The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

22

ABSENCES

The Frenchmen didn’t return that night. The next morning, Flo shopped with Trout and Hakim, who knew enough French to help with the prices. It was market day, the dusty street transformed into a bazaar with shaded stalls and booths offering food, spices, clothing, crafts, and livestock. Flo bought two silver bracelets from Darfur. Trout inspected cheeses, sniffing until she found a lump of salty sheep feta for two paras. At Père Elias’s instruction, Hakim bought olives and a lamb to be butchered and delivered later.

That afternoon they used the bathtub again, each spending a good hour in the warm, salty brew, comfortable in the silence.

Soaking in the tub gave Flo time to think, which, she knew, was not always a good thing for her. Thinking led to feeling, and feeling, sometimes, to panic or gloom. But no, the water was therapeutic. She was determined not to read too much into Gustave’s continued absence, nor worry much either. Though the consul was not in the least concerned for the men’s safety, she was a bit alarmed. Anything could befall three Europeans traveling incognito. They were farther from civilization than anywhere else on their trip, and the road might not be safe.

She dipped a cloth into the tepid water and lay it upon her brow. No. She was not worried so much as disappointed. Why had he left her alone in Koseir? He had been so busy on the caravan, with barely time to chat, avoiding her, it seemed clear now, one way or another. Had her behavior on the beach—her ignorance of sex—annoyed or discouraged him? She had the distinct feeling he was punishing her.

Toward evening, Flo pulled the plug and watched the water coil down the drain and seep through the shells on its return to the sea. A ring remained that Trout tried to scrub using the bar of soap, but without rinse water, couldn’t remove.

“Leave it for Hakim,” Flo said.

“The consul will think we’re dirty.”

“No. He’ll think we were dirty. And now we’re clean.”

• • •

A messenger bearing a bottle of rakı for Père Elias arrived before supper. He reported the Frenchmen would return by midnight and had arranged with the camel drivers to depart for Kenneh the following dawn. The women should pack tonight.

• • •

At the dinner table, Flo was obliged to be social, but she could not force her attention to it. Had it been a shuttlecock that must be gently batted back and forth, the conversation would have languished on the floor. Trout, lacking French, had no obligation—as usual—to keep it aloft. Her lack of charm sawed at Flo’s patience.

Père Elias looked puzzled and sad, as if worried he were guilty of some faux pas. She wasn’t in the mood to reassure him. Her distress must have been apparent, for halfway through dinner, Trout asked in a whisper if she was quite sure she was feeling all right. She was. She offered the excuse of being tired, but she was a poor liar, and the blameless consul and maid both seemed miffed that she was not more forthcoming.

She ate little (the lamb still gamboling in her mind), asked Trout to pack up her belongings for her, and went outside alone on the terrace.

Perhaps he’d never return. The rakı might have been a parting gift for Père Elias. Maybe his itinerary had changed. How would she get back to Kenneh? Surely he hadn’t abandoned them. No, he wouldn’t stoop so low. It wasn’t that. She had merely misjudged him. He didn’t exist as she imagined him—as her spiritual twin—but neither did that make him a villain. It was reassuring to think so clearly, to remain calm.

Perhaps Fanny was right that she placed too much significance on small things and took the world too literally. The event on the beach (titled like a song in her mind) might be a triviality to him. She’d never followed up with the hand mirror, coward that she was. She needed to know he was in the next room to go through with it.

The more she thought, the darker her mood, everything conjoining at last into the familiar doom and hopelessness. As when Kaiserswerth was canceled. As when the deaf school refused her. As when she fell to pieces walking with Efreet-Youssef on the beach. As when, as when, as . . . usual.

If he did not reappear soon, she wouldn’t be able to face him at all. Her enthusiasm would burn through every pore until she shone like a lighthouse warning him off. She might swoon, or worse, fall upon him like a stray dog upon a scrap of food. Upon his arms, whose curves and angles she knew by heart, almost by touch. No, he had never existed except as an ordinary man, a person of no particular consequence she’d briefly encountered. Nothing like herself. A person who couldn’t possibly understand her.

• • •

Sometime in the middle of the night, a commotion erupted downstairs. She heard his voice, angrier—or merely drunker?—than usual. Fouler, too. Something about constipation and Max’s shitty camera and turds. Then an answer in kind using words overheard only in the roughest quarters. You are an a*shole. No, you are. Then you are a bigger a*shole. A pause. Mon ami, you make my argument for me. I am a bigger a*shole. My a*shole is so big I can eat and shit you out. Therefore, you are the turd. Then furniture scraping the floor and muffled thuds followed by a spell of hilarity. She fell back to sleep, content, at least, in their laughter.

• • •

At dawn they loaded their luggage and said their good-byes. Père Elias’s eyes filled with tears as he kissed her on both cheeks. Gustave, too, teared up as he kissed the consul and gave Hakim a rugged embrace. She liked to see such generosity of sentiment in him. WEN never cried, nor did the Poetic Parcel.

Gustave and Max looked awful. She could almost see their heads thrumming with a hangover. They barely spoke and took only two thimbles of coffee for breakfast.

After their intimate talk on the beach, she had hoped that Gustave would make more time for her. But when he left her in Koseir, that prospect seemed to vanish. Besides, even if he didn’t notice them, how would she get over her hurt feelings? If they did spend time together, it would be to chat in the evenings, with Max present. Or perhaps Gustave had formulated one of his plans. For privacy, they could meander around the camp, though it would be dark. Lions and jackals, venomous reptiles. Still, it might be possible.

Minutes from Koseir, the weather turned turbulent, dark skies with ominous winds. Max sighted a khamsin in the shape of a funnel sucking up sand behind them. They hurried on, not stopping to inspect the ancient glyphs on the domed formations of pink rock. In late afternoon, the camel carrying the goatskins stepped into sand riddled with rat tunnels and fell on its side, spilling all the water. Three hours later, they reached the first well, Beer El Ingleez, only to find it had been covered by a rockslide in the few days since they were there.

Sweat dried on her skin in salty patches that pasted over with sand. She was filthy and itched like a flea-bitten dog.

That evening jackals stole the dinner from the fire pit when the cook left to retrieve spices from his saddlebag. They made do with a meal of half-cooked beans and watermelons for moisture, and went to bed hungry. In empathy with the Ababdeh children, Flo used the occasion to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep hungry night after night. This experiment, however, was a failure. She ended up hungrier than before, thought of nothing but food, and felt more selfish than ever. Tomorrow. Tomorrow Gustave and Max would go shooting and they’d be freshly supplied with fowl. They’d find a village and buy goats’ milk or water. Even their personal water and wineskins were depleted.

She fell asleep without undressing and dreamed all night of water. Of rock cliffs softening into great gushes, of licking dew cups from leaves. Nightmare thunderstorms woke her twice. She peeked out of her tent to see if it was light. How terrible it must be to die of thirst! Her lips were so firmly stuck together she felt a gluey membrane—or was it skin?—pop apart as she opened her mouth to lick them before dozing off again.

She awoke before dawn, roused by the camel drivers making their rounds with oil lamps. A camel snorted and groaned as it turned in the sand.

Her dress was too stiff to wear another day. She’d ask Trout to help her change into clean brown Hollands. She lit a candle and stepped outside to cold, refreshing air. The stars were out high in the sky. In the near distance, Gustave sat with his back to her on a box, pulling on his boots. Max was pushing his camera cases from the tent, where he insisted on storing them every night lest they be stolen. Lamp in hand, she stepped behind a rock and urinated, carefully lifting her grimy frock. She’d have to throw it away. It would rot before it could be washed.

Skirting the banked embers marked off by rocks, she advanced toward the outline of Trout’s tent. Faintly etched against the gray sky, it resembled a small black pyramid. “Trout!” she called. “Are you awake, Trout?” She was feeling cheerful. It was a new day. They’d secure water or milk in the next village. Joseph was a clever haggler.

There was no reply. She opened the flap and peeked into the blackness. “Trout, come out, come out wherever you are!”

Which was, no doubt, behind a boulder doing her business. Flo decided to walk around the camp. She trod stiffly, her legs cramped and aching from the night’s restless sleep.

“Rossignol,” Gustave called out. “Bonjour. Where are you marching to?

“Bonjour, Gustave. I’m waiting for Trout. Just stretching my legs.” Her throat tightened on a strand of unacknowledged worry. Trout had never wandered away. And never would.

“I’ll come with you.” They linked arms and continued around the campsite, making discreet forays behind boulders. “Halloo!” Flo called each time to give ample warning. “We are looking for you, Trout.” At one tall outcropping, a serpent skittered across their path. Mohammed had severed a snake outside her tent the first night of the journey. What if Trout had been bitten, or was ill? Perhaps she had digestive trouble and was vomiting in the desert at a respectful distance.

By the time they’d completed their circuit, the restraint that had kept her walking and talking normally escaped with a sigh. “Oh, Gustave, I think she is missing.” She gripped his arm. He placed his hand on top of hers.

“Surely she is just asleep in her tent, n’est-ce pas?”

“I don’t think so.” Trout always woke before Flo. If she had gone to relieve herself, she would have had ample time to return. If she were sick, they’d have to go looking for her.

The thinnest rim of molten gold trembled at the horizon. The colors of the surroundings began to change from grayish black to muted browns and pinks. She felt a powerful urge to pray and closed her eyes for a moment; then she stepped forward and lifted the flap of Trout’s tent.

It was dark inside. Dark, and empty.

• • •

“We might muck it up anyway,” Max said, yielding to Flo as she plunged back into Trout’s tent moments later, this time to investigate thoroughly. Everyone had gathered around.

The men naturally hung back, for it would have been indelicate for them to barge in and invade Trout’s meager privacy. Besides, Flo was more likely to recognize something amiss among the alien feminine trappings.

The air inside the tent was close as a summer afternoon before a rainstorm. It smelled of camel. She peered about.

Trout’s absence was more palpable amid her possessions, as if the expectation of her return added to the oppressive stillness. Her belongings were undisturbed, her clothes folded and stacked inside her portmanteau, her boots lined up alongside the bedding. The dress she’d worn the day before was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, like Flo, she’d never disrobed.

She picked up Trout’s journal, which was lying open, the pages crammed with sloping lines of minute cursive. On the last page, a nib had leaked, leaving a black smear. Nearby, the inkwell had tipped over and soaked the sand. It took a moment to find the pen, which had rolled or fallen far from the book. A chill ran through her. Trout had not wandered off. She’d been interrupted while writing. Tears sprang to her eyes. Kidnapped!

Still clutching the journal, she bent low and exited to the fresher air, folding the tent flap closed behind her. Everyone was congregated, waiting. “She is missing, with signs of surprise.” It would be too awful to say “struggle.”

They searched the environs, peering behind every rock and dune and into every gully. One of the crew found camel hoofprints—two sets—that seemed fresher than their own from the evening before.

After a brief discussion among the Europeans, Max took charge. He signaled Mohammed, standing apart with his crew, to approach. Through Joseph, he questioned him. “Have you heard anything from your men about this woman’s whereabouts?”

“Find out if all the crew are still with us,” Gustave urged.

Joseph duly translated both questions.

Stroking his beard as calmly as if it were a cat, Mohammed answered with what Flo adjudged respect tinged with fearful caution. He gestured with dark, slender hands, his voice solicitous and steady as an undertaker’s. But the length of his reply filled her with dread.

Joseph waited for Mohammed to finish, then chose his words judiciously. Mohammed and his men knew nothing of Trout’s disappearance, he reported. The crew was all accounted for.

Max fixed Joseph with a stare. “I know he said more than that.”

“Oui, monsieur, c’est vrai. But he want me to say con forza his men all counted.”

Flo could not for the life of her remember at that instant if there were five or six camel drivers, nor could she easily distinguish among them.

“All counted,” Max repeated, leveling his gaze at Mohammed. “Charabia evasif!” He raised his voice. Evasive double-talk. An unfortunate expression, she thought. In it, “Arabia” signified nonsense. She hoped Max had read about how easily the hot-blooded Bedouin with their strict codes of honor were offended.

Gustave added, “Ask if they are all here at this moment.”

“Good man,” said Max.

A collision of languages ensued as Joseph translated into Arabic for Mohammed and back into French for her, Max, and Gustave, and each one commented in turn. Tower of Babel, she thought. Ripe for misconstruction.

Through her own silence and inaction she felt Trout’s absence as sharply as a physical complaint. For the first time since they left Kenneh, she wasn’t translating for her. Poor woman! Missing in a vast and hostile wasteland. Flo felt suddenly alone and useless, her chest hollow with foreboding. Around her, the words seemed to boil over, subside, and boil over again as they argued back and forth.

Gustave said, “Allons! du calme, mes enfants, je vous en prie!”

Mohammed nodded and, in the ensuing silence, took the floor. Joseph translated. “He say one man comes to him yesterday and ask permisso to leave. His mother very sick. Last night he goes home.”

“I knew it!” Max said, pounding the sand with his ivory-topped cane. Startled, Flo stepped back. “Foul play,” he continued. “Trout did not vanish on her own.” He shook his head. “Foul play.”

“Mohammed swear by all holy that man have nothing to do with Trout,” Joseph added.

“Il est menteur, le con!” Max cursed under his breath. Joseph let the words pass without the Arabic equivalent.

“Perhaps we should return to Koseir,” she blurted, more out of nervousness than common sense. Her first instinct was always to retreat to the place or moment before a catastrophe, as if she could turn back time itself.

“No,” said Max. “That will do no good.”

Through Joseph, Mohammed proclaimed that they must continue the journey to Kenneh or risk exhausting their food.

He is not the least intimidated by us, she thought. What she had earlier taken for trepidation was something else. But what? Duplicity? Humility? The simple desire to stick to his routine?

“Inshallah, perhaps the woman will return to us,” Mohammed said. “I remain at your service, effendi.” With that, he and his crew turned away to tend to the camels, which had been staked in place since the night before.

Max shouted after him, his cane in the air. “Wait right there! If a Frank is harmed or dies, an Arab, or more than one, shall also die!”

Flo caught her breath. Striking a Bedouin could be fatal. What did insulting or threatening one lead to? To her relief, the camel drivers stopped and listened to Joseph hectically translating. “He say he know the law, effendi, and he and his men are innocent.” Mohammed stopped, gestured toward them, and offered a benediction. “May Allah watch over you.”

“Et vous,” Gustave rushed to say.

“Audthu bilahi min ash shaytan ar rajim,” Mohammed intoned, smiling and bowing before turning away.

“What was that last?” Gustave asked. He looked beside himself with worry.

“He say he seek Allah to protect from the accursed Satan.”

“As should we all,” Max replied halfheartedly. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “Tell Mohammed to send out a search party for the next two hours.”

The message was conveyed. Mohammed held up his hand and nodded, then sent two men to untether their camels.

Max shook his head. “As Damien said on the morning of his execution, ‘It will be rough day.’”

Gustave sat down Indian-style and put his head in his hands.

Flo wondered if the mention of Satan was one of the numberless Arabic proverbs proffered to throttle discussion, or a sly reference to the Europeans as white devils. How could you determine a man’s intention if you didn’t speak his language or share his beliefs? She’d happily embarked on a study of ancient Egyptian religion but had no curiosity about Islam, which seemed an amalgam of oddities and borrowings. She felt with conviction what she’d written home more than once—that Egypt would be an exquisite country were it not for the Egyptians who lived there.

After sending Joseph to spy on the remaining camel drivers, the three of them gathered in the men’s tent, talking and pacing in circles. Flo was feeling more terrible by the minute, knowing Trout must be terrified wherever she was. Which she did not wish to imagine. Instead, she pictured her doll-sized, wrapped in her green plaid shawl in a cartouche with Ramses, her hand securing her black straw bonnet. There she stayed, etched on stone, immobile, safe in the vaults of history until Flo could figure out what to do.

Why, they asked each other, had Trout been kidnapped, but not Flo? Gustave gently suggested she was more vulnerable alone in a small tent, while Flo probably escaped because her tent was large, implying several occupants. Flo’s spirits sank at this supposition, thinking it must be true. Max believed there would be a demand for ransom and that the camel drivers were implicated.

How had it been accomplished, especially as none of the camels was missing? They agreed that a person or persons of professional stealth must have crept up in the night. Max again proposed a conspiracy among the camel drivers that would have eased the culprit’s way.

I am responsible for her, Flo kept thinking. I and only I. I should have anticipated these possibilities. Or was that hubris? Taking responsibility for everything, like God.

The discussion was wearing on her nerves. The obvious horror in Trout’s abduction was rape, a word she dared not say but found so harrowing that merely to think it produced waves of nausea. Instead, they talked around it, addressing it historically, which was only slightly less disturbing. Max mentioned the long, infamous history of white slavery in the Orient, which traced all the way back to Saphira, the Circassian concubine in King Solomon’s court. Beautiful young white women had been kidnapped for centuries, not to mention, Gustave added, the loathsome custom of destitute parents selling their daughters into seraglios. Naturally, some of these women had been found and returned home. If what had happened to Trout was commonplace, might there not be a commonplace solution? But here they reached a logical impasse: since Trout was neither young nor beautiful, why would anyone want her in the first place?

It was unendurable to think of the flinty, middle-aged spinster, so upright in her way, being violated. The cartouche cracked. Trout ran shrieking across the dunes, pursued by turbaned men on camels. Flo struggled not to faint, her face hot, hands cold, and head pounding. She missed Selina and Charles, even the heaving, righteous bosom of Fanny, the speechless awkwardness of WEN. What if Trout were killed or sold into slavery? What if they never learned what happened to her? The tragedy—and her failure as an employer—would settle on her head like a lead weight. And on her heart. She could barely follow the conversation.

Gustave, sitting next to her, seemed to sense her upset, but she made it clear that she wished no affection from him. If Max saw signs of intimacy he might assume that she was Gustave’s conquest, not his confidante. “We must do something to help the poor woman!” she cried abruptly.

“Yes, yes,” Gustave and Max agreed.

At once they decided to send a man back to Koseir to request that Père Elias dispatch a search party into the desert. The messenger took Trout’s camel.

• • •

Two hours later, the luckless crewmen returned empty-handed and subdued.

After a quick luncheon, the caravan pulled up stakes and continued toward Kenneh. The crew struck Trout’s tent and packed up her belongings with Flo’s.

The passing vistas merged into a muddy blur. Flo’s mind locked onto Trout, her thoughts painfully mixed. Trout had been a good patient while ill and better than no company at all at Père Elias’s, where they had enjoyed the tub together even if in a dull silence. Though Flo was desperately worried for her, she could not lie. She refused to be a hypocrite, like the vicars at home, who turned the recently deceased into saints, seconded by parishioners known to despise them. It was only when she allowed herself to imagine danger to Trout’s person that her feelings toward her were temporarily simplified—purified—into a singular loving concern. It was so much easier to deal with Trout—to feel genuine affection and sympathy for her—when she was absent.

That evening they camped later than usual in order to reach the well at Hagee Soolayman, where camels were always watered on the second night of a return journey from Koseir. Mohammed explained that they could not alter the itinerary. If they had tried to stop earlier, the camels would have balked, for they knew where the well was. In their blood, they knew, he said.

Flo was limp with exhaustion. It was nearly midnight. She would have traded anything for a bath in the pink tub, and thought longingly, too, of the Red Sea. Just to behold it again would be refreshing.

The crew bought goats’ milk from the Ababdeh, whose huts clustered in the surrounding hills. It was too late to go shooting for fowl, so they dined on beans and apricot paste. The tribesmen watched from a distance like vultures about to descend on their crumbs, but only the children, naked and shy, came forward to beg, singing and dancing in the orange glow of the campfire. Flo gave them most of her portion.

At Gustave’s insistence, Mohammed posted a sentry outside her tent. With the guard in place, she retired and prepared for sleep. She lit a new candle. The light was hypnotic, and staring at it, she was able to calm herself and collect her thoughts.

She reached into her camel box and retrieved her desk. Touching her writing supplies was reassuring. Steel pen, inkwell, nibs, her diary, and Trout’s brown book. She prepared to jot a line or two in Lavie.

Wouldn’t it be a miracle if Trout had managed a word about her abductor? Or inadvertently noted something suspicious, or had a premonition of what was to come? Didn’t the circumstance demand that she peek at the journal to search for clues? Just the last brief entry before the ink smear . . .

25 April 1850

Here is your drudge in the desert again, cold and lonely.

We left Koseer at dawn. I am writing with one hand, holding your key in the other. I like to remember that you kept it in your pocket near your heart.

The wind is howling. So I checked the pole that the natives say will hold up the tent in a storm. Miss N told me the Egyptian name for tent is “house of hair.” Goat hair, thick as a doormat and never washed. I think vermin live in it that chew on me when I sleep. I itch and itch.


Flo paused to scratch her ankle. Thinking about a bite always made it tickle.

I am cold. My breath is the only heat. Except for shoes, I am dressed. I won’t change clothes until Kenna as there is no water to bathe and no privacy in the desert. Which Miss N calls “solitudinous,” as if a fancy word could fill all that emptiness.


Flo cringed each time she encountered her name. It was terrible to read another person’s truth, especially when it included one’s self.

My eyes stung and hurt all day. I wonder can the desert burn them out. No job fairs for blind maids. I’d be put in the workhouse, caning chairs or weaving on a handloom. Such dark notions I know you do not care for.


It had never occurred to Flo to provide Trout with a green eye-shade. It had seemed a luxury—like good gloves—not a necessity.

I sleep on a rug, but sand works its way through. That is the story of Egypt: one thing after another burrowing into the skin. It isn’t a carpet proper, but a saddlebag with the seams ripped open and restitched flat. When we trek in the daytime, it is stored just above the camel’s foulest part.

I told Miss N I did not want to be alone in a tent, but she did not answer. She sleeps in a big tent and is not afraid like

Flo cringed with horror. She didn’t recall Trout asking to share her tent. She felt a sudden heat, a spreading shame, quickly striped with anger. Question after question tumbled through her mind. Who had given Trout that key and why? Which must be the same one she’d found on the dahabiyah floor and later seen under Trout’s pillow. Not only was Trout’s disappearance a mystery, the woman herself was.

She slammed the book shut, sick with guilt and worry.

A moment later, she opened it and started at the beginning.