Chapter 04 Session 04 Wrap Up

Narrative Recap

The morning after their raucous first night in Alexandria, the party gathered for breakfast at the Locanda del Leone to the competing sounds of mosque calls, church bells, and the distant bray of camels. Freddy and Thomas were in a sorry state, nursing severe hangovers from the previous evening’s lion’s milk, and the landlady mercifully produced a bottle of Mrs. Gray Purse’s hangover remedy to help them along. Over flatbread, white cheese, dates, and cold lamb, the group divided their plans for the day: the ladies would go shopping and visit the baths, while the men would handle money, travel papers, and provisions for the upcoming river journey. Before the group dispersed, Thomas quietly pulled Emma aside to the inn’s courtyard, where a small fountain dribbled in the background, and awkwardly presented her with a beaded veil as a token of his affection — stumbling over his words but earnest in his intent.

Rosa, the widow from Trieste who had outlived three husbands and built a quiet empire of introductions and lace along the Mediterranean, agreed to guide the ladies through the city. She led Emma, Georgiana, and Katherine down through the streets to the souk, a covered lane barely wide enough for three donkeys, where canopies strung between buildings swallowed the sun and the air went thick with cedar, attar of rose, and the sharp bite of dye. Bolts of striped silk and indigo cotton climbed to the rafters, and finished robes and embroidered slippers swayed overhead whenever anyone brushed past. A tailor sat cross-legged behind a counter, driving a needle by lamplight, while veiled women passed in twos and threes through the soft, ankle-deep dust of the lane.

The ladies quickly discovered that without a veil, the merchants would not so much as look at them. Katherine wasted no time, acquiring a traditional widow’s attire — head to toe black silk, a muslin face veil, and soft heelless slippers (Egyptian Street Dress) — and the moment the veil was in place, the merchant who had been ignoring her made direct eye contact and began doing business. She realized with quiet satisfaction that she had become effectively invisible in the local culture, able to disappear into the crowd rather than stand out as a foreign woman. Emma, meanwhile, was drawn to a bolt of peacock shot silk that shifted from blue-green to molten gold as it moved in the lamplight, and she commissioned a custom dress from it to be made overnight (Emma Egyptian Dress). Georgiana requested garments with long sleeves to conceal the mysterious changes spreading across her skin (Georgiana Egyptian Dress), and all three women insisted their new clothes be fitted with hidden interior pockets — a request the skilled local tailors accommodated without so much as a raised eyebrow.

While browsing the market stalls, Emma sought out protective amulets to give to Thomas. She found a blue faience scarab pin said by the seller to be older than Alexander the Great (Blue Faience Scarab Pin), and a hammered silver St. George pendant from a Coptic silversmith’s tray (Silver St George Necklace) — the soldier saint spearing a dragon, worn smooth with age. Georgiana and Katherine also commissioned prayer scrolls (Prayer Scroll Cylinders): small silver cylinders on leather cords, each containing a handwritten prayer tailored to the bearer. Georgiana’s prayer, written in the name of God the merciful, named her mother Cassandra and called for protection from the terrors of the water, the house of painted faces, and the evil eye. Katherine’s scroll asked that the restless dead — those who walk in dreams and knock asking to be answered — be kept from knowing her name.

Rosa then led the ladies to the Hammam al Yasmin, a women’s bathhouse down a lane smelling of wood smoke and jasmine, marked only by a plain studded door with no sign. Inside, the rooms ran from cool to scalding, the domes overhead pierced with colored glass stars that dropped shafts of red and gold light through steam thick enough to chew. Strong-armed attendants scrubbed the women down with coarse mitts on heated belly stones, then sluiced them with brass bowls of water before rubbing them in oil and massaging their shoulders and backs. The bath mistress, Umm Salma, marveled at the restrictive nature of European corsets and stays, and the local women gossiped freely along the benches, cracking sweets between their teeth and talking without drawing breath.

It was when Umm Salma caught sight of Georgiana’s arm that the entire steam room fell silent. The mark — mother-of-pearl in color, shining rather than darkening — was declared a Baraka, a divine blessing, said to flow through the bearer like light through a lamp. The women whispered of Al-Khidr, the deathless green saint of the sea and of travelers, and said the mark bore his color. Mothers edged their children closer, a woman who had miscarried twice quietly asked Georgiana to lay her hand upon her, and others pressed her knuckles to their foreheads and brought small gifts and trinkets. Umm Salma warned Georgiana that the blessing carried a burden: the hand must never be raised in anger or used for low dealings, or the grace within it would sour.

While the ladies were being pampered, the men were navigating a very different kind of ordeal. Yusuf led Freddy, Thomas, Nathaniel, and Adrien to Yaqub ibn Ezra, an elderly Jewish money changer in the banker’s lane who weighed every coin and bit the doubtful ones before taking his commission with a shrug. Nathaniel, however, quickly deduced that Yusuf was skimming a quiet percentage on top of every transaction, and that the Bank of England was quite literally around the corner. He and Adrien made their way there instead, where a meticulous clerk named Wetherall used a slide rule and specimen books to advance Nathaniel a quarter-year’s pay against his Navy arrears. Adrien, meanwhile, visited the French trading house Maison Roux, where the factor Monsieur Bernard treated him with extravagant deference due to his aristocratic title, offering a favorable exchange rate and coffee before the ledger even arrived.

Freddy and Thomas, still green around the edges, retreated to the Amphora — a Greek wine shop two doors off the banker’s lane, cool as a cellar and smelling of pitch and sour wine, lit by light filtering through a pavement grate. There they found two Greek coasting captains mid-backgammon and mid-argument about the wind, who immediately recruited them to hold the stake money for the game. The captains were also arguing about a brig that had arrived carrying a mysterious crate belonging to a dead man, a detail that lingered in the air like smoke. When Nathaniel eventually found them there, he dragged the group onward to the Pasha’s Bureau for their travel papers.

The Pasha’s Bureau was a courtyard of waiting men, clerks cross-legged on a raised platform with reed pens and brass inkwells, and somewhere behind a screen, an official of unknowable rank drinking coffee at the speed of geology. Yusuf transformed at the threshold, louder and grander, trailing their names like banners and slipping bribes to the clerks to move the party up the list. The coffee and dates brought to them were part of a social ritual — a gesture of hospitality that required acknowledgment — but Adrien and Freddy, out of their depth in the local customs, simply accepted the offerings without recognizing what was expected in return. Nathaniel, familiar enough with foreign bureaucracies to know that politeness moved things along as surely as money, was the first to receive his papers (Egypt Travel Papers); Thomas, who had rudely fallen asleep in the corner, was the last.

The victualing market by the old harbor was a roar of livestock and argument, with sacks of rice and lentils standing open-mouthed in rows and live chickens screaming in palm-rib coops. Nathaniel set about assembling provisions for the river journey — rice, lentils, eggs packed in bran, dates, oranges, coffee, charcoal, and a coop of chickens — while Yusuf attempted to manage the transactions. The effort was derailed almost immediately when a one-eyed, sun-blackened veteran named Mansour fell into parade step beside Adrien and began loudly demanding back pay for a donkey he claimed Napoleon owed him, the donkey’s worth growing with each stride back and forth. Meanwhile, Freddy was cornered by a formidable market woman who tried to sell him her entire family’s stock, including premium chickens and the suggestion of a marriageable granddaughter, while Yusuf was dragged into translating the increasingly elaborate negotiation. The party emerged with more dates than they needed, a pair of premium chickens among the regular ones, and the exasperated Yusuf muttering that they must stop smiling at the vendors, as every smile was being taken as agreement to the asking price.

The following morning, eight donkeys and their barefoot, shouting boys arrived outside the inn to carry the party’s trunks, supplies, and the squawking chicken coop down to the old harbor. The procession moved at the pace of the boys’ bare feet, and it was impossible for anyone to look dignified on a donkey. As Georgiana’s animal was being led out, a maid named Aziza silently approached and touched her hand for luck — but Georgiana, startled by the unexpected contact, pulled back. Aziza burst into tears and fled inside, and Georgiana, stricken with guilt, dismounted and chased her down, holding out her hand in reassurance. Aziza pressed it to her forehead and smiled, and Georgiana climbed back onto her donkey and rejoined the procession.

At the old harbor, the party boarded a small lateen-rigged coastal vessel captained by Rais Sala, a lean, barefoot boatman in his thirties with a gold tooth and a fast, easy grin. The djerm sailed east along the coast with the morning breeze, Alexandria’s forest of masts dropping behind them and Pompey’s Pillar standing over the haze until it too disappeared. The trouble came at the mouth of the Nile, where the brown river shoved out against the sea over a dangerous underwater bar, turning the water into a confusion of standing waves and broken foam. Rais was losing the fight with the tiller as two riptides collided around the hull, and Nathaniel, reading the water with a sailor’s instinct, threw his weight onto the tiller alongside the captain. The boat swung clear between the booms, the spray died down, and they slid into the calm of the river mouth, arriving at the lush, green banks of Rashid with its tall houses of alternating black and red brick.

That first night in Rashid, in a well-appointed brick house built right to the edge of the river with a wooden deck extending out over the water, Emma found a quiet moment with Thomas. She pressed the silver St. George necklace into his hands — the soldier saint spearing the dragon, hammered in worn relief — and told him it was for his protection. Thomas turned it over in his fingers for a long moment, his hands suddenly seeming thick and clumsy, and said quietly that he had had men behind him his whole career, men beside him, but never anything over him, and that he would not take it off. It was, by his standards, poetry.

The days on the Nile unfolded in a slow, extraordinary procession of sights and sounds unlike anything most of the party had ever encountered. At dawn on the second day, a crocodile lay hauled out on a mud bank like a fallen log, entirely unbothered, while ibis stalked the shallows on wire-thin legs and a hoopoe flared its crest on the cabin roof. When the wind dropped at midday and the crew took up the long oars, one man called a chant and the rest answered it on the pull — four rising and falling notes that slapped the hull and carried across the water, entrancing Emma so completely that she found herself humming it long after the wind returned. At night, the boat was tied to a stake driven into the bank, and Nathaniel shared snuff with the crew around the brazier, earning their deep and lasting respect. Katherine, keeping watch from the edge of the camp, spotted a neighboring group of travelers using a password challenge to enter their camp — a detail that nagged at her until morning, when she found their fire reduced to smoldering embers and the camp entirely abandoned.

After five days on the river, Cairo appeared around a bend in the Nile — a thousand minarets and the citadel on its ridge, palm groves green along both banks, and the pyramids holding the haze across the desert, pale and exact. The dahabeah nosed into the crowded landing at Bulaq, and the party made their way inland through the narrow lanes of the Muski district to the Auberge du Muski, a whitewashed inn behind a blue door with a tiled courtyard, a running fountain, and a vine older than the marriage of its proprietors covering the south wall. The inn was run by Sergeant Bruyer, a one-eared former French gunner who had missed the evacuation on purpose and stayed in Egypt by choice, and his wife Sitt Nafisa, a broad and upright Cairene woman who was the true power behind the establishment and cooked, it was said, with aggression. Presiding over the courtyard from a stone bench was Le Corporal, an enormous one-eyed cat who, by all accounts, outranked the guests. The party had reached Cairo, and whatever came next, they had arrived.