I lay back inside the awning, stretched my feet out over the scrubbed white floor boards … the man cast off and poled the boat out into the stream.
He was old and immensely practised; a small, tight, ebony face with a white half-moon of stubble, eyes that understood everything in a glance spared from the business in hand. He flapped about the wide edges of the boat in his bare feet, stabbing the water judiciously with his pole, like a bored snooker master, chipping into the triangle and putting away the colours in a mammoth break.
We punted along the shoreline, very gradually pushing out towards the small wind which we would catch near midstream once we had passed the tip of Roda Island jutting out into the river in front of us. The water began to flip and scurry along the bottom of the boat, singing between the runnels of the old wood — the slow current which would take us back to Cairo, just as surely as the breeze from the sea would carry us gently upstream.
The boatman stood up for a moment in the prow, resting his pole in the current. A minute squall of wind flapped his long sleeves, a series of small pistols going off in an ocean. Then it was quiet again. The reedy whisper of water beneath us slowed, almost died. The man turned against the flat blaze of light in front of us and looked back at the city. It had come into its proper context now that one couldn’t see it clearly any more, the ochre ribbon of buildings disappearing in the haze. One forgot completely the cracked and broken glitter of the streets, the slops by the doorways, the years of rubbish congealed in hillocks of tar by the pavements. The detritus of all its history, from Pharaonic shards to Coca-Cola bottles, belonged to a country one had heard much of but never visited, passing slowly half a mile off the coast, looking to the land as though it were a territory in permanent quarantine.
People suffered there, mysterious plagues beyond the medicine books; the sky burnt them mercilessly, fevers never dropped: flies pursued them, a hybrid super-species; they were watched from doorways, sent on endless last journeys; no ease and little joy — characters bound up in a long book of pain, exiled in this desert for no other reason than the water which had brought them here, and was now their only relief. And to be far out on that huge brown stream was never to know the illness, only the cure.
We journeyed to Helwan, stayed there overnight on the shore beyond the town, and came downstream the next day. A day and a night and another day. We travelled like a nineteenth-century Arabist and his dragoman, self-sufficient, but always concerned; a page from Lucie Duff Gordon’s memoirs, a dazzling white-sailed caique moving slowly through the curves of the river by day, suspended at noon under a clump of palm by the water’s edge, making good passage in the wind that came with the last hour of light, finding refuge in the darkness, when the sky lit up the river with tinsel and a shaft of undulating white marble from a large moon.
The man cooked beans on a paraffin burner he had with him, stuffed them into bladders of dark bread, and we brewed a milky tea, spitting the leaves overboard.
I asked him about his life on the river and he talked about it slowly in a whisper-harsh voice, ragged and disrupted from years of calling across water.
As with his ancestors he didn’t speculate about the river; his involvement was uniquely practical. He had no other curiosity about it. It sprang from mud, meant toil, gave life. It flowed northwards, like every river. And when I told him that there were other streams which ran south, in just the opposite direction, he looked at me as if I were professing a new and dangerous faith.
“How could a river flow uphill, against itself?” he said. “What would it do to the crops — if a river worked like that? And where would you put the High Dam then? — in Alexandria? And how would a boat get back from Luxor to Cairo? — for the current would be running in the wrong direction. A river can’t flow backwards.”
Don’t worry, I thought, we’re working hard on it; all the rivers will flow the wrong way soon. We’ll do everything before we’re finished.
We arrived back near Cairo the following evening, cool and silent, the water like a lake, cargo feluccas drifting with us, their crews asleep or crouching round small fires in the stern — a smell of river clay and burning tinder and grilled fish coming over the water which had gone bronze and violet with a burning orange dipping over the western shore.
It had been dark for several hours when we reached the first of the bridges at Giza so that we saw the finger of light from the police launch, prodding the velvet between the piers of the bridge, from some distance away.
I was about to tell the boatman to pull in when he said in the simple easy phrases of a professional describing something seen many times: “They are looking for someone. He has drowned.”
“Couldn’t they be trying to rescue him?”
“No. No, it couldn’t be that. They have a grapple with that boat. They only take it out to look for the ones who are dead.”
It was well after midnight when we finally tied up. I paid him the additional money and said I would stay on board till morning.
Mr. Hawthorn had a funeral on his hands when I got to the Cathedral in the morning. Two funerals, in fact.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, there’s been some trouble,” he said. “An old lady at the Anglo-American — her husband is in police custody. And another man from London — apparently he had some sort of boating accident over the weekend. They found his body above Kasr el Nil last night. I’m sorry, it will mean twenty-four hours’ delay on our trip. I’ve been on to the Consulate. Neither of the people had dependents in the U.K. They’re to be buried at the British cemetery tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been up at Helwan over the weekend.”
Madame. And Henry. I couldn’t think of anyone else falling out of a boat at that moment.
“How did it happen? — the accident, I mean. On one of those small boats?”
“Yes, the man hired the boat apparently, after dark. Either from the Garden City pier or from the island. No one seems to know. The thing overturned — they do if you stand up in them or do anything awkward. The boatman managed to swim back. The other person, a Mr. Edwards, didn’t.”
“Oh dear me.”
Henry had been wild drunk. He must have been. I thought how easily it could have been me.
“But why had he taken the boat in the first place?”
“They’d closed all the bridges to Gezira yesterday.” Hawthorn paused and looked at me briefly. “They were looking for someone. Someone on the island. I understand a woman was abducted, kidnapped or something. The Russians are supposed to have had something to do with it. Probably a wild rumour, you know what the place is like.”
“Yes.” Was he just trying to get off the island, back to town? Or had he been making in the other direction, for the Russian Embassy on the Giza Bank? One would never know. It was just the sort of ambiguous exit Henry would contrive for himself. And the woman? I felt equally sure that it must have been Bridget. She had never made a mistake; the first one would be decisive.
“Did they find this person — the one they were looking for? Or was that the woman?”
“They’ve been asking me that. Your colleagues. As if I knew. You’re the ones to know all about that.”
“Oh, I don’t handle news. Just background. The price of rice, how the people live — your new extension in Tobruk for example; that sort of thing.”