The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

12

LAMENTATION AT PHILAE

On a bright morning in late March, the cange drifted, sails furled, toward Philae. Gustave had glimpsed the island, an outcropping of red and black granite no bigger than the place des Vosges, when they had sailed past it, going upriver, but they hadn’t stopped. Joseph had insisted that the proper approach was from the south, as the priests of Isis and Osiris had intended their suppliants to behold it.

When it seemed they had gone too far north, the captain thundered a command and the crew rowed furiously across the current toward the southern tip. There Gustave set eyes on the ancient quay with its grand submerged staircase. The crew moored the boat. He watched as the rope smeared the green slurry of algae on the north face of the stone piling.

Wearing his slippers on his hands, he sloshed up underwater steps the color of splotched limes. Midway, there entered his mind the vivid image of Cleopatra disembarking in splendor, her gold-trimmed, Tyrian purple robes deflating like the fins and tails of an ornamental carp as they dragged through the graduated shallows. Surely there would have been pomp and circumstance when the queen paid homage to the gods. For a musical flourish, he clapped the slippers together.

Ashore, he wrung out his djellaba, which was sopping wet from the waist down. The approach to the temple of Isis was either across open ground or through two long colonnades; he chose the easternmost colonnade. Max, being more nimble, soon outpaced him on the western side, while Joseph, bare-chested under his red vest and wearing his usual Turkish trousers, paused to light a pipe at the top of the stairs.

Walking in the slashed shade of the columns, Gustave heard the cataracts downriver at Aswan. The miles between softened the roar to calming ambient refreshment, like a hotel fountain. Philae, he wrote in his head: the orchestra section of the Nile’s concert hall, best seats to hear the liquid tympany of the rapids, but still distant enough that one could think and converse.

The island was enchanting. Gusts rattled the palm trees sprouting from the rocks at odd angles. Light filtering through the forests of columns wove a luminous tapestry that hung in the air, turning and changing by the moment like a rotating pane of glass. He could not have dreamed up a more quintessentially Oriental paradise. Only dancing girls and music were missing—preferably harps and flutes to ricochet among the ruins. An occasional birdcall and the subdued ground dither of lizards and insects broke the silence. “No one lives here!” he shouted into the golden air.

Trailing pipe smoke, Joseph hurried toward him, a rare sight. Usually he moved at the pace set by the slow clock of the pyramids and the colossi, to whom a millennium was but a forward tick, the imagined blink of a stone eye.

Max stood fingering the hieroglyphs on one of the pylons of the temple to Isis. He threw his arm around Gustave’s shoulder. “Yes, O Sheik Mustache. Amazing to see a holy place so totally abandoned.” Somewhat out of breath, Joseph added, “They say the last priest he die in anno 500. The peoples stay away, afraid for ghosts.”

Gustave leaned against a fallen pillar and scanned the view. He was standing in a painted postcard, the sky hand-tinted cerulean for added grandeur. Philae was almost too beautiful to be real. A profusion of chapels and temples—sacred, Joseph had said, to Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians alike—conveyed a wealth of choices, like so many stuffed chairs invitingly angled in a room. Everywhere columns of varied vintages drew his eyes upward, testaments to orderliness and stability. Of all Egyptian sites, Philae was the most human in scale, as casual and unimposing as a rambling country estate lapsed into dereliction.

Max stepped back from the pylon and framed it with his thumbs and forefingers. “A perfect time of day for photographs,” he announced. “I’m going back for my equipment. Perhaps you’ll pose for me, Garçon, at one of the temples?”

Gustave pivoted, pointed his rump in Max’s direction, and pretended to fart. Max ignored him, loping back to the boat with Joseph following. The Father of Thinness moved with the deftness of one who had grown up negotiating rocky scapes instead of Parisian pavement, as if he had hooves instead of feet. He’d have made an excellent goatherd.

Gustave struck out for the interior, following a promenade of lotus-topped pillars, the gritty earth crunching beneath his leather carpet slippers. In moments he found a trove of columns with basreliefs still polychromed in the jewel tones the Egyptians favored: gold and turquoise, green, orange, marine blues, and red—red for blood and evil, he recalled. Antiquity and beauty had not deterred graffiti artists in the past thousand years. Signatures in Greek and Latin and what he took to be demotic, the common man’s hieroglyphics, provided chilling proof that a Constantine, Junonius, and Theodora had once lived and graved a small eternity in the sandstone. He, on the contrary, had no desire to leave tailings of himself in the Orient, but rather to take tokens of it home. A monkey, six meters of Dacca cloth . . . maybe a mummy . . . a red vest. . . .

Though surely the painted pillars had once had a roof, Gustave preferred them as they were, with ceilings made of weather. He liked the turn of phrase. The gods were in charge of rolling out a sky to match the human drama below. At the moment, distinct puffs like dumplings floated in blue soup.

He noted again the watery silence—cloistral, somber, imbued with a ritual purposefulness, though the ritual had been lost in the sweep of time. He knew that as the Egyptian religion moved south from Abydos to Thebes to Karnak, it became more specialized, and that the temples at Philae were dedicated to the worship of Isis and her mate, Osiris, the god of the underworld and afterlife. Whatever the lost ceremonies were, they had inspired a gorgeous setting—façades carved in intricate relief, rocks exquisitely hewn and fitted—a model of perfection for the perfect eternity to follow.

Just then, something cream-colored protruding from the nearest wall caught his eye. It reminded him of the straw pigeon nests that stuck out from the upper stories of homes in Cairo. Closer up, he saw it was a scroll of paper jammed between two blocks. He pulled it loose and unrolled it. Dear God, it read in a familiar and handsome hand, take me to you. I do not wish to live. Your faithful servant. Stunned, he wiped his brow and stuffed the paper into the pouch of his robe.

Around the corner he spied another note, rolled tight as a cigarette, and forced into an intaglio of Ra in his bark. His heart began to pound. I am no use to You or myself. I do not think I am a human being but a deviation from Nature. Despite the English, he understood the gist: desperation.

Rossignol’s handwriting was neat and diminutive, marked somehow by inwardness, by containment, claiming scant space on the slip of paper as if not to offend, or as if she might be graded on her copperplate in a note pleading for a quick, painless, and passive death. Such politesse was, he hoped, the mark of a pious soul afraid to take her own life, or perhaps convinced she would go to hell if she did.

Miss Nightingale had departed Abu Simbel on her blue-bannered craft a week before he had. Parthenope, that was the name on the pennant. Her sister’s awful moniker. Like naming a woman “Veritas” or “Fido.”

He had never heard of leaving notes to God in temple walls, but away from good, gray England, it might be an acceptable substitute for a church prayer box.

He heard a whimper followed by a sob. Folding himself in half, he bent through the low doorway to investigate. Inside, he was able to stand. The floor was hard-packed earth dappled with sunlight.

He heard a gasp edged with high squeaks, like the harmonics of a violin bow, and recognized the terrible restraint of someone determined to avert all-out caterwauling. She mumbled a few words between the stifled sobs.

With a hand on either side, he groped his way through the glutinous dark of a stone passageway and down a short flight of stairs until the wall on one side ended in what he presumed was the entrance to a room. Cushioning his head with his hand, he stooped into a duskier realm with pinholes of light leaking through the roof. The air was so stale and arid it stung his lungs, like the heavy, pungent atmosphere of a disused root cellar. He sensed more than saw a figure huddled on the floor. “Bonjour?” he called. “Est-ce-qu’il-y-a quelqu’un? Rossignol?” He stepped forward.

“Go away!”

“C’est moi, Gustave. Please, let me come in.” He took a step and stretched his hand into the muzzy, desiccated air.

“No.” The shape squirmed into the corner, revealing the outline of an arch, like a saint’s niche within a cathedral. He recognized the pretty curve of her bonnet brim.

“Please, Rossignol.”

“Don’t come any closer.”

“All right.” He retracted his hand. “I shall stay where I am.” He peered into the room without success for her face. “Do you mind if I visit a while?” It would take a few more minutes for his eyes to adjust to the dismal light.

“What? What are you saying?” She seemed befuddled by the mundanity of his question.

“I’m just going to take a seat now.” He was overcome with a rare compassion, the same tenderness he had felt for Caroline, and also, oddly, for Louise’s little pink slippers—a hollowness in his chest that radiated out, turning his hands and feet rubbery. He had to keep a calm head, for it occurred to him that the notes might be more than requests to be whisked heavenward. Perhaps she had brought the means of her liberation. A knife. Or poison. Dahabiyahs were notoriously vermin infested, with poison casually stocked alongside coffee and chickpeas. He decided he would not leave her. Eventually Max and Joseph would search him out; then the three of them could chivvy her into returning with them, or, if necessary, gently overwhelm her. He had merely to keep her engaged and talking. Above all, he must show no alarm, despite the rapid throbbing in his neck. He must cultivate an offhand attitude when in reality he wanted to rescue her, hurling himself forward like the lifeguards at Trouville to breast the waves, his heart about to burst, every muscle burning with the effort. Instead, his limbs tingled with unspent urgency.

“What are you writing, Rossignol?” He could distinguish her more clearly now, scratching on a pad of paper, a lady’s aide-mémoire that dangled from a cord around her neck. A cord. A noose!

“Nothing much,” she managed, her voice unsteady.

He had crossed his legs Indian-style, but now he stretched them out in front and leaned back against the stone. “If I were guessing,” he said mildly, “I’d say you were praying.”

She turned and looked squarely at him, her face blank with astonishment. “How did you know?” Curiosity seemed to calm her; she sounded more normal.

“I found some notes outside the temple.” He gestured toward the corridor behind them.

“You didn’t take them, did you?” Her voice tightened with concern. He could see her features clearly now.

“I read them. Would you like me to replace them where I found them?” He felt the pebbled earth pressing through the damp wool homespun of his robe. His buttocks were starting to itch.

“Oh, yes,” she said solemnly. “I would appreciate that. I chose the placement with great care.”

“Let’s do it together,” he proposed. “I have them in my pocket.” He patted the pouch where he’d lodged them, imagined mounding his body around hers in a soft fortress. Was the poor girl mad? Was he? In fact he thought he was, but she was mad in a different way, too much sincerity and care for other people, while his madness had to do with detesting almost everyone.

“Just give them to me.” Her voice was still shaking. “I can do it on my own.” She began to collect herself, her skirts shushing along the rock and sand. Rising to a squat, she braced herself with one hand on the wall.

“I shall help you with them outside and then escort you to your boat.” What more could he say that would not call attention to the seriousness of his concern?

“All right.” She straightened up with difficulty, wedged the newest note in a crevice, and moved closer, standing above him. He didn’t budge. Into the freighted silence between them, she at last lowered herself onto the floor alongside him, primly covering her knees with her dress. He thought of reaching out to pat her arm, but she was wary as a wild animal and might interpret the slightest motion as a threat and vanish into the gloom, there driven to some drastic act.

She stared at him unabashedly. He watched the wisp of a smile solidify into a blithesome grin. The instant he offered a smile in return, she metamorphosed into a different person: her shoulders lowered; her neck softened from a post into a slender curve; her arms settled against her torso, relaxed as wings. She seemed to be sane again. He was pleased that he had managed to soothe her with his cleverness and rationality.

She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a giggle, but the hand flew up, as though yanked on a string, and she exploded with laughter. Unlike her sobbing, she did nothing to fight the impulse, producing guffaws and snickers limited only by the necessity to draw breath.

He shivered in the oven of the chamber. Was she laughing at him? Surely she was mad. What would she do next, especially if she had brought a knife or poison? Didn’t the insane cackle at the most unlikely moments—while setting buildings afire, diving from rooftops, stabbing their husbands with pitchforks?

“Oh, Gustave,” she said with a sigh, “I am sorry to have worried you, for you are worried, I see it in your face.” She leaned closer, inspecting him.

Her eyes glimmered, wet with tears of hilarity. Although she was small with a flat chest, she was distinctly feminine, her torso rising like the stem of a water lily from the circular pad of her skirt. “I have been through this before, this . . . hopelessness. I shall recover.” She picked up one of his hands balled into fists in his lap. “I never thought anyone would find my letters. They were intended only for God.” She pried open his fingers and sandwiched his hand between hers. Her face turned serious again, the veins at her temples suddenly prominent, blue pentimenti of the keening woman he had found moments before.

Was she going to cry? He hated it when women cried. His mother cried daily, not that she lacked a reason to be in perpetual mourning, but he could not abide it. Each of Mme. Flaubert’s tears pierced his heart like a sliver of glass. Louise’s tears had been largely histrionic, intended to melt his resolve, to provoke pity followed by guilt. In the end he had become immune to them.

“Gustave, dis-moi que tu me pardonnes. Forgive me especially for frightening you,” she added. She held his hand in hers. Rather surprising for an Englishwoman, but in her case not coquetry, simply the sign of an openhearted and trusting nature.

“Of course,” he heard himself say, “I forgive you. But only if you swear you are not so despondent as the notes suggest. No, disregard that.” He erased the words with his free hand from the air. He knew she was desperate, and that suicide might beckon again even if her crisis had passed for now. He started over. “Promise me that if you are so melancholy, you will take me as your confidant here, away from home.”

She nodded. “I am not, and I shall.”

Had they just been married? The order and brevity of her words sounded like vows. He withdrew his hand, then thought better of it, and took both of hers. From his mouth (his best feature, everyone said, and his favorite body part after his prick) poured words that bypassed his brain. “My dear Rossignol, I sensed I would be your friend from the moment we met. Fate has brought us together in Egypt for a purpose.” He stood outside himself, marveling at the florid declaration.

“Oh,” she said, glancing down demurely, “if only that were true. But even if it were, we shall soon be parted.” She ignored the tears spilling down her cheeks, as if they were someone else’s, or droplets of rain. He was happy to ignore them, too. “In any case, you may not find me a worthy friend,” she continued. “I am, I’m told, too intense. Too serious. Too ambitious. Oh, and too talkative and I have an impossibly deep, passional nature that will find its outlet. I have loved music too much and friends too much and my family insufficiently—”

“Arrête, Rossignol!” A tender pity surged in him. Beneath the cleverness, candor, and humor, she was shattered by self-doubt. “You must defend yourself first from yourself, for the world will be all too eager to find fault with you.” The rock upon which he sat might have been proclaiming, oracle-like, for all he felt connected to his words, though he intended them sincerely and, to tell the truth, found them moving and sage.

She shifted her weight, copying his position, her feet extended in front, her back against the wall, next to his. She sighed. “As a woman, I am unnatural.” She measured her bony hand against his meatier one. “Everyone says so. I wish to be of use, but to my family I am only a burden, which I loathe. Since I cannot change my sex, I would be better off dea—”

“Don’t say it! Or if you must, consider it only philosophically.” Their hands were still palm to palm. He locked his fingers around hers and squeezed them, shaking her hand with conviction for both of them.

“All right,” she relented. “Let’s consider it philosophically. Which of us shall be Socrates and which the questioner?” She turned toward him and removed her bonnet, which had flattened her hair into two shining wings plastered to her head. Between them, the white of her scalp was startling. A bead of sweat slid down her forehead. He regretted that he did not have a handkerchief to offer her, only the fetid hem of his robe.

He rarely confided in women. Certainly not his dear mother, who, given more information, fretted more, fluttering around baby Caroline’s nursery in paroxysms of dread and grief with her arms upraised and her hair in a tangle. She’d always been a worrier with a gloomy disposition, and who could blame her? Long before the recent tragedies, she’d borne inordinate losses. When she was nine days old, her mother had died, and her father when she was five years old. In the eight years between Gustave and Achille, three babies had died in her arms. Tragedy had shaped her into a woman who suffered in anticipation as much as from outcomes. No, he told her only ebullient news. As for women of his class, they were untrustworthy gossips who viewed him as a potential investment, like a bank bond. Louise had used his confidences to taunt him.

“I have a question, then,” he told Florence. “Shall I give up, too, as you wish to? I’ve already told you that I am a failed novelist—”

“What a noble undertaking, the pursuit of art,” she interrupted. “How I admire you.”

He wanted to disabuse her of the naive veneration he heard in her voice. “The truth is that I am fit for nothing else, least of all ordinary life. I wish to write, but that will require all my resources, my will and bodily strength, my time and affections, and yet I may fail again.”

To his annoyance, she still looked starry-eyed, as if in the presence of Rousseau, Molière, or even a lesser light like Lamartine. “I hate conventionality,” he added, determined to give her a taste of his soured reality. “People are sheep. Sheep-mayors and sheep-grocers. In the esteemed Academy, immortal sheep! I shall never marry, never have children. I hate all that. I refuse to become the standard-bearer of all that I despise for the sake of offspring.”

She stared at him, mouth slightly agape.

He hadn’t planned to tell quite so much, but in all likelihood, they’d never meet outside Egypt. Of course, they could continue a friendship by mail. She seemed to enjoy writing letters and was at ease on the page. But the prospect was unappealing. Rossignol was much more interesting in the flesh, more mercurial, more chemically alive, like a fire. By comparison, her letters emitted only sparks. Anyway, he mused, it was impossible for a man and a woman truly to be friends the way he and Bouilhet were friends. The way he had been a friend with Alfred, the way, mostly, he and Max were friends. Women were more like household accoutrements—walking, talking furnishings with especially alluring appendages and apertures. Except for whores, who had no interest in conversation, other than bantering about price. It was better that way. Prostitutes kept alive his ideal of an honest love unfettered by gingerbread morality. As for Miss Nightingale, she was, apparently, another sort of being—female and an intellectual (unlike Louise, who was more enamored of her own career than of ideas). Plus, Miss Nightingale had a touch of severity that was aesthetically pleasing. He had never met anyone like her. Nevertheless, he was sure that if he told her the truth of himself, she’d be appalled. And there was nothing worse, nothing more enraging, nothing that caused his gut to churn more than the expression of disapproval on a woman’s face. It made him feel like a bad smell. He was especially susceptible to his mother’s outrage, even when it was unjustified.

“I, too, shall never marry,” Florence said, breaking his reverie. She seemed proud of it, her chin tilted up, her expression defiant. He’d never heard a woman say that. “But continue, Gustave. I didn’t mean to interrupt, only to second your notion.”

Leaving out his seizures (known only to his family, Bouilhet, and Max), he recited all his recent desolations: failing law school, the tragic year when Alfred, his father, and sister had been flattened one after another, like stick puppets at a saint’s fair. She listened attentively, with murmurs of sympathy. “When I was a younger man, I took refuge in the Romantics,” he explained. “I thought I’d found my life’s work and a way to rise above the petty world—like Byron, Wordsworth.”

“Yes, great poets. And Byron, so heroic, a martyr to Greek freedom.”

He and Alfred had dressed like the dashing Byron for a time. After Gustave dispensed with the cape and scarf, he retained the stance of the man, who was as notorious for his scandals, debt, and sexual appetite as for his verse.

“Later I came to reject the writers who held an optimistic view of humanity. How,” he asked her, “could Rousseau think the common man noble? How could anyone? For the common man is uncouth. Boring. He is married to tradition, distrustful of new ideas, of art itself!” He could feel the blood of his convictions coursing through his neck and head. Even in the twilit room, his face must be red as a boil. “Only Rabelais and Byron wrote in a spirit of malice, only they dared laugh at the human race.”

“It is true,” she said, unperturbed. “The common man is dirty. He cannot read and therefore barely thinks. But how can he rise above his station without education and the right to determine his destiny? That is why I felt so much sympathy with the Italian reformers,” she added. “I knew some of them in France and Switzerland, the great social and political thinkers in exile there.”

Amazing! While he was laboring all night until dawn in his study on Saint Anthony, she had been discussing the fate of the Italian states with visionaries. Perhaps he was the naive one. Of course, he had been in Paris for the revolution of 1848, though not by design. He had ventured out once from Max’s flat to observe from the ramparts but had never participated. The truth was that without the guidance of his friends, he had few opinions about politics. Mostly, he had to admit, he was simply against things. He aspired to misanthropy, though he had trouble pulling it off face-to-face. There was always the danger, too, that he would end his days as a sullen windbag. He had to take the measure of himself. He had to succeed. The failure of Saint Anthony had nearly broken him.

How much time had passed—half an hour? An hour? The light inside the temple seemed brighter than before, the silence denser, more liturgical.

“Luckily, you have had advantages,” she said. “You are not a common man and never could be. And most important, you have a calling, which your first failure has not altered.”

“Yes,” he muttered. “But it has made me cynical.”

“Then that is another thing we share,” she announced, looking almost excited. “I have grown cynical myself.”

“About what, Rossignol? The music?”

“No, not that. I’ve grown cynical about people, my own class of people. They are so smug, so comfortable sitting in judgment.”

“The bourgeois herd.”

“Two years ago at church, I . . . well . . . sort of lost my temper and made my opinions known.”

He pricked up his ears. “Oh?”

“The vicar had the gall to say it was extraordinary that Jesus arose from the working classes, as if only the rich had a brain or sentiment.”

“And not at all in the spirit of the man Himself.” He loved the thought of her dressing down a cleric.

“I wanted to shout, We are all Pontius Pilate here, but instead, as I went through the receiving line, I told him it would have been more extraordinary if Jesus had arisen from this class of people. Whereupon he pinched my elbow and steered me outside and asked why I hated my own kind.” She shook her head with resignation.

“Perhaps your vicar has never actually read the Bible?” he joked.

She did not respond at first, staring grimly at the floor. “I was so angry, but then I thought, ‘Look at me. I have been educated primarily to enjoy my life, to play the pianoforte, to speak French, to attend lectures and recitals. Who am I to judge him? I am no better—”

“You are, you are much, much better!” He touched her cheek.

“But all my luxuries and leisure depend upon the drudgery of people who are barely acknowledged as human beings.” Sighing, she looked into his eyes.

“No, you are better. You are nothing like those people.”

“Perhaps you are right. At least I notice the inequity.” She smiled a little. “At least I do not say what the wealthy always say of the poor: ‘Let them suffer here below becau—”

“‘Because Heaven will be their recompense. They are not like us.’ Blah-blah-blah-blah.”

“Exactly!”

They looked at each other beyond the few seconds allowed in the presence of other people, who were always monitoring the length and propriety of a glance. He was aware of the soft skin of her cradling hand. But instead of an awakening in his groin, he felt his bottom itching. In her presence, he couldn’t just reach around and scratch his ass. Pity. Had he ever felt that free in front of Caroline? He couldn’t recall.

“You have laid bare your heart,” she whispered. “Will you keep a secret of mine that only one other human being knows?”

“Mais oui. On my life!” He thought back to the day he and Alfred had commingled their blood with finger pricks as boys. Secrets thrilled him.

She yawned and hiccuped, her manners apparently suspended during extreme spiritual distress. Might she next burp or pass wind in his presence? The thought excited him, like the voyeur’s fantasy that the woman he has been secretly watching continues to undress, knowing she is being watched.

“Promise you will not laugh or think me crazy if I tell you.” Her voice was firm and serious.

Could he promise that? He thought he must, whatever he might actually believe. “Again, on my life.”

She scooped up sand from the floor and let it sift through her fingers, gathering her thoughts. “I, too, have a calling.”

At last, he thought, the mysterious source of her despondency and of her fierce commitment would be revealed.

“My calling is from God.” She closed her eyes, rapturous, then opened them, looking stunned. “I mean to say that when I was seventeen, God spoke to me.”

“I see,” Gustave whispered respectfully. He added a weight to the scale in his mind on the side of her craziness. In France, many people conversed with God, most of them wretched peasants desperate to distinguish themselves from the flock, to leave off being sheep. He was crestfallen to think that brilliant Rossignol was similarly deluded: Joan of Arc redux. He cleared his throat. “Are there many mystics in England?” He might have been asking about the weather.

“Mystics?” It was clear from the tone of her voice that she had never applied the word to herself. “No, I’ve never heard of any. Is that what I am, then, a mystic?” Her voice was shaky, tinged with fear. Or was it anger?

“I don’t know,” Gustave floundered. “That is what we call them in France, the people who speak to God.”

“But I didn’t speak to God!” She lurched forward, her back ramrod straight. “He spoke to me. He called me to His service. I had no say in it. I was merely the vessel—”

“I’m so sorry. I hope I haven’t offended you—”

“Offended me? No, but clearly you think me mad.”

Anger, then. She made to move away from him, but he held on to her arm. A rivulet of sweat streaked between his shoulder blades. The room had disappeared from awareness for a time. Now it was stifling again.

“I don’t think you are mad,” he lied. “I am sometimes rude or tactless without meaning to be.” A pressure was building behind his eyes, a headache coming on. Or was he about to have a seizure? He’d never been able to identify the warning signs before he vanished into the black maze of nonexistence. To prevent or at least anticipate future episodes, he tried to remember afterward what he had been doing or feeling. But only afterward, when it felt like he’d died and revived, after a chunk of his life had been severed with an ax. “But please, tell me how and when it happened to you, Rossignol.” If he did have a seizure, would she know what to do?

“Gustave? Are you quite all right?” Her head was inclined toward him, an expression of care on her face so intense it seemed that her whole life force were focused on him in a single beam of attention.

“I am fine.” The pain was receding. He breathed more easily. “I have been thinking that we should swear to have no secrets today, no shame between us.” Did he dare divulge the secret of his illness? He wanted to, but not quite yet. “I myself have done things I would be ashamed to tell you—”

“But I am not ashamed!” She pulled her arm free and scooted away on the floor, horrified, though she did not leave. A wave of gratitude washed over him—gratitude to Philae and its ancient architects. Where but in such a sacred and exotic quarter could this chimerical conversation continue?

“You must forgive . . . my ineptitude.” His words issued from his throat like thread catching on a spool. “I was only saying I have secrets, I have things I am ashamed of.” The words kept coming, colored this way, then that, like the endless silk scarf of a magician. “Ashamed of my behavior on occasion with women. I have, in short, sinned. But you! You are blessed. You are blessed that God chose you.” He felt utterly lost. How had one remark altered her mood so sharply? His words lay at his feet, a tangle of knots, a hatful of failed tricks.

“You understand nothing of this event,” she said sharply. “I am not blessed. He called me to His service, but that was twelve years ago and I still do not know what I am to do.” She kicked at the floor, raising a flurry of dust motes that settled erratically, like bits of gold leaf.

It took every drop of his self-control not to laugh: a woman considering suicide because her god was fickle or had a poor memory? He took several deep breaths to vanquish the hoot that hovered in his throat like a sneeze in the nose. He could feel a smile forming in his face, a disembodied grin in the sepulchral gloom. He bit his lip until his eyes teared.

She began to keen, to sob. She covered her face with her hands, as if to block the anguish from issuing forth. He had never seen such a display, not of grief, but of grief denied, of grief beat back with a hammer, of great blockades erected and then broached. He was unable to look away, like an onlooker at a fire. He had paid to watch women masturbate, but that was not nearly as intimate as watching this young Englishwoman try to subdue the beast of her raw feeling.

She looked up, her nose dripping. “It is not a blessing, but a curse.” Her voice was thin as a wire.

He crawled across the space between them and rested his head against her shoulder. Philae held them in its silted-up silence. Barely touching her for fear she’d collapse under the weight of an embrace or move away again, he encircled her with his arms. “I am waiting for the muse to visit me,” he managed to whisper, “just as you are waiting for God to speak to you again.” Were they not both self-made pariahs? He felt himself in complete sympathy with her, as if they had mingled their blood in the purity and innocence of childhood.

She wiped her face on her sleeve and, still within the crook of his arm, raised her head and in a small voice asked, “What sins have you committed with women?”

He thought for a moment, considering his options. Did not the location alone cast the whole enterprise in a unique and liberating light? He was inside a derelict temple in Egypt where, for all he knew, orgies had been conducted with sacred whores, and hearts excised and weighed on golden scales. He decided not to consider custom or pride, which could only lead to lies and silence. “Because I cannot betray my calling by marrying,” he began, “I no longer court proper women.”

Florence listened while he explained how disillusioned he had been that Louise, a fellow artist, had tricked him into believing that she yearned for something other than a bourgeois existence when in fact she wanted a husband and a lover, and that was not revolutionary in the least. “That marked the beginning of my life as a cynic,” he explained.

He had been cruel to Louise. But now, miles and months removed, his fury had been replaced by wistfulness, by the memory of her tongue darting between his lips like a hungry bird, the salty tang of golden thatch under her arms. “In the main,” he continued to Florence, “I have found another outlet for my passions in the brothels of Paris.” In the spirit of full disclosure he added, “And Egypt.”

She did not move, her head still nuzzled against his chest. He felt her bony rib cage rising and falling. “Brothels?”

“Oui. J’ai frequenté des bordels presque depuis mon enfance.”

Her voice altered, resembling a schoolgirl’s neutrally reciting the population of Spain, the successor to Henry VIII. No, it was the sexual peccadilloes of members of Parliament. “It’s bruited about that lords in England do the same. Not that I would know. Or condone it.” She looked up at him. “I am sure it is degrading to all concerned.”

“Of course,” he lied. Clearly, Florence knew nothing about brothels. How could she, being English, rich, pious, and protected? Had he ever felt degraded? He did not think so. Had he ever degraded the women? Without doubt. He had once f*cked an old woman while wearing a hat and smoking a cigar as two friends cheered him on, then passed her around like a bottle of cognac.

“I suppose it is better than deceiving a girl by promising to marry her to gain an advantage,” she added.

In other circumstances, he might have found it amusing to think of sex as an “advantage” rather than his rightful due. The only time, as far as he was concerned, that sex was not an advantage was when it led to marriage. Then he feared it. But he wouldn’t say that. He could never say that. Because once he began to think so coldheartedly, so truthfully, love in the brothel became impossible, the brothel itself distasteful, actually a pathetic substitute. No, he could not give up his whores.

“I shall die a virgin, I suppose,” she said, brushing away a channel of sand in the pleat of her skirt, “though I came close to marrying once.” She told him about refusing Richard. “I reasoned that if I married, I would be a prisoner of my household, unable to do whatever it is God wishes of me. My family didn’t understand how much it pained me to disappoint them. And myself, for I have a deeply passional nature.”

“So you said earlier.”

“Not just carnal passion.”

“I understand. There is the mind. Ah, and the yearning spirit.” She would die, he thought, without ever discovering the bazaar of flavors, sights, and sensations that was the body. A shame, all those nerve endings wasted. He remembered the corpses in his father’s dissecting room, he and Caroline watching the autopsies from the apartment across the way, happy to be horrified.

“As I said, I am excessive in my likes and dislikes—my likes especially.” She was matter-of-fact again, her hands folded in her lap. “And with such a passionate nature, everyone believes that I am at greater risk than usual when I travel. I have a chaperone everywhere and at all times in England. Abroad, they say I am what is called in hunting parlance an easy target.”

“After a certain age, my sister, too, required a chaperone.” It was the age of breasts and blood, he thought but did not say. “When she was young, I schooled her to be a tomboy and a free spirit. She was a painter and actress. Then she grew up and married.” He had been angry with Caroline for yielding to convention, for joining the ranks of the enemy, only recently realizing that she had no choice unless she wished to become one of the sexless spinsters he joked about to her. Sometimes when they were together with her new husband, she would look at him as if to say It’s not so bad. I’ve paid the price. Why can’t you? Or perhaps he had only imagined that message in her glance. As a bride she seemed unquestionably happy, nearly gloating, not the Caroline he knew and loved. But why should he grow up to be like her? Why should any man wish to become a silo—a stolid, stationary provider for every hungry mouth?

She continued, “Everything must be planned with chaperoning in mind. You and Max follow your fancies, free to move about. You can be invisible—men among men—while wherever I go, I am a bauble trying to hang in the air as invisibly as a spider’s thread.”

He shifted to one haunch to relieve the itching. Stung with sweat, it had intensified. “Oh, but that is not quite correct, Rossignol. Max and I are not always safe. It just seems so to you. Of course,” he conceded, “we are safer than you would be.”

“Without the Bracebridges, I should be mad by now. They took me to Italy last year to prevent a civil war at home.” She had been feuding with her family, she explained, for ten years, ever since they returned from their Grand Tour and Fanny undertook to marry her off. She enumerated a few of the battles: the opposition to mathematics as being manly, Fanny forbidding her to volunteer at hospitals and orphanages, both parents’ distaste for her work at the Ragged School, their horror at the amount of time she spent with the poor villagers.

“I am meant to sit quietly, look pretty, and entertain at the piano—in short, to be useless in a world where so much needs to be done.”

“Yes,” he said, “I see that now.” He did understand. He recognized the dull world she described. However, his unhappiness was of a different stripe, for he refused to aspire to the usefulness within it that she so desired. Could she grasp his nature after all? he wondered.

“According to Father, every man in the world has his mind on seduction and conquest, and will revert to it at the first opportunity, like a traveler to his native language. Then he becomes a ravening monster. The way Father talks, it is only their suits and cravats that separate men from beasts.”

“He’s trying to frighten you to protect you. It isn’t true.” Actually, it was. He was certainly guilty of making the lives of unescorted women miserable, taunting them on the street, catcalling when drunk and sometimes when sober.

“I must be out in the world to accomplish anything, but how will I do it if the world is so dangerous that I can’t take a walk alone?”

“Dear girl,” he said, petting her hair, “here’s an idea. Why don’t you come with Max and me to Koseir. It’s on the Red—”

“Sea. Yes, I know where it is. I looked it up on the map when Max wrote me about it.”

Max hadn’t told him that he’d written to her. The lout! Did he have his rascally eye on what he called “English pudding”? He’d set him straight: Miss Nightingale was not to be prey, but comrade. “The Bracebridges could come along or wait for you in Kenneh.”

She sat up briskly, eyes glittering. “Is that a genuine invitation?”

“It is.” He swept the air gallantly with his hand and bowed his head. “It would be my great pleasure to remove you from your scheduled itinerary. Imagine”—he stretched an arm toward the opposite wall, using it as a canvas—“the sun turning the sea to a golden laver that stretches to the horizon. Immersing yourself in the ancient waters where all those Egyptians drowned with their horses and chariots.” But the more he painted the scene, the more disheartened she became. “What is wrong, Rossignol?”

“I shall still need a chaperone. The Bracebridges are in poor health and would never allow me to go with the two of you. The chaperone must be a male relative or older woman or married couple. Those are the rules, even in the Orient, even in the emptiness of the Sahara.”

“You can take your servant, La Truite. It might do her good.”

“Trout?” she repeated dubiously. Her face, moments before glowing like an alabaster lamp, clouded over. “I don’t think she’ll agree to it.”

“Leave it to me.” He dreaded the thought of flirting with the churlish hen, but then he had slept with whores older than Trout. “Oh, but I cannot!” He smacked his thigh. “She doesn’t speak French!”

“She hates me,” said Flo. “It would turn her against the idea if I translated for you. She’d smell a plot.”

“But Max can get by. I shall set him the task.” Even in broken English, Max was adept at melting hearts with the saga of his life as an orphan. (He never mentioned his wealth and that his parents died when he was nearly grown.) “Max could photograph the old biddy. So few people have seen a photograph, let alone owned one. Surely she could be bought with a portrait of herself on the rump of a camel. He could say he needs her as a model on the caravan.”

Florence clapped her hands. “If only it could be done.”

How good it was to see her animated. He felt himself expand with pleasure, too. Not only had he cheered her up; he’d also found a way to put some distance between himself and Max. Max would be less inclined to ask for his assistance if Miss Nightingale came along. She would be Gustave’s project for the desert trip.

“Let’s find Max,” he said, offering his hand as she stood.

They brushed off their clothes and located the entrance, then crept up the stairs. Bending through the doorway as one, they stepped onto a slab of light on the threshold. Flo extended her palm. “Oh, my letters, please.”

He’d nearly forgotten them. “Will you put them back?”

“No. I left one inside the chamber of Osiris. That is enough.”

Reluctant to return them—he cherished his mementos of women—he dug one of the two from his pocket. “I seem to have only this,” he said, placing it in her palm. She tucked it in her bodice. A mummy . . . dates from Derr . . . Rossignol’s secret scroll . . .

They tramped arm in arm over the rubble in silence. As they neared the temple to Isis, Max hailed them excitedly. “Venez ici!” he shouted, waving to them. “Look what I’ve found.” Hadji Ismael lounged nearby, braiding a palm frond, his one eye focused elsewhere. Joseph was nowhere to be seen.

Max indicated a stele behind the pylons. When they did not react, he pointed to a French inscription incised near the ground: En l’année 1799, Napoleon à conquis les Mamelukes dans la Bataille des Pyramides.

“Do you think our great emperor wrote his name everywhere, like Ramses?” Gustave asked. “Why is there no mention of his sweetheart, Josephine?” He winked at Flo, who began to laugh. In a moment, they were both howling. He assured Max they were not laughing at him. The truth was they were laughing because they needed to after the intense encounter in the temple. Anything might have triggered it.

“Laugh all you want,” Max said, kicking at the ground. “I have photographed this historical marker for my book.” Behind his bluster was clearly dismay.

“I suppose we shall need a squeeze of this,” Gustave said.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“You did promise to teach me how to make a squeeze, M. Flaubert,” Flo said nonchalantly. “Might it be this one?”

So he was M. Flaubert again. “This one is awfully low,” he said. “It will be difficult, with a lot of bending and groveling in dirt. A higher engraving would be easier.”

Max tapped Flo on the shoulder and pointed to the back of Gustave’s robes. Two ovals of solidly caked sand formed a tawny imprint of his buttocks. Gustave hung his head in mock shame. “All right,” he conceded, “we shall make a squeeze of this. We shall call it ‘What the Great French Left Behind.’” He wiggled his fanny. Flo and Max howled.

“Agreed.” Max shook his hand and bowed to Flo.

“Tomorrow?” Flo asked.

“I shall send a letter to your dahabiyah, setting the time. And now”—he extended his elbow to her—“shouldn’t you be returning?” He patted her hand as she linked it with his. Max looked to him for a clue, but Gustave gave no hint of the events that had played out while Max was taking photographs. “I will see you back on the cange,” he said, keeping his face impassive.

Staying within the perimeter wall of granite and sandstone, they trudged along, arm in arm, toward the dahabiyah.

“What do you think of the temple to Osiris?” Flo asked. Judging by her tone, it was clearly a place deeply laden with meaning for her. She pointed to it in the near distance.

“I’m not quite sure.” He had been so distracted by her desperate notes when he wandered by that he had paid no attention once inside. “Let’s go down to the beach here,” he said. Forming a stirrup with his hands, he gave her a boost over the low wall.

“This is not the way I came,” Flo said, scrambling over the top. “I never climbed the wall.”

“But you came alone today.” He hadn’t thought about it in those terms until that moment. “You had no chaperone.”

“That’s true. But it’s an uninhabited island. And I was only gone a short while.”

He wagged a finger at her. “Still, you’ve broken the rules as you explained them to me.”

“I suppose so.”

It genuinely pleased him that she had shown some gumption, that she had the potential, like Caroline, to be a miscreant. What other rules might she be willing to break?

From the shore, the encircling river fractured and multiplied the light like the beveled edge of a looking glass. He felt deeply content, as when he and Caroline wandered the riverbank at home with no destination.

They reached Trajan’s bed, an open-sided tomb that resembled a greenhouse, with vigorous weeds growing up through the floor. In the cove below, they spied the dahabiyah. Selina and Charles were sitting under the reed panel, drinking tea and reading.

Selina raised her arm in welcome. “You’ve come back, my dear. And with an old friend.”

He saw that Miss Nightingale was blushing and smiling, happy to see her dear friend. Or was she, possibly, happy to be seen in his company? For an unpleasant moment he wondered if the Bracebridges had a role in finding a match for Flo. He banished the thought.

As she set foot on the gangplank, Flo waved good-bye. He waved, then turned around, his back burning with her gaze.

They had been in the temple of Osiris? He made a mental note to return. It was one of the most important monuments on Philae. He’d noticed nothing but Miss Nightingale.