it seemed that he had inquired about me at the Consulate. "I have connections," he explained, seeing how startled I looked, and then, almost idly, "Who is this Jared MacKay whose promissory note you brought to Cairo with you?"

  I only smiled at this and shook my head. "A good friend," I said.

  Nevertheless, within a matter of weeks he had skillfully drawn from me the meaning of Jared in my life, his whereabouts, and our plans, so that he knew of me not just the bits and pieces that had circulated around Cairo following my appearance, or the little Isabelle knew, but almost the whole of my story. "I hear that you visit the Consulate each morning to ask if there's a message from him," he said. "It's been only five weeks; do you really believe this Jared of yours could travel so quickly?"

  I thought. Oh yes—yes he could, but I did not say this.