The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

28

CROCODILE GODS

After Kenneh, Max dithered over the list of monuments remaining to be photographed. More agitated than usual, he kept adding and subtracting names. Gustave was grateful—so grateful!—that they’d already finished with the necropolis at Giza, the Sphinx, and the pyramids. He lacked the strength to crawl through those dark tunnels now, or scale the meter-high blocks to the apex of Cheops’s pyramid to watch the sunrise. Miss Nightingale might be viewing it at that moment. He pictured her twisting through the passageways in her blue dress, hugging a small notebook to her chest. The graffiti might not amuse her, he thought. The name of the singer Jenny Lind scrawled repeatedly on an arch, apparently by a fan. And on the top of the great pyramid, a certain Henri Buffard could not resist advertising his goods. Nor could Gustave wash the useless information—Constructeur de Papier Peint, 79 rue St. Martin, Paris—from his mind. As much as Europeans loved Egyptian antiquities, they loved defacing them more.

He glanced at Max’s list on the table between their beds. Grotto of Samoun (Crocodiles) had been added. Gustave had never heard of it. Perhaps Joseph had suggested it while reminding Max yet again that he had journeyed up the Nile sixty times.

He was in a foul mood. The suspicious chancre that had appeared at Koseir was now characteristically painless, smooth, and hard as a button. Please God, he prayed, let it not be pox, though he was almost certain it was. He avoided looking at his body because next, if he were right, a rash would erupt on the palms of his hands or the soles of his feet, possibly the backs of his legs. Syphilis could mark a man almost anywhere. Perhaps this was Kuchuk Hanem’s true keepsake. He remembered the delicate blue Arabic script tattooed on her arm. He had his own translation now: Love killed your sister and it will kill you, too, but slowly.

He went on deck. Aided by a stiff breeze, the cange was skimming along with the current, sails furled. The sight of the passing shore dizzied him. It took a moment to get his legs under him.

Except for a man at the rudder, the crew was relaxing—smoking, sleeping, playing backgammon. He joined Max and Joseph chatting with Rais Ibrahim in the shade of a canvas awning.

“It is hardly worth the time to see it,” Rais Ibrahim said.

Joseph demurred. “But messieurs wish to take mummy home.”

Max noted Gustave’s arrival. “We’re discussing whether to visit the Grotto of Crocodiles,” he explained.

Red vest, note to God, Dacca cloth . . . mummy! Until that instant, he’d forgotten the shopkeeper in Kenneh who’d promised to inquire about mummies. Surely the man would have tracked him down if he’d found one. The whole town knew of his return.

“How long would it take?” asked Max.

“Half a day,” Joseph said. “Perhaps one day.”

The captain pursed his lips and sighed histrionically. Accustomed to slapping his crew when they displeased him, he plainly wished to pummel Joseph for contradicting him. And just as plainly, Joseph’s opinion rested on the hope of a fat baksheesh if he succeeded in finding them mummies.

“I do want to bring a mummy home,” said Gustave from his fog. The sound of his own voice startled him, as though he were hearing it amplified through a pipe or megaphone.

“I am puzzled,” Max said. “Joseph says one thing, the guidebook and the captain another.”

“Do you have it here?” asked Gustave. “The book?” Rais Ibrahim shot him a penetrating glance.

Max removed it from his pocket and passed it to him.

The entry was brief and dripping with disdain, written, as Bouilhet liked to say, from a very high horse. Not worth visiting, the guidebook said, unless you wished to bring home the charred mummy of a crocodile. Difficult climbing also was noted. Apparently the grotto had emitted suffocating fumes for years and was highly flammable.

“Listen to this,” Gustave said. “‘Fragments of Homer and the lost orations of Hyperides of Athens were discovered there in 1845.’”

Max’s eyes widened. Gustave continued reading to himself. Nothing else valuable could have survived a fire that broke out in 1846 and burned for more than a year.

How could a fire burn for more than a year? A tiny asterisk led his eye to the bottom of the page. The grotto had heavy deposits of bitumen. Pitch. Essentially, the cave was a tar pit! That meant no photographing and no squeeze-making. “I vote for going,” he announced, closing and returning the book. “I think we should take Joseph’s advice. We both want mummies.”

“So be it,” said Max. “A search for buried treasure.”

Rais Ibrahim, also highly flammable, excused himself and sulked on the deck with his back to them, dangling his feet in the spray of the keel. The excursion would lengthen the voyage by a day, one additional day until the captain could screw his new wife. They hadn’t challenged him before. Max had been right, Gustave realized, to insist on withholding half his fee until the end, ensuring that he kept his foul moods to himself. Max usually was right about money. When Gustave paid Kuchuk Hanem twice her fee, he had disapproved, and clearly, on the second visit, Gustave did not get his money’s worth.

• • •

Rais Ibrahim had hired two guides from the village of Maabdeh as well as donkeys to ride and haul their provisions and swag. The next morning they disembarked south of Manfaloot at el-Cheguel Ghil, where the desert and the fertile delta met, and where, Joseph said, there had once been crocodiles in the millions. These days the animals were a rarity in Middle Egypt because they had all been mummified. He and Max soon would see for themselves.

The riverbank was high, blocking completely views of the land beyond it. They ascended on their donkeys, tacking single file. It was a bright, sunny day, not yet too warm.

The top of the embankment overlooked a wide plain planted with corn, barley, and flowering fava beans, their scent sweet on the air. Between the rows, in ragged pink patches, clover bloomed, and lupine, in a scattered purple haze. In the distance Gustave spied a herd of black goats or sheep that dotted the ground like ants on a cloth. Just beneath him, on a ledge, two donkey foals gamboled, braying and tossing their gray velvet heads. He and Max smiled at each other. What a good decision to venture through lush and little-known lands!

They soon reached Maabdeh, a cluster of mud hovels surrounded by a brick wall. Pointing to it, a guide explained that it had been raised against Bedouins, who routinely pillaged the livestock and crops, and sometimes abducted women and children.

Threading along the edge of the plateau to another steep hill—five or six hundred meters, Gustave estimated—they passed a limestone outcrop with clear chisels marks. Giant blocks had been quarried willy-nilly, leaving what appeared to be a deranged staircase. No one, Joseph remarked, had worked this stone for a millennium.

As he zigzagged steadily higher, Gustave avoided looking down, observing instead his donkey’s muscles twitch under its hair coat as it leaned into the trail. Twice it faltered, terrifying him, rocks falling away in a miniature avalanche. Difficult climbing, indeed.

At the next precipice, he was mystified to see the Nile again, winding after him like a thick green serpent. His sense of direction was muddled. Max proudly pointed out Manfaloot, crowned with gray minarets, on the opposite shore, as if he had placed it there himself to further addle Gustave’s bearings.

Below lay a veritable panorama of Egyptian agriculture on another vast plain. Or was it the one he’d seen earlier? For the first and last time, he reconsidered filing a report about the abundant crops to honor his government commission. But if he wrote one, he’d have to write several. None, then. Villages tufted with palm trees came into view, and beyond them, like a dreamscape rendered in pastels, the soft pink and lavender outline of the Arabian hills. He memorized the view. If Max had taken a photograph, it couldn’t have captured the subtle colors, the shapes as luscious as an odalisque’s curves. An odalisque’s curves: he liked it.

As they turned right (what direction would that be? he wondered), the guides galloped past him, shouting. He followed, lurching forward like a boy on a hobbyhorse. His mount had a ball-crushing gait, as bad as a camel.

For the third time, a rocky prominence blocked the view. Beneath it, the trail glittered miraculously, paved with crystals.

“Talc,” Max cried triumphantly. “They mined talc here, but no longer.” Had Max memorized the entire guidebook? His flaunting of details, his heedless glee, galled him.

After twenty minutes in the sparkling dust, Gustave saw a dark cleft in the rock like a gaping mouth painted black. The entrance to the grotto. “We are here,” he announced before Max could speak. “Are we not?”

“Obviously,” granted Max.

They dismounted and tied their donkeys to shrubby trees. With Joseph bringing up the rear, they entered the opening single file.

As Gustave bent into the darkness, a sickening stench assaulted him. Breathing through his mouth, he followed the back of Max’s blue jacket for three or four meters. Abruptly the tunnel enlarged, the line backed up and all seven men crowded against the slippery black wall where the crevasse ended.

“And now we enter!” cried Joseph. Before Gustave could make sense of this remark, the first guide, lantern in hand, disappeared down a smoke vent at the base of the wall. Max scrambled after him, whooping with delight.

About a meter tall, the tunnel was unpredictable, narrowing and widening as it bored through the earth. He crawled on his knees, he wiggled and slid. One vertebra at a time, he inched forward on his back, snakelike, propelling himself through the turns by digging down with his heels. Several times he scraped against treacherous spikes overhead. Had he not lost weight, he thought, he might have debrided his skin against the stone—dégoûtant!—or been stuck in the passage for the remainder of a short life.

The bad odor strengthened, along with the heat. Drenching sweat ran in runnels down his belly and back, his groin and armpits. In front of him, the worn-down soles of Max’s cavalry boots dragged lightly along the ground, like the feet of a marionette. Behind him, the guide shouted out encouragements in Arabic and butted him with his head.

After several insufferable minutes, the tunnel flared into a gallery where he was able to stand. He yanked out the hem of his shirt to use as a mask.

What exactly was that rank smell? Not shit. He knew the smell of shit all too well. As a child in diapers, his mother liked to recount, she had found him carefully dabbing it on himself and the walls of his room. You were painting, she’d said with a laugh. He begged her not to tell the story to friends, but she did, especially after baby Caroline came to live at Croisset. So, not shit. Shit didn’t frighten him, but this odor did.

Before he could see much in the cavern, Max pulled him aside. “This is why I took precautions,” he whispered, “why I told the guides no exposed candles.” He pointed to his feet. Gustave followed a wan light to the floor.

Mummies. They were standing on mummies. He recalled the drifts of dead cicadas he’d seen as a boy encrusting the streets of Rouen. He’d be thirty-two when the next swarm hatched. Four more years.

He stepped forward and heard a crunch. Then another. Then a sifting sound like rats scurrying through litter. He froze and shouted for a guide to bring his lantern.

“Many rooms like this,” Joseph said, rolling his hands to illustrate iteration. “My last monsieur spends five hours in the grotto and never finds the end of it.”

Pitch dripped from the ceiling, forming stalactites that hung down in ravaged partitions. Eight months and three thousand kilometers and here he was at last in the heart of the heart of ancient Egypt. Or in the heart of its death. Mummies covered the floor. They were the floor. It felt like standing on a stack of mattresses. Death, usually so invisible, so quick to vanish once it struck, was preserved here in a stinking pile, and he was the fortunate fellow balanced on top of it. But would he never stop noticing the stench? Shouldn’t his nose have acclimated to it by now?

He picked up a crocodile and sniffed it. The distinctive odor of active decay was unmistakable. Though the bodies had been preserved, dried to the lightness of husks, in the dampness of the cave something continued to rot. Hair? Nails? Bones? The leathery skin that remained after natron had extracted all the fluid from the flesh?

Besides the large crocs, there were pointy mummified eggs and baby crocodiles with elongated bodies and snouts easily recognizable through their bandages. All of them, he knew, were sacrifices to Sobek, the crocodile deity, to keep the real crocodiles at bay. His worshippers had not stinted. The hoard contained thousands of crocodile and human remains. Tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands, he revised, estimating the depth of the piles. Millions, if you counted all the caverns in the grotto.

He’d watched the fearsome reptiles slicking through the Nile at Aswan. No one was safe near a croc, even if it appeared to sleep as it basked on the muddy bank.

Why not make a god of the thing you feared most? In which case he would have numerous deities: the butcher, with his sharp knives and dull brain; the grocer, with his palette of vegetables and colorless imagination. Professionals, too—lawyers and doctors (including his brother), and all proper dames. Only artists, a few teachers, and whores were exempt from his pantheon.

A sound like claws on pavement interrupted his reverie. He lifted his lantern and shined it on the brightest objects in the cavern—Max’s hands, rending a crocodile mummy. Twisting off the legs like drumsticks and tossing them into a corner, Max broke open the torso and plunged into the gut cavity, pulling out blackened gauze.

“What in the world are you doing?” Gustave asked.

“Looking for treasure. Gold or jeweled scarabs.” He crushed a tiny crocodile underfoot and lifted a bigger one. “They’re so light,” he said, tearing off its limbs.

From each animal Max disarticulated, noxious odors rose in fresh waves. Sick to his stomach, Gustave moved to the next gallery, trailed by a guide.

Everywhere lay linen, scorched or reduced to cinders. That was part of the odor, too—burned cloth. A stockpile of small charred packets leaned against a wall. Organs? He knew the Egyptians mummified them separately. Hearts reduced to crumbs? Brains withered to walnut shells?

He decided to look for a human mummy and located two right away. But they had already been pilfered, their wrappings in disarray. After half an hour of kicking aside one crocodile mummy to find an identical one beneath it, he settled for the charred foot, still attached to the ankle, of the first mummy. This would do well enough. How could he transport an entire mummy anyway? They were as delicate as butterfly wings. Everywhere he stepped, he heard and felt them cracking. Yes, a foot made a fine memento—of the arduous climb, of trampling mummies. He returned to the first gallery.

Max was kneeling over something, his guide standing alongside, arms heaped with booty. He straightened up and wiped his brow with the filthy sleeve of his jacket.

“What do you have there?” Gustave asked.

“No scarabs, but wonderful stuff.” Max delved into the farrago of the guide’s bundle. “A crocodile mummy, of course.” He held it up briefly. “Also, a bird mummy—”

“Really? I didn’t see any birds.” He felt a tiny bit envious.

“Also a snake. And yes, here”—Max withdrew a wafer-shaped object—“a fish. And we found a cat mummy.”

Now Gustave was jealous. “Let me see it.”

Max dug it out of the pile and passed it to him. He studied the shape. The ears were missing or had been flattened in the wrapping. It could have been a loaf of rustic bread.

“These are my favorites,” Max said, sorting through a second lot arranged on the floor. He withdrew two gilded feet—two gilded feet! That son of a bitch— then a pair of blackened hands, and finally an entire head, its long tresses intact in an unnatural shade of red.

Was it possible the second room had been more plundered than the first? Gustave wondered. That made no sense. He must simply be unlucky. His souvenir foot was so meager by comparison.

He spied something on the floor and picked it up. “You’ve forgotten a trinket.” It lacked wrappings and felt leathery and velvety by turns. “What is it, anyway?” he asked Max.

“Give it here, and bring the lantern closer.”

Gustave watched Max turn the thing in the light. A tiny face appeared, then wings and little claws. “Ugh!” Max shivered, revolted. “A dead bat!” He flung it high in the air. For a split second, a rustling like silk rubbing on silk issued from the reaches of the ceiling.

In the next moment, bats rained on them, swooping and diving from every direction, a hail of creatures. Colliding in midair, some of them tumbled to the floor and hopped like crows. The cave echoed with their piercing whistles and squeaks. “They are attacking us,” Max cried, covering his eyes with his hands.

“No, monsieur, they no attack,” Joseph offered calmly. “You attack. They run away.”

Unconvinced, Max huddled on the floor.

In their panic, some bats escaped through the passage the men had entered; others fled through narrow ledge gaps. Most returned, chirping, to their sleeping nests, vanishing into the dark vault of the gallery. The air was suddenly clear. Stunned bats lay throbbing on the floor. He could see them floundering about in the shadows, like broken umbrellas.

“Little bastards,” said Max. “They scared the shit out of me.”

“Yes, they did,” remarked Gustave. He wasn’t afraid of bats, had trapped and killed stragglers in the chimneys at Croisset. “They’re only dangerous if they bite you, and they only bite when they’re rabid, which is why if one does bite—”

“Enough!” Max stood. “We should go.” He brushed off his shoulders. “Are you finished? Did you find anything worthwhile?”

Gustave showed him the foot. “For my desk.”

Max nodded, unimpressed. “I am ready to leave when you are.” He withdrew a white cloth from his pocket and gently placed his loot on it. He had brought a cloth and yet not advised him to? After Gustave added his mummy’s foot, Max folded the cloth and tied it up like a picnic lunch.

“You’ll need a wooden chest for all that stuff,” Gustave said.

“I have a wooden chest. Two, in fact, packed inside the trunks.” Max paused thoughtfully. “In the meantime, I shall wedge them into the camera cases if I have to.”

The climb into the cave had been wearying, and though they’d been in the grotto for only an hour, the air was execrable. Watching Max think and move so spryly, he felt asthmatic.

After securing their lanterns, they lined up and descended into the passage; Max went in front of him and Joseph behind. The second guide went last, dragging the plunder with him, out of everyone’s way.

Halfway along, Max shouted that he had made a discovery. He sounded excited, but then he was more easily excited than ten men. Another of his bothersome qualities.

The stench Gustave had first encountered assailed him anew. He gagged, regretting he hadn’t thought to cover his mouth with a rag. This odor was different from the one inside, he noticed, and far worse.

“It is so grotesque as to defy description,” Max called out, delighted, it seemed, in the very repulsion he felt. “How did we miss it on the way in? Oooo! It is ghastly!”

“What is that dreadful stink?” Gustave asked.

“This! This is the dreadful stink.” Max coughed, italicizing his words. “Sacré nom de Dieu, it is terrible when you get close.”

“Y’allah!” The guide in front shouted.

“J’arrive!” Max shouted. “J’arrive tout de suite!” To Gustave, more quietly, he called back, “The poor bastard is having a fit. I’m going ahead.”

Now on his knees, now on his belly, Gustave edged forward. If memory served, he was approaching the part like the neck of a bottle. Surely he’d have noticed anything freakish in such a confined space. Whatever it was, Max had missed it too. He wondered about the guides—did they know it was there?

Turning on his side, he squeezed by an especially bulbous crag. Behind it, in a cranny at an acute angle to the main passage, he saw it: the head, torso, and arms of a man wedged behind a curtain of glossy stalactites, like an actor waiting in the wings to spring onto the stage. The legless corpse without wrappings was not an ancient Egyptian but a modern one, an obvious victim of the grotto in which he had, it seemed, begun naturally to mummify, for the face was shriveled and flat as a plate. Within it, the mouth had contorted into a circle where an agonized scream had been preserved for the ages. Chills rippled through Gustave’s shoulders, into his belly.

He screamed. He gagged. He pressed his hand to his face to filter out the odor, but the sleeve of his shirt was sticky with resin. It, too, stank.

If fumes or smoke had overcome the man, where was the rest of him? A gruesome scenario took shape in his mind—a later explorer severing the legs to get them out of the way.

The eyes were half open, the sockets empty beneath the lids. He expected to see an insect crawl out, daintily place each of its legs on a clean patch of flesh, and wash itself like a fly. He stared at a stalactite to annihilate the image.

As he stole another look at the face, the tendrils of a profound dread insinuated themselves into his very being. He tried to back away, but without room to rise on all fours and crawl, he succeeded only in squirming closer. He shivered and groaned in revulsion.

Complaints beset him from behind and in front. “Go,” chided Joseph, knocking at the soles of his shoes. “Too hot for sightseeing in this here.”

“Gustave, where are you?” Max yelled. “Say something.”

Ahead of him, the light of a lantern faded. He hadn’t wanted to carry one himself. Abu Muknaf, the Father of Thinness, could have doubled his girth, carried a lantern, and still slid through the shaft like a greased hog.

“I am coming to get you!” Max’s disembodied voice promised.

Joseph jerked on his left foot. “Monsieur, you are all right?” he asked. “Have you faint?” In his poor French it sounded like Have you daydreamed?

He closed his eyes and silently invoked the beach at Koseir—cool turquoise water rushing around my ankles, Rossignol sorting shells on her lap, the breeze like . . . like . . . A black wave of tar and rot.

Max’s arms snaked toward him. He must have turned around. “Give me your hand,” he urged. “I’ll unstick you.”

“No. I shall come out by myself.” F*ck shit, f*ck shit, f*ck f*ck f*ck! he cursed under his breath. “I am only resting.”

“Resting, my eye,” Max said with a sneer. Joseph continued to push at his leg. In a moment of terrifying clairvoyance, he saw his own amputated foot on some future tourist’s desk.

“I’m trying to help you, a*shole.”

“Va te faire foutre. I’ll be out when I’m ready.”

When Max reached for his hand, the iron lethargy that had weighed him down for days lifted all at once, as though yanked free by a pulley. “Do not touch me, I warn you,” he growled. He felt his terror altering into a new shape, like liquid left on a stovetop that suddenly solidifies into a nasty, inedible bolus.

“A couple of minutes more and you’ll be out,” Max reassured him. “Courage!”

The new shape was fury. At that moment in the stuffy shaft, Gustave struck a vein of pure hatred for his companion. He hated the way Max talked—too confidently. He hated his planning, the way he burped, the smell of him every night in the next bed. The way each time he blew his nose, he inspected his handkerchief afterward. He hated that. He detested Max for being skinny and eating enormous portions without gaining a gram.

“Stop being foolish,” Max said, clawing at his hand.

“You are the fool,” Gustave replied, retracting his hands into knobs under his chin. “Did anyone ever tell you that you laugh like a jackal? You f*ck like one, too.”

“Calme toi. Let me help you, mon ami,” Max coddled in an oily and patronizing tone that outraged him even more. He was indebted to Max for convincing his family to let him go, and for taking charge of the trip, but not enough to tolerate his acting the nursemaid.

“You and your shitty ambition,” he spat. “You fart higher than your a*shole.”

“Give me your hand and shut up.”

“Am I disrupting your almighty schedule by pausing for two minutes?” The disgust he had felt for himself while ill was misdirected, he saw that now. In fact, he was disgusted with Max and hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. Their friendship had soured, like a marriage. Without the novelty and color of the Orient to distract them, it would have soured sooner. After eight months the bloom was off the rose, leaving only the thorns. This burst of understanding, like most knowledge, did nothing to mitigate his wrath.

“The delay is beside the point!” Max said. “You are using up the air in the tunnel. Think of the poor sods behind you and give me your hand!”

Hypocrite! Max didn’t give a shit for the other men. For all his wealth, he was not a generous person. He was a tightwad and a measly tipper. Even drunk, he’d bestir himself to calculate the tip to the last sou. Or para. Or piastre. Calculating, that was Max, with his industrious lists. Always thinking and planning his life, never just giving in, following the impulse wherever it led. Was that why he f*cked so ceaselessly? How awful it must be to live from the neck up. The closest Max came to pleasure lasted only the few minutes he f*cked, when, instead of feeling his brain, he felt his prick. Gustave was the true voluptuary; Max, no better than an aging delinquent with a bit of philosophy under his belt. It followed that Max envied his own easy sensuality. Who wouldn’t envy a man who conjured a thousand liquid breasts while floating in the Red Sea? How had he ever trusted his opinion on Saint Anthony? He’d have no need of Max’s advice in the future.

It would be impossible to travel with him for another year. “You know nothing of pleasure,” he blurted. “You are a fake, pretending to be enjoying yourself when you don’t know how.”

“Move, move, move!” shouted Joseph. The guides conferred in rapid Arabic, their voices ricocheting in the passage like scattershot.

“One way or another you are coming out of this cave, Garçon.” Max had reached his head, and was pulling him by the occipital knot, a six-months’ growth of ponytail.

He bit him on the wrist.

“Goddamn you!” Max screamed. “Fils de putain! I should leave you to die in here.” He sucked noisily at his hand.

“Maybe then you’d begin to take life seriously.”

“You think I don’t take it seriously? Am I the one who is ignoring a commission that could set me on the path to the Legion of Honor?”

“You can’t take life seriously if you can’t enjoy it.” It had never once occurred to Gustave that the commission might actually be important, that it might impress people in Paris.

“You are mad, you filthy cunt licker!”

“Shithead!”

“Asswipe!”

Max slapped Gustave’s head so hard it stung. His skull vibrated like a cello string.

“Shit-eating bourgeois bung hole.” Gustave swatted at him. He would have killed him if he could, he thought with the stirring clarity of rage.

He felt his left shoe pop off. Joseph ran his thumbnail down the sole of his foot, the same way his father used to check reflexes. The foot jumped. He lurched forward involuntarily.

“Enfin!” Joseph cried. “Keep going, monsieur.”

Max grabbed both arms and pulled. “You accomplish nothing but jackassery,” he said, grunting. “You have squandered your money and opportunities. And I am the one who pays for it, you idiotic prick.” Holding fast to Gustave’s arms, he paused to catch his breath. “Because of you, I have lost Persia.”

Gustave yielded against his will, dragged toward the corpse’s face, that mouth through which every iota of human strength had been mustered in a final cry of pain or plea for help. The mouth would swallow him whole! He bumped along the sharp stone floor, bruising and scraping himself.

“No, the great Flaubert is too refined!” Max shouted. “You whoring wretch! You wanker! If only you would write some reports for the Ministry of Agriculture”—he paused his tirade to pull once more, like a midwife helping to birth a child—“then at the right moment, you could trade your commercial reputation for something more literary. One must make a name. It doesn’t matter what for!”

What if Max were right? What if writing well were not enough to ensure success? If the salon were more crucial, if social demerits outweighed the fruits of his desk? “All right!” he muttered. “Enough. I am coming out.”

Max let go of his arms. Joseph released his foot. He looked at the wall; the dead man was behind him.

• • •

The guides stood to one side, hawking up brown phlegm.

The sun was high in the sky, heating the barren cliffs. Gustave, Max, and Joseph lay flat on their backs, unmoving, until vultures began to circle overhead.

“Jesus Christ,” Gustave muttered after a long time. “That was as bad as the night in the wagon with Achille. Worse, because I remember it all.”

Max sat up. “You were scared shitless in there, goddamn it. Just admit it.”

Gustave sat up, too, resting his arms and head on his knees. “Shut your mouth, will you?”

Joseph pricked up his ears. “Messieurs, no more. Je vous en prie!”

“He is right.” Gustave said.

“Just admit your were stuck. Be humble for once in your life.”

“About my commission,” he began, getting to his feet.

“What about it?”

He sensed Max’s eagerness. “Did you actually expect me to go from city to city, asking ‘How much oil do you shit out here? How many potatoes do you cram into your trap?’ You have a legitimate project of interest, while I—”

“While you were treated like a king because of your commission? Did you keep that in mind when you decided to do nothing in exchange for the protection and largesse of your country?” Max stood and brushed off his trousers with no effect. The dirt was oily and ground in.

Watching Max’s futile gestures, it occurred to Gustave that his friend was even stupider than he’d allowed. Suddenly he found himself succumbing to laughter, shrieking like a maniac. “My commission?” he finally managed. “No one cares about that, you idiot. We were treated well because we are French, not because of a wad of paper. Have you never noticed that the Egyptians revere Napoleon like a god?”

Joseph stepped between them. He came up to Gustave’s nose. “Messieurs—”

“Must you always bellow like an ox?” Max asked, plainly at his wit’s end. “You are a bumpkin, and you will always be a bumpkin.” He scuffed at the gravelly ground. “Anyway, this is not about our commissions,” he added cryptically.

Gustave couldn’t resist. “Then what is it about?”

“Here’s a hint,” Max said, dripping contempt. “What is the one thing that can ruin the friendship between two people?”

Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Wasn’t that the old saw? It had no bearing on their situation, though. Not wishing to venture a stupid guess, he waited for Max to answer his own question.

“A third person. Particularly a woman.” Max glared at him. “You have been distinctly selfish about the lovely and lonely Miss Nightingale. Am I blind? What in Christ is it? Are you, perhaps, taken with her? Have the lovebirds had a spat? Did you fail to f*ck her?”

Gustave’s fist was five centimeters shy of Max’s jaw when Joseph’s forearm intervened. The guide screamed in pain and clutched his elbow. Gustave immediately apologized to him. Glowering, Max mounted his donkey and started down the trail in a silence broken only by the clatter of hooves on rock.

• • •

That night on the cange, Gustave and Max slept like a young couple feuding after their first fight. In their separate berths, they turned their backs to each other and hugged the walls, pulling up the covers around their ears.

Max was right about one thing: he had certainly not shared Miss Nightingale with him—not one word of what they had discussed or written, nothing about their walks on the beach at Koseir, at Philae, at Kenneh, and nothing of what transpired in the desert while Max was ill. But the source of the venom he regretted spewing at Max, was, he realized, much simpler: he hadn’t the least desire to be with him, in the grotto, even on the cange. He would have preferred to spend his time with her, as ridiculous as that was. A woman never could have squirmed through a tar pit, nor endured his lubricities when the spirit moved him, nor accepted that lasciviousness was merely beauty with a hard-on. Though she was neither an entry in the Encyclopedia of the Cunt nor a potential reader for it, at the moment she, not Max, was his closest friend. He could say things to her without being attacked or made fun of. He thought she understood him, and he was beginning to understand her.

The question was whether he should make the effort to continue their association. And if he did, what would be the result? Even with the mercury treatment, the syphilis might preclude a normal sexual bond. He couldn’t stand the thought of passing her the disease. On the other hand, he couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing her again. And if he saw her once, he’d want to continue seeing her, talking to her, reading to her, receiving letters, replying to them. Could he control his desire as well as flaunt the proscriptions of the civilized world? There would be so much to explain, so much to overcome. The task would never end or it would end badly.

Debauchery, which he had practiced so assiduously, was not always satisfying. Perhaps that was why one of the things he liked about her was the way he was in her presence. Not that he was smarter or more high-minded, but he was different—more trusting, more trusted. Still, he couldn’t always be the sensitive soul she found so endearing and that was such a refreshing change for him. What if she began chattering again, for example? One way or the other, she would wear him down. He would hate himself for disappointing her, and yet it seemed inevitable that he would.

First Kuchuk Hanem, now this. He was sick of romance. Love, he reflected abruptly, seemed to be a form of perfection akin to art and, therefore, largely unattainable. Indeed, rarity was essential to its power and appeal. This thought had vast ramifications, he realized. For one thing, his second visit to Kuchuk Hanem appeared in a new light. He could actually relish his bitterness now without feeling like a fool. Every love he’d ever known, beginning on the beach at Trouville, pointed toward it: love was something to anticipate and recollect, to aspire to, but not to expect or rely on.

• • •

The rest of the Nile trip passed quickly: Hamarna; then Antinoöpolis, a city reduced to a few ancient marble columns where he made squeezes; then Asiyoot and Benisoof, where Joseph presented a final letter from his wife for translation. Gustave took his time mulling it over.

“Vite, vite, read her to me,” Joseph urged.

Unlike its fellows, it contained no mention of money, but rather a list of what she wished to do upon Joseph’s return: take me to hear music, take me to Stars and Moon, the new café in the Greek quarter. Did you buy me any gifts?

“I am a bit embarrassed,” Gustave said, “it is so personal, so intimate.”

“Just read to me, monsieur. I excuse you.”

“She says she is going to f*ck your brains out when you get home.”

Joseph shrieked his happiness.

“And she asks you to please burn her letters.”

Joseph’s eyes glittered as he dutifully lit a small bonfire on the brazier that evening after dinner.

• • •

On the twenty-fifth of May, Cairo glimmered into view. As they glided past Giza, the pyramids seemed to float, suspended in the clouds. They reached the yellow walls of Solimon Pasha’s garden and the Grande Princesse’s palace, then docked at last at Bulak, the westernmost fringe of the city sprawl and home to most of the sailors.

Breasts, thighs, scented hair: Cairo, he mused, meant a return to the world of women. Miss Nightingale was not the only one awaiting a man in the glorious city. In rooms with carved wooden grilles beyond the grimy harbor, freshly depilated wives, daughters, whores, and mothers awaited the crew. Plots would thicken, pleasures and problems bubble up. Daily life could resume in its endless chain of caprice.

In Bulak the first evening, they dined with Rais Ibrahim’s uncle. Bad news, however, greeted the captain. The new wife with whom he’d so ardently anticipated reuniting had tried to murder his younger brother by secreting a needle in a piece of bread. His uncle had sent her packing to the house of her father. After dinner, the captain decided to divorce her.

The next day was taken up with pay calls on the cange and gut-wrenching farewells to the crew. To Hadji Ismael, Aouadallah, and Rais Ibrahim, Gustave gave big baksheesh. He wept, knowing he’d never see them again. The crew scattered, some bound for home, others for drinking, whoring, and gambling binges while the two Frenchmen set off on donkeys for Cairo proper.