The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

6

MIRAGE

Early the next morning, Gustave had the good fortune to be on the deck of the cange when a slave ship was passing. A long, shallow craft, it resembled a huge dugout canoe with masts added at either end. At this cool hour after dawn, the sails were furled and the boat was drifting downriver with the current, toward Cairo. Over its midsection fluttered a tattered canopy rolled up on a metal frame, leaving the boat’s cargo in full view. A camel, tethered by its bridle to the mast, stood uncertainly at the stern, its legs widely planted. In front of the camel, seated in rows like oarsmen, a dozen or so Nubian girls huddled together.

The farther upriver Gustave traveled—the farther south—the more primitive the people had become. Alexandria had been cosmopolitan, an Eastern version of Paris, bustling with European, Egyptian, Turkish, African, and Arab denizens. Two hundred and eighty kilometers to the south, in Cairo, the first signs of the vast, untamed interior appeared: burlap bags of gum Arabic, salt, and dates piled up on the docks; covered bazaars where the products of metal, straw, leather, and wood workshops were arrayed; and, of course, the slave markets. Cairo was very much a city, with schools and policemen, soldiers and veiled women billowing through the streets, a steady rush of multifariously intentioned traffic moving in all directions at once. Approaching Abu Simbel, a thousand kilometers farther south, he had sensed another order of change. With every passing kilometer, it seemed he moved back in time. Except for the pyramids at Giza, the monuments of Nubia were the biggest and oldest in Egypt, and they existed in isolation. Nearby were no mud brick houses, no mosques, schools, or gardens—in short, nothing but ancient temples and riverine way stations where a traveler might negotiate for food or flesh. Only stouthearted explorers ventured beyond the second cataracts or dared to leave the security of the riverbank for the unmapped hinterland.

The women in the slave boat did not refuse his gaze; in fact, they seemed emboldened by it. Because he detected no shame in their eyes, he gave himself permission to stare openly, to catalog every detail. The eldest might have been fifteen; the others were barely pubescent. He wondered how they had come to be slaves. Perhaps the girls’ families had sold them because they could not afford a dowry for a husband. He was convinced that matrimony was somehow involved in their fate, just as it was for European women. If he had been born a woman, he would have chosen the life of the mistress or the spinster rather than the wife.

It was this kind of thinking that had soured him on his sister’s marriage. He had never really accepted the fact that Caroline would one day cease to be the free-spirited painter and reader of books he adored, that she would spend an entire week in Paris hunting for pillowcases and blankets for her trousseau instead of suitable landscapes to sketch. She had always been a delightfully impish child and then a rowdy girl, following her big brother’s lead.

Grief tightened his throat. It seemed impossible that she would not dash through the doors and onto the lawn to greet him when he returned to Croisset. How many times had he caught himself pondering gifts for her along the Nile?

Though he had opposed the betrothal, he had said nothing to interfere with her happiness. But on the wedding day, when he saw her in her ivory peau de soie wedding gown, looking more like a pastry than a person, he’d battled the impulse to lift the lace veil from her face, drag her from the church, and return her to her rightful place by his side as they mounted one of their spontaneous theatrical productions or skipped pebbles across the glass skin of the Seine. He had wanted to shake her—shake off her solemnity—and indulge in a session with Le Garçon—“Short Pants”—whose mediocre school history Caroline had fabricated. M. Descambeaux has received from the École du Droit black balls in Torts, Contracts, and Procedures, and two red balls to match his own, one in Comedy and the other in Excuses. How could Caroline have turned into a matron, depriving him of her good humor and beauty, of the jaunty swish of her skirts along the stone patio? For his pauvre Caroline, marriage had been worse than enslavement; it had been a death sentence. His beloved sister had died of a school friend’s hard-on, he thought now without rancor. He might as well have infected her with cholera or smallpox.

The price of passion was death; he had always known that.

The sky, a depthless painted-on blue, brightened as the slave boat loomed closer. Several of the women stood to get a better view of the cange and him. With the exception of bead necklaces and short grass skirts attached to a string pulled tight around their hips, they were naked. Just the day before, Joseph had cautioned him to avoid the poisonous castor bean plants growing wild along the swampy fringes of the river. Only the Nubians, he said, had found a use for it. Indeed. These slaves had soaked their hair and skin with the oil. In the clear morning light, they gleamed like polished wood.

As the boat veered closer, he locked eyes with a girl whose coiffure resembled a black jester’s hat. He had never seen such profuse tresses, except in wigs. Her hair was plaited in fine braids that were bunched together all over her head into points. She lifted one hand and waved shyly at him. He reciprocated. As the boat overtook the cange, the women looked back at him, turning their heads over their shoulders in unison, like a flock of birds, and trilling to him with high-pitched voices. The next moment, in one of the many tricks of light Gustave had observed on the Nile, the boat vanished into a blinding explosion of glare where the sun caught fire on the mirrored surface of the river. The avian calls of the Nubian girls hung in the air briefly, and then the river was still again except for the wind and the creaking of the cange as it seesawed in the wake of the slave boat. Gustave watched the water until he could no longer distinguish the pattern of the wake from the random figures of the current. A papyrus island, which he had thought firm land, drifted past, with birds chittering among the tall green stalks.

Gustave switched his attention from the river to the meal being assembled nearby. Max had already taken his place at the table and was stirring orange-flavored sugar into his water. “Quick! Eat something,” he called out. “We should get an early start today at the rock temples.” Was he imagining it, or were they always in a rush to eat and then to leave? He liked to dawdle over his food, but Max hated wasting time. Max was lecherous, but he was no voluptuary, like dear dead Alfred.

Hadji Ismael hurried to arrange Gustave’s folding stool beneath him. This one-eyed man never lost sight of his employers, yet didn’t move his head excessively, as if his eye could migrate at will to the back of his skull.

Set before Gustave was breakfast: a piece of flat bread and three quail eggs, steamed in their shells. His mouth began to water as he lifted an olive to his lips.

• • •

Gustave and a new assistant, Achmet, the youngest crewman, made molds by lamplight that morning in one of the gloomy halls of the great temple, spared the direct sun, but nearly suffocating in the dead air of the cavernous space. It felt to Gustave as if an eternity of repetitive labor had passed since breakfast. He raised his head and peered about in the dim light of the chamber. There were enough bloody inscriptions to keep him busy for a year. At least he was free to choose which ones he copied. The only limitation was that they be contiguous, which assumed that the walls shared something in common with books—that the narrative flowed from left to right or right to left. He had already made squeezes of the inscriptions on the eight columns in the main hall. As for the total number of squeezes, he was completely at the mercy of Max. The longer Max stayed at Abu Simbel taking photographs, the more squeezes he was obliged to produce. There were no diversions nearby to seduce Gustave from his task—no brothels, taverns, or restaurants—nothing but the Nile, and the towering cliffs on either side. Still, his mind was not free while he was required to apply wet paper to unyielding stone.

He looked forward to the time when he had only to supervise Achmet. One of the few literate crew members, Achmet understood that he was preserving the wisdom of his ancient forebears who, until now, had excited no curiosity in him. Gustave had explained that a scholar in France might spend years studying Achmet’s squeezes. So, despite the tedium, the man was meticulous, brushing the inscriptions clean as Gustave had demonstrated, wetting the paper, then pressing it into the reliefs with a finer brush. Since taking on the job, Achmet carried himself among the crew with the pride of the anointed, certain that making squeezes was preferable to excavating the head of Ramses or swabbing the decks of the cange.

From time to time Gustave clowned and pantomimed for Achmet, who cackled loudly at his japes, clapping his hands over his mouth.

Achmet carefully peeled off two dry squeezes and placed them in their cardboard box. Carting the molds around was like transporting eggs—anything could ruin them. He looked to Gustave for further instruction. Gustave responded with a rolling movement of his hands. “Continue, mon ami,” he said. “Fais un autre.” With that, he picked up one of the lamps and set off toward the entrance to get a breath of air. The cavern stank of burning lamp oil, sweat, the staleness of the ages, and the fine-bore shit of scorpions and beetles.

The next room was bathed in a dusky orange glow. Around two more corners, daylight leaked in. He hoisted himself up the sandy ramp to the entrance, squinting against the stinging onslaught of windblown sand.

Standing in the doorway, he contemplated the scene before him. Because of the height of the temple, he could not see the river below or its banks, only a glittering streak of blue-silver in the distance, where the Nile snaked away through the cliffs. It looked small and insignificant, like a misplaced piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Closer by, tourists were picnicking and lounging under the stunted acacia trees. There were always tourists camped by the rock temple, but he had no desire to meet any of them and remained in mufti.

Directly before him was the gigantic hill of sand that had swallowed the fourth Ramses up to his nostrils. It was wide as well as steep, always difficult to negotiate. If they did take the caravan to Koseir, he expected they would encounter dunes that would make this one seem a piker.

As he eyed the sand ramp from the top of it, an indistinct vision appeared at the bottom. A mirage, he first thought. But it lacked the illusion of water, the sparkling waves he’d often observed hovering above the desert, especially early in the morning. Was it, perhaps, another sort of mirage? Fata morgana, he recalled, the name of the storied mirage off the Strait of Messina, which had been spotted for hundreds of years, like clockwork. It appeared to passing sailors like a wooded hillside or a ship, the images hanging high on the sky like unfinished paintings.

As he stared, something blue and slender, like a fishing float, bobbed into view. Above it, a scintillant blur the pink of a seashell stretched wide and narrowed again. Then dark dots formed beneath the blue stripe, like clumps of soil hanging from the root of a flower. The entire assemblage moved again. Perhaps it was going sideways; perhaps it was advancing. Long moments passed as the blue stem widened to an oval. And then, as if bursting through a curtain or an invisible membrane, the colored slices merged and a small party climbing the hill led by a woman in blue resolved into sharper focus. He watched the woman’s small, foreshortened figure toil uphill. Though she was only halfway along the ramp, he could now see that she wore a pink bonnet. The blue of her dress was the color of a summer day, tender and hopeful. Feeling as if he had witnessed a birth, he slumped down, exhausted and exalted, out of her sight.

He remembered another summer sky, another blue dress. It was July, a few months after Caroline died. He was taking her death mask and a plaster cast of her hand to James Pradier, who had recently made his father’s memorial bust. The atelier was immense, one of those airy, high-ceilinged rooms favored by artists, with columns instead of walls, like a ballroom. Close to the windows, alongside a pedestal laden with clay, James stood, dashingly attired in red velvet tights embroidered in gold. Over a white shirt with an extravagant lace jabot he wore a brown canvas apron. His hands were gray with dried clay. He greeted Gustave, pointing to a sofa and one of a pair of overstuffed chairs. In the magical light of the atelier, the chair, with its loosening down stuffing, seemed not shabby, but as if it were sprouting feathery wings.

A woman sat upon a stool with her back to him and James. Blond sausage curls dangled on pale pink shoulders. She was wearing a blue dress. No, blue was not the word. Azure. For such a creature with golden tresses, the gown must be azure. Bunches of fabric—smocked sleeves, and a wide gathered skirt—conveyed plenitude, as if the sky had wrapped itself around her for the pure pleasure of azure. She sat stock still while Pradier daubed clay from the amorphous lump beside him to the emergent bust on the revolving table.

“Who is your visitor?” the woman asked, her face still hidden.

“No one who would interest you,” James answered. “A mere provincial, a young writer from Rouen.”

“Oh?” the voice said. “I have heard his footsteps. May I hear his voice?”

“As long as you do not move a centimeter.” James nodded at Gustave, giving him permission to speak.

“Je m’appele Gustave. Gustave Flaubert.”

“Oh, Flaubert. I’ve heard of you.”

“No, you haven’t!” James said.

“I certainly have,” the voice insisted, rising with irritation. It did not seem attached to the inert figure on the stool.

James turned to Gustave. “Louise will never admit that anyone is unknown to her.”

“Perhaps you’ve mentioned me to her,” Gustave said, enjoying the cooling effect of a breeze that blew through the open windows.

“Why would I do that?”

“The death of my father, perhaps?” Gustave conjectured. “He was, after all, a well-known surgeon. Could you have shown her his bust?”

James shook his head and began to throw small pinches onto the head where the hair would go. The clay sat up in tufts like beaten egg whites.

“I shall meet him soon in any case,” Louise said. “I must take a break. My neck is aching.” She swiveled on her stool and in the next instant was extending an alabaster hand to him. He rose from his chair and, bowing formally, gathered her hand in his and kissed it. “A great pleasure, I’m sure,” he mumbled. At twenty-five he could still be flustered by a beautiful woman, and the glimpse of her face, not to mention her shoulders and hair, had undone him. He hoped he was not blushing.

James completed the introductions. “Madame Colet is a poet of some repute.” He turned to Louise. “And Gustave is a promising young writer.”

“A poet also?” she asked. She moved toward the furniture, sorting out her voluminous skirts behind her, like an exotic bird preening its tail feathers. The neckline of her dress was fashionably low front and back. He tried not to stare.

“I am not a poet, madame. I am a novelist.”

Louise arranged herself upon the worn loveseat, taking up most of it. “Have these novels seen the light of day? Who is your publisher?”

After he quit law school, he had revised Novembre, but did not intend to publish it yet. He considered it the draft of a novice. Too personal to share with anyone but his closest friends, it aged in a drawer at home, alongside the manuscript of Smarrh, the novella he wrote when he was thirteen. He could not mention that to her, either. Nor was it safe to talk about The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which he had just begun to research. “I am still a virgin, madame, when it comes to publication. I am revising, awaiting the right opportunity.”

She tucked one foot under her petticoats and turned sideways to face him. “That is very wise. Reviewers have memories like elephants, and the first work published must set the standard. Revision is good. Though I myself”—she paused to secure his gaze—“am known for writing rapidly.”

James carefully draped a damp canvas cloth over the bust. “Louise cranked out one poem in three days to meet a deadline. Isn’t that correct? They say you wrote it in one sitting of fifty-five hours.”

“Indeed. I never changed out of my housedress. That was my first prize-winning poem from the Academy. Do you know it, monsieur?” she asked Gustave. “‘Le Musée de Versailles’?” She dropped her glance to pick a piece of lint off her bodice, giving him an opportunity—almost inviting him—to stare at it himself. Her rib cage was small and firm, perhaps from boning, a perfect complement to the lavish softness of her breasts, which rose majestically above the neckline and bobbled slightly, like twin puddings, as she moved her arms. The lady, he was pleased to note, was delectably feminine in every regard. The blue satin shoe that peeked from her lacy underskirts might have been a child’s slipper. Her face was bright, her eyes oceanic, her features regular, with plump cheeks that lent a petulant pout, even when her face was in repose. He set upon fixing her in his mind until the time when he might request a portrait from her as a keepsake.

“I regret that I do not know the work,” Gustave replied. “Could you furnish me with a copy?”

“But of course. It would be my pleasure. Shall I fetch it now? I shall give you a copy of my first book as well, Fleurs du Midi—”

“No!” James bellowed. “You are posing for me, are you not?

“It would only take a few moments.” Louise explained to Gustave that she lived two blocks away, on rue Fontaine Saint-George. She made sure to mention her husband, the composer Hippolyte, and her daughter, Henriette. This information, Gustave understood, was offered as the bona fides of her availability, not to discourage his interest. As he well knew, everyone in Paris who was anyone took a lover. If he were going to have a sex life despite the risk of triggering a seizure, it would be best on many counts with a respectable married woman rather than a prostitute. He could form a loving and long-term relationship; a pregnancy could be finessed as legitimate progeny.

James compromised. “A few more minutes, Louise, until I finish the hairline, and we’ll be done for the day. Perhaps Gustave will accompany you to your flat to save you the return trip.”

“It would be my pleasure,” he said.

It was clear to them that a flirtation and assignation had been accomplished with the air of complete respectability. Had Louise’s husband, Hippolyte, been in the room, Gustave thought with a shiver of delight, there would have been nothing he could have pointed to as improper.

Louise resumed posing. Gustave watched fascinated as James rolled clay between his hands to fashion slender coils. On the bust, they became a crude approximation of the tendrils of hair at her nape.

“Done!” James pronounced, once again covering the bust with a damp cloth. Louise hopped down from the stool and retreated to a dry sink at the far end of the studio to freshen up.

It was then that Gustave handed Caroline’s death mask and the cast of her hand to James. Immediately upon seeing the likeness of his sister, his mood plummeted. James stood silently pondering the mask for a long moment. At last, he spoke. The bronze he had used for Dr. Flaubert’s bust was a practical and masculine material, ideal for a distinguished man. For Caroline he suggested marble, befitting her delicate beauty. Gustave agreed.

When she rejoined them, Louise was sharply taken aback by the mask, which was unmistakably the face of a dead woman, the eyes closed, the mouth set for eternity. “Oh, my dears,” she whispered. “Who?”

“My sister, Caroline. My only sister.” Gustave looked down at the floor to control his feelings.

“And so young. How?”

He continued to look down, unable to speak.

“Childbed fever,” said James.

Louise stepped nearer and inserted her hand in the crook of Gustave’s arm. “I am very sorry, my dear,” she whispered, so low the words were barely audible. She touched his hand.

If only he could look up to meet her eyes, to acknowledge her kindness, the physical warmth of her touch. But he was afraid he would burst into tears.

“Come, my new friend, we shall walk and Paris herself will lift your spirits.”

Sniffling, Gustave reached one-handed for his handkerchief. His nose was running furiously.

“Let me,” she said, removing the cloth from his pocket and touching it lightly to his mouth and nose. “There, chéri. That’s better, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Come. The urchins and beggars of Paris are waiting for us.”

Still arm in arm, Louise handed Gustave her straw bonnet to hold by its satin ties and they exited through the wide door, clattering down the metal stairs.

Gustave could not believe his luck. Not an hour had passed since he first laid eyes on Louise’s curls, and now he was hurrying with this blond Venus to her apartment.

On the street, he fumbled for an instant, unsure as to etiquette. Was the gentleman supposed to be closer to the street in case of horses taking a shit or running amok? Or closer to the houses, to receive the onslaught of emptied chamber pots? He could not for the life of him recall in that moment which was considered more gallant.

Louise’s flat occupied the corner of a golden-red brick, pre-Revolutionary house converted to apartments. Though fallen into mild disrepair—there were pieces of slate missing from the roof, gutters slightly askew, windows cracked here and there—the beauty and grandeur of the building’s origins overpowered its recent history.

Louise withdrew a key from a lavender velvet wristlet, unlocked the massive door, and gestured him into a fair-sized drawing room. A pier glass caught their reflections as they entered, she confident, he more tentative. She stationed him on the couch and excused herself.

As the curtains floated up in the breeze, he caught her perfume, a whiff of musk and roses. He began to scan the room for clues to her character. Everything about his goddess was blue. Her eyes, her dress, and now her parlor, He was sitting on a worn blue camelbacked sofa draped with a darker blue silk shawl. Throw rugs in shades of aquamarine were strewn in thoughtful asymmetry along the dark planks of the floor, like garden plantings. The furnishings suggested that Madame Colet was financially pressed, that her chairs and taborets, tables and sconces were finds from flea markets and secondhand shops, with the exception, perhaps, of a finely carved alabaster lamp hanging from the ceiling by three brass chains.

Face and chest freshly powdered, Louise returned bearing a tray with strawberries, a bottle of wine, a pitcher of cream, and bread.

In truth, he had no appetite, at least not for food. But it would be rude to refuse her hospitality, so he accepted the nondescript wine she offered in a cheap glass. He swallowed a mouthful and felt it go directly to his head, where it buzzed and faded, like an annoying insect.

Louise drizzled heavy cream over the sugared strawberries and he watched as white rivulets feathered out into ferny shapes that turned pink as they mingled with the sauce. He smeared a spoonful of the mixture onto his bread. As his teeth sank into the soft white dough, a trickle of jam melted onto his tongue, exploding with sweetness and tartness.

“Delicious,” he muttered. “The combination . . .” The flavors surged in his mouth, the crisp crust becoming a moist, tender wad, the fleshy berries yielding to the syrup, all of it clinging to the fat of the cream before it vanished into the cleansing tang of the wine, which flowed tidelike around his mouth. His mouth! He was profoundly grateful for that marvelous organ, which, at this moment, equaled anything he had ever experienced with that other wonder, his prick. Had he ever eaten before? Christ, he thought, the purest culinary bliss I have ever known, the flavor, the savor—

“I am flattered, monsieur, that my cooking pleases you.”

“And how,” he mumbled, his voice drenched with the creamy, sugared fruit. “Is there some secret ingredient perhaps? Honey? Lemon zest?”

“I assure you no.”

Soon the tray was empty. She smiled, pleased by his satisfaction.

While she cleared away the dishes, he sat back, content, and peered around the room, noticing its details at leisure. There were knickknacks and sentimental objects scattered about: a miniature vase with straw flowers; an ordinary rock on a table. (Did it represent a love affair, a pleasant afternoon picnicking in the country, an arduous hike in the Alps?) But mostly, there were books. Everywhere. They lined the walls of the salon and the end table shelves. Beneath the coffee table, the floor was stacked with journals and newspapers. Across the desk where it adjoined the wall, bookends kept a regiment of taller books upright. A stack of books leaned in a corner, behind a jade plant. He relaxed into the sofa with a sigh, feeling at home, among his own kind. “My dear Madame Colet,” he ventured. “Tell me, what do you like to read?”

A torrent of authors and titles ensued. The conversation, until then a pleasant stream, roared into a deluge as Gustave shouted out names and Louise pulled books down from shelves. Hugo and Aristotle, Vigny, Musset, Byron, Sophocles—beloved Sophocles—and Plato, Montaigne and Rousseau, Chateaubriand. Soon the open books surrounded them like a flock of hungry street pigeons come to partake of the literary feast.

For Gustave, reading was a sacred event. “To me,” he explained, “words refine experience, the way a smelter turns ore into steel, giving it the luster and strength of truth that is lacking in its coarse, original form.” Quite eloquent, he thought, for a first articulation.

Louise smiled. “Beautifully put. And so true. I could not have said it better.”

“And I wonder if you have discovered the master himself.” He was testing her, hoping she wouldn’t fail. “I am speaking of a writer we have only in translation, and only recently,” he hinted.

Louise rushed to her desk, removed a thick portfolio, and plopped down beside him on the couch. Whisking a lace doily to the floor, she placed the folder on the small coffee table, untied its suede closures, and removed a sheaf of paper. Her eyes were blue fireworks. “I’ve translated The Tempest,” she announced.

Could it be that his goddess loved Shakespeare as much as he did? So few of his countrymen were conversant with the Bard. For some reason, it had taken the French hundreds of years to discover the greatest writer on earth. “Please,” Gustave said. “Would you honor me with a reading?”

Her cheeks flushing, Louise fanned the pages until she found the scene she wanted. “Ah, here is the most captivating speech,” she said excitedly. “It is Prospero’s. You will undoubtedly recognize it.” She paused for a moment, collecting herself like an actress about to declaim, her face growing solemn. When she read, her voice was deeper and more powerful, like a peaceful river that was forced through narrows.

Gustave knew The Tempest well. He and Bouilhet had read it out loud together, in French and English, often mystified by the archaic language, but in love with its music and wit. He knew, too, that translation was a difficult art, demanding the precision of a scholar and the vision of a poet. Madame Colet was clearly inspired; she had not lost the passion of the text. But he also knew that Shakespeare rarely wrote in classic Alexandrine couplets. Louise’s rhymes were clanging distractions (“Players/layers . . . palace/chalice”), too loud and predictable for the nuanced images. But surely, a negative comment was not the way to her bed. She might even feel insulted. After all, she was a published poet and he—who was he to criticize?

“And our little lives are circled with a snooze,” she concluded.

“Brilliant,” he lied. He planted a kiss on her knuckles. He couldn’t stop staring at her. “You are such an adorable genius, my dear Madame Colet.” The last time he had felt so moved, he was fourteen and watching Elisa suckling her infant on the beach. Now he ached to take Louise in his arms.

“You must call me Louise,” she said, still using the more formal vous.

“My dear Louise.” Desire now burned in him like lava rising to the rim of a caldera. He leaned to kiss her cheek. She, too, pressed forward, aligning her face to meet his lips. But at the very moment the fine golden hairs on her upper lip swam into view, he heard a loud click. The door flew open and a child burst into the room, followed by a nurse trying to restrain her. He and Louise snapped apart.

“Maman!” the little girl cried, jumping onto Louise’s lap.

Louise made the introductions, but the child was not interested. She wished only to hang from her mother’s neck, playing with her earrings as she recounted everything she had seen outdoors, babbling on and on to Louise’s delight.

The child was as beautiful as her mother, he observed, further proof that Louise’s beauty was not a chance or temporary thing, but an inalterable essence so innate to her being that it could be relied upon to reproduce itself.

Louise cast him a look that conveyed it was time to leave. After peremptory pleasantries all around, he gathered his jacket and hat. Louise suggested that the nurse take Henriette to her room to use the chamber pot while she accompanied her guest to the door.

As they stood prolonging their good-byes, he realized that she had not once mentioned her husband and that the apartment was devoid of male belongings. The esteemed composer must not reside there. “The child’s father, does he visit?” he asked.

“We are separated.” Louise adjusted the hem of his jacket sleeve to reach his shirt cuff. “It’s a complicated arrangement.” Later Pradier explained that neither Hippolyte Colet nor Victor Cousin, a previous lover, acknowledged Henriette’s paternity.

He kissed her hand, hoping she would not object to the tip of his tongue brushing the skin.

“Tomorrow the nurse will return Henriette to her boarding school,” she whispered. “Will you visit again in the afternoon?”

He nodded. The thought of what the next day might bring made him giddy. “Au revoir.” He turned to go. “À demain.”

He pushed through the immense old door into the July heat.

• • •

Still slumped in the temple doorway, Gustave regarded his right hand, which lay by his side in a bright patch of light, as separate from him as a specimen in his father’s laboratory. The shiny pink scar where his father had scalded him while tending him after his first seizure flamed anew in the desert sun. The burn had pained him for months and left him marked for life with this paternal sign—of deep-seated disapproval? Surely it had been an accident, but one that had acquired symbolic importance. On the scar, sweat formed a glistening slick. He could almost see the moisture evaporate in fetid waves.

The woman in the mirage was clearer now as she trudged purposefully forward. A native guide peripatetically extended an arm to steady her, but she seemed determined to outpace him and avoid his assistance. Behind her, a plumper woman trod more slowly, a native pressing both hands against her back to help her up the steep incline. As Gustave well knew, even where the sand was level, it constantly gave way so that one never had secure footing. The second woman was graceless. Hunkered down, her stout arms extended on either side for balance, she shambled forward like a bear.

Abruptly, she lost her footing and shrieked, continuing to yowl as she skidded onto her back and slid down the slope, finally coming to a stop like an upended tortoise. He sprang to his feet and rushed toward her.

He tacked laterally across the sand for better purchase, leaving zigzagging footprints like the trail of a huge snake. Below him, two guides were attempting to lift the horizontal female, but she was fending them off, kicking and slapping at their hands and shouting shrilly lest, he gathered, they touch her. What, he wondered, would be an acceptable anchor by which they could right this beached whale? The hair, no doubt, but that would be painful and might result in baldness. Surely she would have no objection to a native guide grabbing her by the feet. But to drag her the rest of the way would be more of a sanding than a salvation. What was needed was a magician to levitate her above the dune like one of the whirling, swirling dervishes he’d seen in Cairo.

Her smaller companion accosted him just as he reached the comical scene. It was Miss Nightingale. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, squinting into the sun. “Can you help my maid?”

“It would be my honor,” Gustave answered in French.

“M. Flaubert?”

“At your service, mademoiselle.” He pushed back his pom-pommed hood, exposing a sunburned face, shaggy beard, and shaved head.

The squirming figure on the ground paused in her struggles to watch the pair become reacquainted. “Leave off of me!” she screamed as the guide misread her momentary stillness as an invitation to try to hoist her from the ground. Poor fellow, Gustave thought, he thinks the soles of his feet will be blistered if he doesn’t get her up in the next few minutes. Bastinadoes all around when news of the debacle reached their captain.

“This is my maid, Trout,” Florence began. “Trout, meet Mr. Flau—”

“For the love of God, mum, save the introductions and just get me up. I’m sinking. Is it quicksand I’m in?”

“No, definitely not. Plain sand.”

Gustave liked being the hero, but he wasn’t certain that he was equal to this feat. He wondered which would be easier to move: deadweight or weight attempting ineffectually to rise? He waved the guides back. “It would help,” he told Florence in French, “if she would stop fighting and lie still.” Florence translated and Trout quieted, her hand stiffened into a visor on her forehead.

Planting his feet apart on the incline, Gustave bent to the task, placing one arm under Trout’s knees and the other under her neck, swashbuckler-like. He lifted with all his strength, but the hot dune immediately shifted under him, spilling him up to his calves in sand. He let go and stood, shaking his head. What was that principle of the lever he had studied in school? The longer the handle, the greater the weight? He remembered an illustration of Archimedes lifting the earth with a pole, but the only lever he had handy were his arms, which weren’t getting any longer. He stepped closer. Perhaps the fireman’s carry, the maid like a gunnysack over his shoulder?

Miss Nightingale said, “Trout, I think it would work if one person could lift your head and another your feet.”

Trout made a sour face. “I don’t want these heathens touching me, mum. It ain’t proper for an Englishwoman to be handled by such as these.”

Gustave resumed his position to try again.

“Let me help,” Florence said, bending down.

“No, you are too small.”

“I’m very strong,”

“I have no doubt of that, but it would not be enough,” Gustave said. “The sand sucks everything down.”

They stood pondering while Trout lay in the sun, her face red, sweat forming in droplets on her upper lip and in the rolls of her neck. She wiped her brow with the sleeve of her dress.

“J’ai une idée,” Miss Nightingale said. She removed her brown Holland jacket and stuffed it into Gustave’s hands, then knelt, bare-armed, beside Trout and whispered into her ear.

“No,” Trout objected loudly. “I won’t do it!”

Florence stood up. “There is no other way.”

Trout’s face turned crimson with rage. “I wish I’d never come to this godless desert.”

“You are not in England now. You are in Egypt and you are being unnecessarily difficult.”

Trout began to bawl; small bubbles inflated and popped at her nostrils.

“As your employer, I must insist.” Miss Nightingale retrieved her jacket from Gustave. The native guides shuffled their feet, looking ill at ease and fearful. Relentless sun, indifferent sand. This was, after all, the eastern Sahara. Gustave felt the heat thickening the rough wool of his robes, secreting itself into every fold of fabric and skin, sweat dripping from his armpits, chest, neck, and groin. Through the soles of his boots, his feet were beginning to burn. Trout would soon be Trout frite and then they would have to bury or eat her.

Miss Nightingale knelt again, and folding her beige jacket in half, blindfolded Trout, tying the sleeves behind her head. She waved the servants to return to the reluctant lady in distress and gestured for Gustave to take charge. She did not have to say a word. Everyone understood the enterprise. Trout was to be tackled by however many hands as were needed, placed on whatever parts of her body provided traction.

And so the Englishwoman was hefted silently from the dune by six hands and borne like a ceremonial offering toward the temple of Ramses II. Behind Trout’s improvised blinders, Gustave thought he detected a muffled sigh of resignation or relief. He followed the pink of Miss Nightingale’s bonnet, the tiny masterful hands. She had placed herself alongside the procession, at his shoulder. How delicate she was, deerlike, and yet how practical, resourceful, and forthright. But there was something beyond those familiar English traits in her. He sensed it in her bearing, in the way she had taken charge of the situation—eagerly, like someone with a sense of purpose. It seemed to him that where the French had raised passion to a universal good, the English had substituted purpose, social progress, and sexual prohibition.

The innocent Miss Nightingale (most likely she was a virgin, he theorized) smiled at him, a commendation for a job well executed as the entourage struggled at last into a patch of shade. There they were met by the picnickers he‘d observed earlier, a small mob of concerned Europeans oohing and aahing at the sight of an Englishwoman being transported like a pharaoh across the blazing sand.

Among the crowd were Miss Nightingale’s companions whom he’d seen before from a distance when he first met her on the road. The man loped forward and arranged a blanket to receive the still-airborne servant. But she wasn’t having it and insisted they put her down on her own two feet, whereupon she all but collapsed on the blanket, her skirts deflating around her like laundry in a dead wind.

The natives vanished in a wink, going, he figured, behind the temple or in it for shade. Miss Nightingale hastened to introduce everyone and invited Gustave to join her for sugar water and English biscuits. She really was polite, this little deer, with a heart-shaped faced and lustrous brown hair, some of which had come loose from her pink hat and hung in damp tendrils on her neck and shoulder. Her skin was as pale as cream, with an inner glow, the result of the heat, no doubt. She untied her jacket and shook it out. Her arms were thin, but with well-defined muscles. Unbidden, the image of himself licking them clean of sweat flashed to mind.

When he did not respond to her invitation, she repeated it, but her companion, Charles, had already moved into gear, pumping Gustave’s hand. “Biscuits, posh! You must join us for dinner.”

Gustave agreed to meet on their houseboat at eight the next evening.

“Along with Mr. Du Camp,” Flo added.

“Who?” Charles asked.

Flo reminded her dear friend that she had met two Frenchmen on the road. Didn’t he recall? They had had guns.

“I love to shoot,” Charles said. “Almost as much as I love to visit Greece. My two favorite pastimes.”

Miss Nightingale stepped away, in deference to Mr. Bracebridge, and was conferring with Mrs. Bracebridge, one hand on her bonnet and the other clasping her friend’s hand. He watched her moving in her dress, a costume that made her larger than she was from the waist down, and smaller than she was from the waist up. The most fetching fashion for most women, as far as he was concerned, was a bedsheet.

“I must return to work,” he said, draining the tumbler of sugar water.

“Mr. Flaubert is an emissary of the French government,” Flo explained. The Bracebridges nodded, appropriately impressed if still unclear as to his occupation.

“We are making squeezes of the monuments,” he explained. “Inside the temple. I have my man, Achmet, working, but he slacks off if I don’t supervise.” That was a lie. Achmet worked harder than a man ought, as if in fear for his life. Gustave planned to reward him with a generous baksheesh at journey’s end.

“I’m sorry you can’t linger,” Florence said. She offered him her hand, that dainty and delightful frond of flesh. Ever the cavalier, he bowed and pressed it to his lips. He took the taste of her skin with him as he walked toward the three Ramseses steadily regarding the scene.