The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

18

CARAVAN

Once a week, the Kenneh market occupied a dusty street at the northern tip of the harbor, itself no more than a sloping beach. Narrow booths lined either side of the winding thoroughfare. When the merchants were not sweeping sand from their stalls, they sat out front hawking their goods, or took refuge within from the heat and wind, bent over their accounts or chatting with customers.

One could not shop quickly. Ceremonies had to be observed. In the Orient, a substantial sale required the leisure to establish goodwill and to offset the innately degrading effects of cold cash. Tea and sweets lubricated the extensive dickering process. With Joseph’s help, they spent an hour purchasing staples: kamr-ed-din—apricot paste—along with a crock of olives, freshly butchered chickens, several dozen eggs, and a slaughtered lamb. They still needed lamps and lamp oil, goatskins and saddlebags. The caravan crew supplied nothing but camels and desert expertise.

It was hard for Gustave to talk to Miss Nightingale as they squeezed through crowds that surged through the street like a riptide or, conversely, stood in scattered formations immovable as lampposts. Miss Nightingale was often busy translating for Trout or distracted by Max’s peripatetic presence. Walking faster than seemed humanly possibly, Max scouted the shops ahead and rushed back to report. He couldn’t resist fingering the merchandise, while Gustave was more restrained and deliberate, not wishing to convey too much interest to keep the price low. For despite his native costume, he knew that he could never really pass for an Oriental. Besides being in the company of two European women, small incongruities gave him away. His nails and robes were too clean; his skin, though tanned, too pink. He was fleshier and taller than most Egyptians.

They stopped at a chandler’s stall. “It’s very bright in the market, isn’t it?” Miss Nightingale remarked, shading her eyes with her hand.

“And also very dark,” Gustave countered. He pointed to the back of the booth where the face of the beturbaned owner swam up like a reflection at the bottom of a well.

“Let’s go in,” she said, pulling Trout by the arm linked in hers. Clearly, the maid had been enlisted as chaperone.

Inside, the shop was stuffy and close. While he, Miss Nightingale, and Trout lingered over rows and rows of the clay lamps ubiquitous in the Orient, Joseph negotiated for candles at the back of the shop, where the owner kept them to guard against pilferage.

They proceeded to a saddlery to buy goatskins and camel bags. Gustave delighted in the profusion of kilim pouches in vivid patterns of madder, brown, blue, ivory, and black. “Let’s take our time,” he suggested.

“Yes,” Miss Nightingale replied, “I hate to rush. These are all so handsome.”

Even Trout took an interest in the selection. An hour later, pleased with their purchases and full of more sweets, they followed Joseph up a hill. The open-air shop at the crest was strung with clotheslines fluttering with scarves and homespun robes of every description. Sunlight and wind playing through the textiles created the atmosphere of a carnival.

“You must to cover the head,” Joseph told the women, patting his skull.

“Oh, I have a shawl,” Miss Nightingale replied. “I’ll be fine.”

In his butchered French, Joseph explained that she and her friend must wear kaffiyehs. Nothing else would do in the desert.

She examined a kaffiyeh whipping on the line. “I am sure my English cloth is just as good, if not better.”

Joseph whispered and Gustave passed it along. “He says he will not be responsible if you do not wear proper headgear.”

Looking amused, Miss Nightingale translated this warning for Trout. “But he has no idea what English cloth is like.”

“I am sure you are right, Rossignol, but it is just as easy to buy a kaffiyeh.” He picked out a red-and-white one trimmed with yellow silk. “Very pretty, isn’t it?

“Yes, but—”

“Let it be a gift from me, Rossignol,” he insisted. He quickly selected a second, plainer one with black-and-white stripes. “And this is for you, Trout.” He pressed it into her hand over her objections, eliciting a polite smile. She folded it under her arm.

“Trout has a very practical straw hat she can wear,” Miss Nightingale said. “But these will make lovely souvenirs. Thank you, Gustave.”

“Well, I shall wear the Arab headgear,” he said pointedly, unfolding the one he’d chosen for himself and draping it around his head. “There. I am ready for the khamsins.”

“Surely you have heard of the Arkwright Mills, Gustave.”

“The what?” he asked. Trout pricked up her ears at the familiar English words.

“The Arkwright Mills. The most famous in the world. They weave the finest cotton cloth.”

“Is that so?” He passed a handful of piastres to Joseph to pay for the scarves.

“Quite so. You see, the mill is a new industrial design. The looms are gigantic and run day and night. I’ve seen them myself—”

“I had no idea.” She seemed quite enthusiastic, even a tad mulish on the subject.

“Oh, yes, indeed.” She turned to her maid. “Isn’t that right, Trout? And they use only the strongest cotton, grown on the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina.”

He feigned interest while eyeing a chunky amber necklace. Prayer beads. He picked up the strand. The amber was warm and oily in his hand. Perfect to finger in his pocket or for his desk. A red vest, six meters of Dacca cloth, a monkey, a mummy. . .. the mummy! Joseph had told him there was a shop in Kenneh specializing in Egyptian antiquities. But where was it?

She was still enthusing about the cloth. The mills weren’t far from her home. She had visited them with her father. Did he know that the girls who worked at the mill lived together in dormitories? He did not.

“Pardon me for interrupting,” he told Miss Nightingale, “but we must leave. There’s one more thing I want to buy—a mummy.”

“Oh.” She fidgeted with a sleeve. “A mummy, you say?”

“But first, let’s try this on for size.” He carefully arranged the kaffiyeh around her face, demonstrating how she might fasten it to cover all but her eyes. It was charming on her; the yellow silk had been an inspired choice. “It looks beautiful, doesn’t it, Trout? Biblical.”

“Really?” She stroked the cloth covering her hair. “What do you say, Trout?”

“I wouldn’t know, mum. You do look more Egyptian.”

“It’s very flattering,” he insisted, taking her arm as they strolled from the shop. Perhaps that would be the end of the talking jag about the mills. He hoped so.

The antiquities shop was close to the harbor; they had passed it on their way to the butcher’s. Inside, cheaply executed reproductions abounded—clay heads of pharaohs, models of the pyramids and the Sphinx. When Gustave inquired about a genuine mummy, the merchant smiled and bowed effusively, promising an answer by the time the monsieur returned from Koseir.

Miss Nightingale wore the kaffiyeh for the rest of the excursion. But she remained silent, clasping fast to his arm each time he offered it.

• • •

The next morning, she appeared wearing a green eyeshade suspended from her bonnet. She had brought it out to Egypt at the urging of Herr Professor Baron Bunsen, about whom, by 7 A.M., he did not wish to hear one more word. This contraption lent her the remote but insidious expression of a card sharp. She seemed nervous. And apparently, when she was nervous, she chattered. With relish, she had already recited a compendium of facts about each of the wells en route, the climate, and the living conditions of the Ababdeh (mud hovels too squat to stand up in; poor diet).

“And scattered among this fastness of sand,” she declared as the crewmen were loading up the camels, “are remains of ancient cities and Roman garrisons.”

Her chatter about the mill had been odd, but now, as the caravan prepared to depart, she turned into an automaton—not a charming mechanical bird that chirped in a gilded cage at the turn of a key, or a little clown who spun about on tiptoes. There was nothing charming about the change that had come over her.

“I didn’t know the empire extended this far east,” Gustave replied. He wanted only to mount his camel and gallop away. But he saw that she fervently wished to be taken seriously, to be treated as his equal, to be of help in any capacity. To this end, she had brought her levinge with the promise of demonstrating it. She also seemed to have decided to pour into him every drop she knew about the eastern desert. He already felt like a big cranky baby in need of burping. Nothing he had said thus far and no studied silence on his part had stanched her endless flood of data.

“Oh, indeed. They guarded the wealth that passed from India across the Red Sea and thence to Rome. I read it in the baron’s book.”

Oh, God. He’d explode if she continued on this path.

So much for his tentative hope that they shared a deep connection beneath the obvious divisions of nationality and sex, that she might prove to be a confidante, like Bouilhet, or like Louise, but without the sexual entanglement. No, she was not his twin, but his opposite. He would take his greatest pleasure in the memory of what he saw; she in anticipating it. He wished to be surprised; she wanted to know in detail what to expect before it arrived. The idea of crossing the desert alongside a talking textbook filled him with dread.

He kept wishing for Max, always helpful in deflecting the garrulous and setting the nervous at ease, to appear on the scene, but he was busy with Hadji Ismael, apparently rebundling the camera equipment to pass through the eye of a needle. Nor could Gustave hold Miss Nightingale’s hand in that moment without embarrassing her, though touch might have done the trick as the virginal Rossignol had never recoiled from his contact.

“Peppercorns, silks and cinnamon, emeralds and rubies,” she continued.

Dacca cloth, dates from Derr, a red vest, maybe a mummy, Miss Nightingale’s note to God, he countered mentally. She was clearly in an agitated state, incapable of actual conversation. Still, he had to shut her up. “I don’t care about any of that,” he said. “I shall be happy simply to swim in the Red Sea.” He turned away.

What he had said wasn’t strictly true. The journey through the desert did interest him—not what had been built or abandoned, but the desert’s vast néant—the nothingness of it.

She fell silent, as if upbraided. They departed a few minutes later, the awkwardness between them now thick in the air.

Gustave maintained a veneer of courtesy and solicitude, but kept his distance from her the rest of the day without drawing attention to the fact. He sensed that her capricious behavior was not under her control and that her intentions were likely innocent enough—merely to be of use to him, somehow to repay him for the favor of bringing her along. Still, he had to avoid her: should she inflict another didactic eruption on him, he might behave rudely indeed. Better to politely disengage. For these reasons he spent the brief free moments after supper the first evening continuing a missive to Bouilhet he’d begun several days before.

15 April 1850

My dear right testicle,

The caravan has begun!

Our party consists of ten camels and ten people—we four “Franks,” Joseph, and five Arab camel drivers, silent characters in dirty white woolen robes who speak no French and communicate through Joseph, who hired them yesterday from a larger, grimier throng of applicants at Père Issa’s house. For his part, the dragoman seems pleased to be in a position of greater authority.

Tough-skinned and tough-minded, the camel drivers are a different breed from the Nile crew—gaunter and more leathery, with hands and faces like the crackled fell of roast lamb. They wear colorful kaffiyehs and turbans and sleep in their clothes. They conduct themselves with more reserve and dignity than the river crew, as if the desert had leached every trace of nonchalance and frivolity from them. Too little water, too much heat and wind, Joseph explained, have taught them to expend as little energy as possible.

We started from a wadi east of Kenneh, watering the camels immediately before departing. They will not drink again for days. As Joseph translated, the headman, a grizzled, bearded Mohammed, shouted out two cautions:

1. We must never, ever, wander out of sight. Our lives depend on complying with this rule. If a man falls into the Nile, he is heard and seen before it swallows him. In the desert, he vanishes silently, before he ever realizes he is lost behind a drift like every other drift.

2. Water must be consumed sparingly.

No maps of the routes through the eastern desert exist save those in the minds of the Bedouin and the camel drivers. Also, there are no proper roads, only depressions in sand on the rocky outcrops where hoofprints of camels, horses, or flocks occasionally survive the onslaught of the wind long enough to mark the way.

Miss Nightingale’s servant, Trout, speaks only when addressed. Both women ride sidesaddle, no easy feat on a humped quadruped. I cringe to think of the discomfort on their joints and the danger of being so high from the ground without firm purchase. Perched in the colorful weavings and braided leather of double-pommeled saddles, they could be dolls precariously posed on a high shelf.

We stopped for lunch at the village of Lakeita and bought two watermelons. Joseph served boiled eggs, which we ate with apricot paste and bread. The Nile water we collected at the wadi was pure and sweet, better than any wine, Max said. In the quiet of early afternoon, we passed through a steep gorge as hot as a furnace. I was determined to observe every detail—the subtle shadings of yellow, dun, and brown, the mountains serried like blue stacks of books in the distance—but what filled the center of my vision for the next four hours were Miss Nightingale and her maid jiggling above the skinny asses of their camels.

In late afternoon, we passed our first caravan in a narrow defile. Père Issa said we’d encounter pilgrims, Koseir being the port from which they sail to Jedda, then travel overland to Mecca for the hajj. Our first fellow traveler was a man who carried his two wives in baskets suspended from either side of his camel. The wind gusted, ruffling sand around the camel’s legs so that it seemed to fly forward through clouds. Every one of these beasts is bedecked with colorful tack—halters, bridles, saddles, and cinches woven with beads, tassels, and coins. Perhaps this decoration identifies them to their owners. Surely it is a mark of value and pride.

Whatever intelligence camels possess is not reflected in their faces. Their expression is of a man encountering a rank odor. Their tongues are long, thick paddles spotted with green from their forage. If provoked, they can spit great distances.

And now, mon ami, I find my head drawn to the packed sand under the kilim that is my mattress.

The schedule each day was rigid: rise between three and four, travel until noon, lunch, rest during the hottest part of the day, resume riding until sundown, then sup before sleeping. No time for diversions or side trips.

Although Gustave did not intend to avoid Miss Nightingale further, the next day passed without substantial conversation other than a quick greeting at lunch, after which everyone passed out in the heat. Other than when they were dining or resting, the journey was as solitary for the travelers as if they were in separate railroad cars. He urged his camel forward to join hers, but the beast refused. In fact, the camels rarely tolerated walking abreast, preferring to plod single file. And like prisoners called to the guillotine, not one was in a hurry.

As the light paled to dull pewter in late afternoon, the camels became vigilant. Lifting their heads, they sniffed the air suspiciously. A distant fire? Abruptly, one of them shat and then they all stopped to shit, as if a group stink would protect them. After this cooperation, they turned wary and distrustful of each other. They have transformed themselves into the quintessential French family, he thought, disappointed he could not share the joke with anyone. The camels jittered forward, then balked.

The caravan crew were prepared for this skittishness: they began to serenade the beasts, ending with shrill, falsetto ululations that resembled a battle cry. Why among the seventy trunks of supplies had he not brought earplugs?

“Camels like musica!” Joseph shouted over the din.

The camels responded by twitching their tails and flicking their ears, quickening the pace to a rolling trot that set the riders bouncing hard in their saddles. Gustave tried to read their mood from their bodies as with the cats at home, but dromedaries proved inscrutable. Long-lashed, half-closed eyes gave them the woozy mien of opium smokers.

Just as the caravan resumed walking in formation again, Trout shrieked. Joseph’s mount had bolted and galloped within a hair’s breadth of hers. Gustave watched his red jacket fly off to the side and heard his terrified cries. So fleet was Joseph’s camel that it appeared to skim the ground, and after fifty meters, blended into the landscape and vanished, exactly as the headman, Mohammed, had foretold, leaving Joseph’s ghostly voice trailing behind. In another moment, that, too, disappeared, as if he had never been among them, as if he had vaporized.

Miss Nightingale clamped her hand to her mouth in horror. Gustave and she stared at each other, hardly blinking. While two camel drivers chased after Joseph, the others encircled the Franks. Mohammed inserted ropes through the animals’ nostrils and urged the riders to hold them taut.

“Dear God,” implored Miss Nightingale. “Poor Joseph. What shall we do?”

Trout was crying, her face beet-red, her mount furious, stomping in place and bellowing.

“We shall wait for him,” said Gustave.

“Pray God the men will find him. They must know the area,” she replied.

“But it will soon be dark,” Max pointed out, calmly lighting his pipe.

Gustave felt like striking him or, at the very least, elbowing him hard in the ribs, but he was stuck atop his camel and couldn’t dismount without risking a broken leg. Tomorrow he’d learn to command his camel to knee. “Then we shall sleep here and look for him in the morning.” He glared at Max to convey that he should say nothing else to alarm the women.

Instantly, Max changed his tune. “I suppose the camel knows where the wells are and will eventually take Joseph to one.” Clearly he made this up to placate Gustave. How did the bugger remain so equable? Gustave worried that all the excitement would trigger a seizure. And how would they communicate with Mohammed and his crew?

Miss Nightingale spoke repeatedly to Trout, who did not respond or look relieved.

The dromedaries lowed and grunted as if calling after their comrade. Had God made a more unwieldy animal? Or a more uncomfortable mount? Now that Gustave had stopped moving, he realized his ass was sore and his nuts felt busted.

At last, the guides helped them dismount and tied the camels to stakes in the sand. Lying together, they looked like a flock of overgrown ostriches.

They all walked toward the campfire already sending up smoke.

“I have read that camels always return to their caravans,” Gustave told Miss Nightingale, wishing to calm her, “that a runaway camel is no real cause for alarm.”

“Oh, that is good to know. Very good.” She sighed and delicately wiped her mouth on a handkerchief withdrawn from her sleeve. Max tried to catch his eye, but Gustave refused him. It was hard enough to lie without Max staring at him.

They sat in a circle and in utter silence watched the headman cook the first of the chickens in a dome-bottomed pan over open flames. Gustave had never smelled anything more delicious. The key to exquisite food, he decided, was not the chef’s recipe but the diner’s hunger.

They ate without talking, as if it would be disloyal to Joseph to enjoy the meal too much. The crew pitched the tents. Their steadiness, whatever its source, and Joseph’s waiting tent felt like reassurances that he was safe.

• • •

After dinner, Max unloaded his camera to photograph the moon, which had hung in the sky full and bright since the afternoon. He knew better than to ask Gustave to participate. As for Miss Nightingale, she waved him off politely and reminded him that Trout was his model. Gustave couldn’t wait to see the result: the desert at night with a lone and lost-looking English maid. Max instructed her not to stiffen up or pose, that it would be a candid shot. Gustave found the term amusing, since the camera was always candid; it was incapable of lying.

Outside her tent, Miss Nightingale sat wrapped in shawls and blankets. The desert air was chilly.

“Are you not using your levinge tonight?” he asked.

“I was going to, but it seems there are no insects out here. And to be truthful, I am too tired to fiddle with it.”

“Yes, always be truthful with me,” he told her, “and I shall be with you. Perhaps you can use it when we reach Koseir. I’m certain there will be plenty of bugs on the coast.” The sand was still warm beneath the surface, and he scooped it over his legs by the handful.

She laughed. “I never thought I’d look forward to biting flies. But I do want you to see the contraption, for the rest of your trip. In Constantinople I expect the insects will be ferocious—flies, ticks, mosquitoes, sand gnats probably—”

“Would you like some sand?” He interrupted her to forestall a fact-filled disquisition on bugs. “It’s as good as a bed warmer.”

“Oh. Yes, I shall try a little.” She extended her hand, palm up, and he filled it. The first stars were out, the sky a regal purple with pink and orange banners.

“Mm,” she hummed. “That is pleasant.”

“How is our fish doing?”

“Travel is completely wasted on Trout.” She sighed and studied the ground as if consigning her thoughts there, possibly envisioning her maid there, too.

“I hope I was not rude yesterday,” he said. What was it about men and women who didn’t know each other well? he wondered. Though romance was not his object, there was awkwardness simply because he was a man and she was a woman. Each time they met, they had to reestablish their footing, treading carefully, putting on their best faces. The brothel was easier, Caroline was easier, his dear mother, even, was easier. The p-ssyfooting about reminded him of taking exams at school. So exhausting, so much precision required!

“Rude?”

“When I cut you off talking about the baron’s book.”

“Oh, yes.”

An expression settled on her face that he had come to recognize. Her eyes seemed to lighten and her face to slacken, as if an inner vision were replacing whatever artifice or intention had held it taut. She inclined her head quizzically, and a smile gradually formed. When her lips parted and the teeth showed, she would have formulated a thought and was likely to say anything.

“You only startled me. You see, sometimes I talk too much.” She said this without any self-consciousness, trepidation, or shame, the way another woman might say, “I like apples.”

He was relieved; he had passed the exam and now they were back in the cave on Philae. “I thought you were ill at ease.”

“I don’t know if I was. It just happens. And once I start, I can’t abide silence, nor can I be derailed, except by a shock. I understood from your reply that I must stop.” She spilled the last few grains of warm sand from her hand. “Do you think it strange?”

“No.” He dribbled more warm sand on her hand and wrist. He had the urge to bury her in it as if they were children playing on the beach on a hot August day, baking together in the sun. “Not strange. It is . . . feminine. A feminine trait.”

“Oh?”

He explained that when he didn’t understand a woman he assumed it was because her experience was different from his. She listened dutifully. Only a few glimmers of twilight remained at the horizon. On the plain beyond the camp, he could see the outlines of Trout and Max, Trout with her hand on her straw hat.

In the light of the oil lamp, Miss Nightingale’s face glowed. A sudden tenderness came over him. She was lovely and also pitiful. He knew she must be rich and yet she suffered—clearly she suffered—because she had nothing to do in the world. He felt their connection come alive again like a foot gone numb prickling awake.

“That is sweet,” she pronounced. “But in my experience, women are not so different from men as they are made out to be. Still, they are expected to act differently, to want different things, and most important, not to want too much.”

“Mon ami,” he whispered. “I understand.” At that moment, he realized what he and the intense, birdlike Englishwoman had in common: ambition; hers to accomplish something in the world, his to accomplish something in spite of that world. “I know you wish to do good—”

“I do. Desperately.”

“But the world is a much nastier place than you imagine.” Her purpose was so virtuous, her motives so pure and unreasonable. It would be easy to worry about her, to wish to rescue her, though obviously she did not wish to be rescued by him or anyone.

“I am sure you are right. You have seen more of the world than I.”

Their conversation always followed this pattern—dark silences punctuated by profoundly bright and intimate jabs, like shining knives laying them painlessly open to each other.

A small commotion was under way beyond the encampment. Trout and Max were waving and shouting. He stood to get a better view.

“I hear something,” Rossignol said.

The sound of an animal running—pounding at top speed—catapulted through the empty air. And then, just as rapidly as he had vanished, Joseph materialized, galloping hard on his camel and weeping with joy.

16 April 1850

Two gory complications today: the salted lamb carcass was reeking by noon and we discarded it. The moment it hit the sand, vultures descended upon it, rending it in bloody chunks. The feeding was so brutal Miss Nightingale averted her gaze. Later in the afternoon, one of the pack camels broke a leg. Mohammed slit its throat and gave it to an Abadi tribesman.

We have now ridden through a khamsin, which appeared at the horizon as a plume of dark brown with rusty margins that swept back and forth like a broom. The name derives from the Arabic for “fifty,” because the storm sometimes lasts as many days, long enough to drive man and beast insane. Khamsin sand is a horizontal as well as a vertical force. It pours like salt, ascends in billows, and slashes sideways like rain, wrapping the traveler in its stinging net. In the eyes, it cuts like splinters of glass. It can move or make mountains. One camel driver told Joseph that he saw an entire caravan buried in less than an hour.

Max is sick. He ate something at the Ababdeh village and has been puking and shitting ever since. He has a fever and speaks to no one. The rest of us are hale and hearty.

Despite bad food and water, my mind has been a beehive, producing ideas to fill the emptiness of the desert. Three schemes for a book are buzzing in my head, all stories of insatiable love, whether earthly or mystical, and all, no doubt, the unconscious plotting of that stubborn romantic who lives, much beleaguered, in my heart (and who had such a pitiful second visit to Kuchuk Hanem).

The first, “A Night with Don Juan,” worries me—wouldn’t it still entail writing about whores? And if he f*cks everyone, where is the suspense, where the makings of a plot? The second, still lacking a title, is the mythological legend of the Egyptian woman, Anubis, who wished to screw a god. Same problems as the first idea. Finally, I am considering writing about a rural Flemish girl, a young mystic who dies a virgin. (I don’t know what she dies of, but she will have to expire if she won’t f*ck!) No whore here, but a heroine who succumbs to spiritual masturbation after practicing the manual kind. Is there anyone I would not offend no matter how delicately I approach her obsessions?

While I agonize over my writing, my mother hatches plans for me. In her last letter, she again mentioned her wish that I find a little job. To remain respectable, she thinks I must do something visible that other people can verify. Appearances impress her inordinately. I wrote back immediately, pointing out that the pittance I could earn would be inconsequential and that it is a delusion to believe that one can work a day job and still write in the evening. Finally, I sealed my fate, I hope, by hinting that a job would keep me from spending time with her. When I get home, I shall explain the great undertaking I am about to begin—as soon as I know what it is myself.

Gustave had little inclination to converse after spending eleven hours a day on a camel. First, fatigue settled in like lead weights. The landscape was exhausting—unremittingly splendid or unceasingly boring. Either way it deadened the mind.

Max, normally gregarious and loquacious, was in a stupor from drinking rakı. Since water was in short supply, he sipped it straight, hoping to settle his guts or numb them into submission. Gustave had lost track of the number of times Max dismounted to shit or puke. The women stared off in the other direction for modesty’s sake. Their camels couldn’t abide each other and began to spit if they came too close.

After three days in the desert, Gustave hungered for a color other than brown. Especially green. There was nothing green. The desert was a gigantic theater hung with numberless scrims in shades of tan, ecru, ivory, beige, and mauve. When the wind blew, he passed through them as if through scratchy tulle. Though he had never enjoyed the taste of plain water, he’d never again take it for granted, nor for that matter small beer, the cheapest blended cabernet, coffee, or tea. Nor the transforming power of sugar, though not even sugar had made the water at Hagee Soolayman palatable that day. Execrable taste and odor! Rotten eggs with a smear of fresh dog shit.

They ate the last two chickens for dinner and afterward Max and Trout went to bed. Everyone was exhausted, having ridden an extra two hours by moonlight before the meal.

Gustave and Miss Nightingale stretched out on blankets in the open air. Her logorrhea seemed to have subsided completely. They lounged in a comfortable, even velvety silence together. How pleasant it was simply to enjoy each other’s presence.

Gustave stared up at the sky. The darkness seemed to absorb him the way air drank in moisture. “The desert at night is so mysterious,” he said. “It’s like walking across a room in which the ceiling disappears. Suddenly, instead of plaster rosettes overhead there are stars.”

“Mm,” she agreed, leaning forward slightly.

“Then a little farther, the walls dissolve. Now you do not know what obstacles lie in your path. You might be treading the edge of the earth, about to walk into the ocean, or off a cliff. Every molecule has lost its reflective shine, its very identity, to the darkness.”

“I do like your rhapsodies,” she said.

Could she see his face in the darkness? He could barely discern hers. He was avid to continue. “Daylight is different here, too, because you see everything without interruption and for a great distance; on the other hand, there is only nothingness to see. Night: a sponge that sucks you up inside it. Daytime: a bright nothingness that spits you out.”

Rossignol continued the thread. “This explains perfectly what I have been feeling—claustrophobia at night, and in the daylight, a sort of paralyzing humility.”

“Yes.”

“Mm.”

They both lay back, content to return to the rich silence.

The third night, my dear friend:

If Plato buried his proverbial table in the eastern desert, it would quickly be eaten away by the sun and scouring gusts, proving what he said about reality—that ultimately, it consists not of things but of abstractions—ideas about things, i.e., the idea of a table buried in sand. My dear Bouilhet: reality is mental! Any other explanation is wishful thinking. Reality is therefore unreliable, something perceived through thought and dedication, or, if you are a writer, by judicious decanting into words. Today as I scanned the huge surround in vain for a trace of greenery, it struck me that if reality is not substance—the thing described—then it must be the way it is described—which means style! Style is everything. When I realized this, a spasm passed through me ten times stronger than any orgasm. I must focus on my style; everything else is negotiable. (Though I still need an ostensible subject other than whores and saints.) This insight was the gift and the lesson of the desert’s style, which consists not of sand or mountains, but the light, which creates mirages and other optical fascinations. If I were Max, I’d photograph the emptiness of the desert instead of all the man-made attempts to subdue or outlast it, for to ride in the desert is to experience firsthand the shifting and shifty nature of what we call reality or truth.

These realizations so thrilled me, that as my camel dipped down for me to alight, I lost my footing and tumbled to the ground. (A camel is like a boat: when one dismounts, the earth feels strange, the legs even stranger.) Good old Max rushed over, worried I was in the throes of an attack.

These past three days, thrown together in close quarters, I have learned that despite my dismissal of most people in theory, once I’ve spent time with someone, my sympathy seeps out against my will like mother’s milk at her infant’s cries. My curiosity also makes it difficult to remain aloof. In short, I have taken an interest in Trout. Her stoicism moves me. Also, the unpredictability of her questions and answers, some of which are naive and some worldly. She and I have conversed in short bursts with Miss Nightingale or Max translating. Miss Nightingale seems grateful for the attention to her maid, as it lightens her burden of being the woman’s only human connection.

Like most working people, Trout knows nothing of politics and revolution and yet I don’t think I am mistaken when I say that revolutions are always undertaken in the name of people like Trout. Her family lives in straitened circumstances, working on farms or, worse, as colliers.

Tomorrow we reach Koseir. Writing the name raises my pulse. This is the farthest east we shall travel, at least in Egypt.

I hope the gods continue to send poems and plays your way. Read some Shakespeare aloud for me. And now, my oil lamp sputters, my eyes close. Adieu, dear friend.

Je t’embrasse.

G. Bourgeoisophobus