The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

21

OLD KOSEIR

Once the ancient port of Aennum, Old Koseir lay eight kilometers north of Koseir. Max planned to photograph the ruins. On the way, he talked as if buried monuments lay readily protruding from the sand, waiting for him to trip over them.

“We have arrived!” he announced after nearly two hours on the dusty road.

“How can you tell?” Gustave joked, for there were no inhabitants, and other than random rubble, only derelict Arab houses and huts. The port was not evident.

True to his character, Max was not discouraged. Instead of photographing, he decided to excavate the site. Gustave was happy not to make squeezes. The day would be a simple outing.

He climbed down from his horse. Clouds had scudded in on a breeze, turning the sky to a gray pot lid. He had brought Horace’s Odes, a bilingual edition to polish his Latin. While Max scouted the area, he piled sand beneath his blanket for a pillow and, with a goatskin of wine by his side, reclined.

Forlorn, windswept, bleak: Old Koseir suited his mood. The excitement and fatigue of crossing the eastern Sahara combined with his time on the beach with Miss Nightingale had left him altogether perplexed.

On the first night of the caravan, he had felt disloyal retreating to his tent to write Bouilhet. But beneath her logorrhea, that erudite confection, there had been a voice that cried out—indeed, that clawed at him—saying, listen, look at me, dote on me, be with me! Mercifully, she had returned to normal. Yesterday afternoon at the beach, the soulful Rossignol he knew and liked had been very much in evidence, if charmingly uninformed on sexual matters. Still, he was wary of her unpredictability. The best and worst thing about her, he decided, was that she was not altogether civilized.

Alas, he seemed destined to be disappointed by other people. Usually it was not his fault. Sometimes it was, though the mechanism of his role was unclear. Either way, he suffered, for those he loved most had often betrayed him, beginning with Alfred.

“What is this?” he overheard Max ask Joseph. He sat up to see Max leaning on a shovel with a rock in his hand—white granite speckled with black. “Is this anything?”

“Have you found something?” he called out.

Max waved the question away with a hand. “It is too soon to say.” He conferred with Joseph. “We think anything of value will be buried deep.”

“I wish I could help.” Digging was exactly the sort of exertion that might trigger a spell.

“No, don’t take any chances,” said Max. “Rest and enjoy yourself.”

Gustave watched Max jerk the shovel free, then lean hard into it, his foot on the shoulder of the blade. Max was sparrow-thin, like Alfred, and yet robust in comparison. How much he missed his dear lost friend! Sallow, with flabby muscles, Alfred had had the perfect physique for a man who suffered from what he called the malaise of the century—ennui. Gustave had happily adopted Alfred’s philosophy, which amounted, in a word, to debauchery. Drink, smoke, and whore yourself into oblivion.

The warning signs of the defection had eluded him. When Alfred finished law school and opened a practice in Rouen, what had he thought? Nothing. He must have assumed that Alfred was stalling until he undertook his real work, which was . . . what? Suave disdain? His trademark contempt for the bourgeoisie? Boredom raised to an art form? He’d always thought that Alfred had abandoned his principles, marrying because he needed someone to nurse him through tuberculosis and syphilis. But perhaps he had changed his view of matrimony, discovering some hidden advantage that Gustave had yet to glimpse. They had never discussed it.

“Voilà!” Max cried. Gustave looked up to see Joseph hoisting a timber from the sand. “Come see what you think.”

He laid his book on the blanket and walked over. “A rotten plank,” he declared.

“Exactly my point,” said Max, nonplussed. “It’s definitely not a tree.” He wiped his sweaty brow on the sleeve of his robe. “A human hand made this, but whose, and when?” He took out his pocket magnifier.

Journalist, raconteur, photographer, and now archaeologist! Was there anything Max would not take it upon himself to master?

Joseph ran his hand along the rough surface. “It can be a boat, peut-être?”

“From the floor of a hut?” Gustave offered.

Max sat down in the sand and studied it with the glass.

“I shall leave you to it,” said Gustave.

“Worm holes!” cried Max. “Part of the anchorage, perhaps.” He stood and retrieved his shovel, paced off a few meters, and began to dig anew. Joseph followed.

Gustave returned to his blanket and lay with the sun at his back. He paged through his book and closed it. Today he was too introspective for witty aphorisms.

In a delicious irony, Alfred had suggested that he might find a lover at Pradier’s studio. And he had duly met and fallen in love with Louise. Another disaster in the inventory of his broken heart. But how he had loved burying his face between her perfumed breasts, the eminently graspable indentation of her waist, the silky rise of her hips. Her taste for foul language matched his own scatological genius. But for all her looseness, Louise turned out to be deeply conventional, hoping to trap him in a settled, long-term affair different in title only from a marriage. Why had he been so blind to her—

Max kicked sand onto his leg, standing above him. “I am exhausted, mon ami. What do you say we picnic on the beach?”

Gustave brushed off the sand. “I am ready when you are.”

They gathered up their things and headed east, about a kilometer across rocky terrain to the shore. It, too, was deserted.

The clouds had dissipated, the water and sky both bright blue, one glittering, the other still as paint. The three men dismounted. Gustave walked closer to the sea, eyeing the water like a duck as he spread his blanket on the packed sand. He flopped onto it and removed his boots, then pulled off his trousers and shirt.

“You yourself reported that the water was cold only yesterday,” Max said, watching him disrobe.

“It’s fine.” Gustave stuck a foot in the surf. “I’m going in!” With that, he flung his underwear to the sand and charged into the water, diving and surfacing like a porpoise. He floated on his back, bobbing on the gentle waves. When he glanced shoreward, Max was still observing him. “Take the plunge!” he shouted, using his hands as a megaphone. “It will do you good!”

“All right.” Max slowly undressed, folding his clothes into a neat pile. He waded in up to his knees, plashing water on his chest and shivering. “I was right. It’s frigid.”

“It’s warmer over here,” Gustave lied. “There’s a current. Swim out.” He lay back and felt the waves lift and pulse through him. He heard Max approach, the sound dulled by water in his ears.

“I’m freezing. Where is this current?”

“The Red Sea,” Gustave opined, spewing a little fountain from the side of his mouth, “feels like floating on a thousand liquid breasts.”

“Ice water, not breasts.” Max splashed him violently.

Gustave retaliated, dashing water into his face with an elbow. “You are just jealous, mon ami.” He stopped splashing. “Of my new lover”—he caught Max’s eye where, to his horror, he saw the truth register for an instant—“my new lover, the Red Sea.”

“She is not yours, Short Pants. Or anyone’s, despite your pretty description.” Max turned to swim to shore. “She is too cold,” he called back over his shoulder, already winded.

• • •

After lunch, they returned to Old Koseir. On his blanket, Gustave could smell the sunshine drying his hair, warming him through his clothing. As he lay unthinking, a woman’s face appeared on the orange screen of his eyelids, like one of Max’s photographs developing on the paper negative. It was Harriet Collier! Had she always intended to seduce him? How close he had come, again without warning or insight. He closed his eyes and breathed evenly until he drifted off.

Sometime later, he woke to Max’s excited shouts. “A treasure! I have found a genuine treasure!”

“Bring it here, won’t you?” Gustave called drowsily from his makeshift bed.

Max nipped over and knelt down. He was beside himself with exuberance. “Look at that!” He passed the object to Gustave. “Gold! I can hardly believe it.”

Gustave sat up and held the coin with two fingers. Recto, verso, it seemed to be authentically Roman, with an imperial head in the center and an illegible Latin motto encircling it. It was heavy, still gleaming after centuries underground, probably pure gold. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “Where was it?”

“Over there.” Max pointed to a hole close by. “It wasn’t even very deep. All of a sudden it was simply . . . there. I heard the shovel strike it.”

Max’s enthusiasm was contagious. “Allahu akbar!” Gustave cried. “Perhaps there are more.”

“There must be.” Max hadn’t looked this happy since the day he photographed the Sphinx. “I shall keep digging. There might be a whole trove!” Max clapped his shoulder and stood up. “I was worried we’d have to go farther north. Joseph told me there is another ancient port in better shape thirty kilometers away. But now we can camp here and dig again tomorrow.”

“We’re not going back for the night?” Gustave looked at the sky. It was already getting late to start back. To stay away for an evening would not be rude, but the next day, too? What would Miss Nightingale do with herself? The idea discomfited him. Such a long absence would be an affront to her. He felt a pang of guilt. Why hadn’t he considered this before he left Koseir?

“I don’t want to lose a minute,” Max replied. “And if I explain what we’re doing, we’ll have a Bedouin gold rush on our hands.” He shined the coin on the cloth of his robe. “No, we can camp here and dig all day tomorrow, possibly the next.”

Max was right: it would be a waste of time to go back and forth. But it was simply bad manners, Gustave convinced him, to abandon their companions for more than one night, and so Max agreed to return to Koseir on the morrow, even if it meant traveling in the dark.

“I am swearing Joseph to secrecy with baksheesh. At least for now. If he talks after we leave, so be it.” Max turned to go. “You, too,” he told Gustave, putting his fingers to his lips.

• • •

The rest of that day and the next, Max and Joseph dug, riddling the sand with postholes and trenches, but they found only pottery shards, half an amphora, and another timber.

Gustave passed his time at the beach, more resigned to the delay after he discovered a shallow reef not far from shore. He spent hours among its colorful inhabitants—pink and white madrepores, giant red sea urchins, fleshily flowered anemones, and schools of fish like yellow butterflies. When he was not swimming, he lazed on the sand and recorded the exotic new creatures in his journal. Like the strains of a catchy melody, other thoughts drifted into and out of his ken. Thoughts about women. And love. Men and women. Friendship. Men and men. Women and women. The whole bewildering array of potential configurations and motivations occupied him. And what of Louise, whose beauty, even in recollection, still made him weak in the knees? Had she changed? Or had she hidden her true nature for as long as she could, then begrudgingly revealed it to him? And Miss Nightingale: did she want only friendship from him? And what did he want from her?

The sun beat fiercely down. Only a man truly ignorant of women would be so continually baffled and surprised by them. Until now, he had never regarded them as anything but sparring partners in the game of sex, never thought of them the way he thought of men—as people. It seemed only natural that men ran the world and women gleaned their living along the edges. But Miss Nightingale did not fit any familiar category of woman. It was exciting to be with her, but the moment they parted, he felt confused.

At the end of two days among the jewel-toned anemones, brilliantly striped and dotted fish, and waving corals, he felt reinvigorated. In the water, at least, he had seen every beautiful object clearly.