Chapter 04 Session 05 Wrap Up
Narrative Recap
The party arrived in Cairo as the last light of day faded over the city, their donkeys clattering through the dusty lanes of the Muski district until they found themselves standing before a blue door set into an otherwise anonymous whitewashed wall. Behind it lay the Auberge du Muski, a secure inn with a tiled courtyard in worn blue and white, a running fountain, and an ancient vine climbing the south wall as though it had always been there. Sergeant-Fusilier Bruyère, a one-eared French ex-soldier who had stayed in Egypt on purpose, welcomed them with the practiced efficiency of a man who had spent thirteen years as a quartermaster. His wife, Sitt Nafisa, came bustling out of the kitchen with flour up to her elbows, looked the group over with sharp eyes, and immediately began issuing instructions in Arabic before disappearing to put more food on the table.
The rooms were assigned with uncanny precision. Katherine received the corner room with a mashrabiya screen overlooking the Muski, a carved wooden lattice that let her watch the entire street below without being seen. Nathaniel was placed in a room facing the street, where every sound of the city would pour through the shutters, while Freddy was given an end room with a window that opened onto a roof stair and the terraced rooftops beyond. Bruyère took those who were curious down to see his strong room — an old grain cellar reinforced with a thick iron door, a heavy swing bolt, and a lock that no blade could cut through — and noted that he slept directly above it to ensure nothing went missing.
The courtyard table was laden with a feast that stopped every member of the party in their tracks. Stuffed pigeons with frikeh that smelled of smoke, lamb with apricot, lentils and rice with fried onion, mulukhiyah the color of pond weed, bread, fruit, and coffee were all piled high in celebration of Eid al-Fitr, the breaking of the fast after a full month of fasting. Bruyère explained that they had arrived on the first of three days of feasting, and Sitt Nafisa pushed double portions in front of Emma with the quiet authority of a woman who had decided the girl needed fattening up. Adrien was handed a glass of brandy by Bruyère, who leaned in and asked if he might come speak with him the following evening — he thirsted, he said, for news of France.
After eating, the group ventured out into the lamp-lit streets of Cairo, where the lane outside the blue door had transformed entirely from the one they had arrived on. Lanterns hung on poles, a wooden roundabout turned with children standing on it, and strangers pressed rings of sugar cake — kahk, a shortbread stuffed with dates or nuts and buried under icing sugar — into their hands without breaking off their conversations. The sound of drums and reed pipes drifted from somewhere deeper in the city, and Emma followed it without hesitation, the rest of the party trailing behind her through winding streets until they had no idea where they were.
They emerged into a courtyard where two men sat with drums between their knees and a third stood over them with a reed pipe, the rhythm arriving exactly when expected. Three veiled women danced in the center of a ring of onlookers, their dresses swirling around them, and the music caught Emma so completely that she moved to join them before Thomas caught her by the arm. He pointed out quietly that every person in the courtyard except for the three of them was male, and the dancers were professionals. The group turned around and navigated their way back through the lamp-lit streets, Freddy eventually retreating to his trunk to search for something to drink, finding only a flask of bad port buried beneath the chaos of his unpacked belongings.
Later, those who climbed to the terraced rooftop of the inn found Cairo spread out before them in the warm night air. Rooftop parties glimmered across the neighborhood, and in the distance, the walled Frank Quarter sat mostly dark except for a few lit establishments that glowed with the promise of something more familiar. The city hummed with celebration, and for a little while, the strangeness of being so far from home felt less like a burden and more like a gift.
Morning came quietly. Katherine was the first to stir, watching through her mashrabiya screen as women in black veils moved through the lane below in twos and threes, carrying palm branches and covered baskets, while a water seller stood aside to let them pass without calling out. The courtyard held a simple breakfast of ful medames — fava beans stewed all night in a copper pot and served with oil, lemon, and cumin — alongside baladi bread torn by hand, salty white cheese, olives, kahk, and coffee. The one-eyed cat had not moved from its stone bench since the previous day, and when Nathaniel approached it with cautious goodwill, it looked up at him with its single eye and then looked pointedly away, as though he had not been worth the effort.
The party divided itself into practical groups. Thomas and Nathaniel made the trek back to Bulaq, where they found a scrawny, nearly toothless man overseeing a primitive but effective water filtration system — a foot-pedal jar that dipped into the Nile and brought water up through multiple layers of cloth before draining it into barrels. They negotiated for twenty water skins, following Bruyère’s specific advice to have them properly oiled so they would not crack and leak in the desert heat, and arranged for the skins to be delivered directly to their caravan once it was organized. Nathaniel, in a moment of desperate optimism, asked the workers if they had any clothing to sell, only to realize the men were wearing little more than loincloths and had absolutely nothing to offer him.
Meanwhile, Adrien and Katherine made their way to the Frank Quarter to find Krikor Bedrossian, an Armenian merchant of about sixty whom Bruyère had recommended for arranging desert travel. They found him in a quiet room with the shutters half-closed against the light, writing the same line simultaneously in two open ledgers in two different alphabets, finishing both before he acknowledged them. He arranged passage for seven people on a caravan departing for Suez on the morning of the twentieth, under caravan master Hassan al-Rashidi, and noted that other Europeans would be traveling with them. He was clear that water was not provided and would need to be brought by the party themselves, and he named his price without any invitation to haggle.
Emma, Georgiana, and Freddy discovered that the Muski was entirely closed for the festival, every merchant having shuttered their stalls in honor of Eid. The Frank Quarter was little better, with most counting houses and warehouses taking an unofficial holiday of their own. Freddy found a barber in the Gallerie building and submitted himself to the care of foreign hands, sitting beside a tailor who lamented the lack of business but was unable to produce desert clothing in fewer than a week. Eventually, Freddy located a Greek tavern by the gate where European men were drinking ouzo and watery ale, and a man named Ben immediately recognized his connection to the Board of Control and began bending his ear about East India Company policy with the fervor of someone who had been waiting six days for camels and had run out of other things to complain about.
Back at the inn, word of Georgiana’s saintly reputation had traveled faster than the party had. A group of women were waiting in the courtyard when the group returned for lunch, one holding a child on her hip, another seeking a blessing for her sick husband, and a third hoping Georgiana might cure her goat’s barrenness. Sitt Nafisa took charge immediately, organizing the women into a line and translating their requests one by one with brisk efficiency, scolding anyone who pushed forward out of turn. Emma and Freddy watched from the sidelines with dates and bread, thoroughly entertained, while Georgiana dispensed blessings with as much grace as she could manage.
The afternoon heat was unlike anything any of them had experienced before, pressing down on the city like a physical weight well over a hundred degrees. The party retreated to their rooms, where they lay under mosquito nets and operated toe fans — large woven fans connected to ropes that could be pulled with a foot to push air through the room — in a state of sweating, motionless endurance. Thomas sat beside Emma’s bed and fanned her by hand, his shirt open and clinging to him, until she told him to stop worrying about it. Outside, a wedding procession moved through the lane, drums and pipes filling the street with music and lanterns on poles casting warm light over the celebration.
That evening, Bruyère unlocked his private salon and invited Adrien inside for brandy and conversation. The room was furnished with French chairs and a square table that looked as though they had been carried a very long way to be there, and at the far end sat a stack of months-old French newspapers that had been read to absolute shreds and carefully kept. Bruyère was hungry for news of home — he knew about the consulate, the coronation, Austerlitz, Spain, Moscow, the retreat, and the abdication, but had heard nothing reliable since the Bourbon restoration. Adrien told him everything he knew, and Bruyère kept refilling his glass in exchange for more, until Adrien eventually stumbled out of the salon into the early evening and walked directly into Freddy in the hallway.
The sound of Sitt Nafisa yelling in the courtyard drew the rest of the party to the gallery railing, where they found Thomas standing in the fountain in an attempt to cool off, and the innkeeper’s wife throwing bread and plates at him while delivering what was clearly a thorough scolding in Arabic. He climbed out, dripping, and the party gathered in the courtyard as the evening music of the festival drifted in over the walls. Emma stood quietly and listened, and for the first time since a corridor had stretched impossibly long in front of her back in Tarrytown, music carried no terror with it — no occult overtones, no dread, just pure and uncomplicated joy. Georgiana noticed, and immediately dangled a small fish charm in front of her sister’s face.
The morning of the eighteenth came early, with Sitt Nafisa having packed each of them a breakfast pannier for the journey. They rode donkeys down to the old Cairo ferry, where skinny boys with long poles pulled them across the Nile, and on the far bank, horses were already waiting in the grey pre-dawn light. The ride to Giza took about an hour across flat, sandy ground, the pyramids seeming to stay perpetually on the horizon until suddenly they were simply there, enormous and immediate, the way a wall is always there. The Sphinx sat buried to its neck in sand, its nose already gone, its head alone rising from the dune at a scale that made the horses look like toys.
The Great Pyramid’s casing stones had been stripped centuries ago to build Cairo’s mosques and walls, leaving the stepped core exposed and climbable by anyone determined enough. Georgiana was determined enough. She entered through a forced tunnel cut into the north face around 820 AD by a caliph hunting treasure, crawling through passages barely four feet high before hauling herself up a steep, polished granite slope in near-total darkness by candlelight. The passage opened at last into the Grand Gallery, a soaring corbelled vault twenty-eight feet above her head running a hundred and fifty feet upward at the same steep angle, and she stood in it in the flickering light of her lantern and looked up.
Outside, Freddy sketched the landscape and purchased thin local wine from a merchant who was delighted to have a reason to do business. Thomas negotiated with a local guide, trading one of his cufflinks for a chair and a parasol, which he set up for Emma in the shade. He then reached into his pocket and produced a silver anklet adorned with bells and small charms, which he presented to her with the quiet certainty of a man who had thought about it for longer than he would ever admit. Emma put it on, and the bells rang softly every time she moved.
The nineteenth was given over entirely to preparation. Bruyère informed the party that camels could not carry rigid trunks, and so everything had to be repacked into soft bags — a process that involved shaking out weeks of accumulated chaos and starting fresh. Sitt Nafisa helped the women select appropriate desert clothing: loose printed cotton layers, wraps, and head and face coverings, with a firm instruction that stays were absolutely not to be worn. The men traded their European clothes for sirwal, long loose shirts to the ankle, sashes, wool outer cloaks for the cold desert nights, and headcloths that could be pulled across the face when the wind came up. Tinted spectacles in blue and green glass were distributed against the glare, water skins were confirmed for delivery to the caravan, and dates, dried biscuits, coffee, and grease for cracked lips were packed alongside pistols and swords.
On the morning of the twentieth, before dawn, the party gathered their soft bags and their chickens and their dignity — what remained of it — and prepared to leave the blue door of the Auberge du Muski behind. Cairo had given them a festival, a saint’s queue, a drunk Frenchman, a fountain incident, a moment of peace, and a view from inside one of the oldest structures on earth. Ahead of them lay eighty-four miles of gravel and heat, a caravan master named Hassan al-Rashidi, and whatever the desert had decided to put in their way.