The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [83]
My departure and the setting of the sun coincide, and from the white deck under the purpling sky and over the boiling, blackening Nile, I see Cairo recede, the crowd on the dock, the lights of the square, the smoke rising from the houses and the ahwas and shops, mingling with the smoke from the boat. One can almost see from this distance the smiling faces of the luggage porters as they sit down on the dock to begin without delay their study of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt (Collins Amorous Literature, 1920). One wears one’s twill suit, tailored by one of Egypt’s greatest men of the needle. One leans on the polished wooden parapet on the port side of a fine vessel. One watches in anticipation and relaxation as one chugs past narcissistic palms and nearly naked peasants, virtually unchanged from their portraits on ancient papyri. One admires the ladies onboard—almost all American, one notes—and one thinks of home (so far) and of destiny (so near), and one remarks with frustration the premonition of thundering stomach pain to come. Descend to my cabin.
Later, calmer, below. I was soon able to rise to the saloon level, the god of belly disorder granting a respite after only an hour or so of enforced worship. Soothing drinks above and belowdecks. And a jazz trio in the saloon, Egyptians, in fact, tootling competently enough. While I danced with tourist ladies rapt by tales of exploration, the native bandleader, in red smoking jacket and fez, slapped a banjo while another honked a dented cornet and a third crooned, with a wonderful accent, songs such as “You’re a Lucky Fellah” and “I Love That Man and I’ll Keep Him, Just Aziz” and:
In old Pharaoh’s Egypt,
The Hebrews came to stay,
Until old Moses rose up
To lead his folks away.
“Let my people go,” said Moses.
And Pharaoh said, “No, sir!”
And then gave baby Jesus
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
Quite so. That and the oily churn behind the boat do give one a sense of peculiar disorientation that the gin cannot quite overcome.
Margaret: Tonight on the boat to Luxor, my dinner companions at the small table set for three were an old American couple, who I assumed were on their first travels abroad, the spicy reward for a life of bland savings, children and grandchildren seeing them off for their whirling adventure, their last but one. But, no, they turned out to be something much more substantial, difficult to explain as I lie now in my cabin, trying to capture their charms as sleep gnaws at me and the recollections of what they showed me tonight fog my thinking. They were not like anyone I have ever known. Such a softness to them.
They hail from Minneapolis, or some such outlandish hamlet in the corn-blanketed depths of your America. There, Len and Sonia Nordquist are pillars of society, such as it is. He is an executive in a grain-milling concern of some sort and is fascinated by how the Egyptians harvest and process their flax and millet. She is on the board of the little city’s museum, its theatre, its school for deaf-mutes, all manner of thing. Of course they did not appear as grandees. In their travel kit (he in light Scotch hunting tweeds, she in a stylised pith helmet with some symbolic mosquito netting tied under her chin), the two grey birds were peculiarly American in their friendliness. They sat hand in hand whenever possible, but she would often take my hand in her old fingers, or Len would pat me on the back paternally. When one of them irritated the other, they would snap with much rolling of eyes and headshaking wonder at their mate’s stupidity, and then, a moment later, they were holding hands again, or stroking their partner’s sagging cheek. Len suffers terribly from the climate or the dust; he was an almost constant source of noise, but Sonia would hand him a handkerchief without even looking up or dropping a line of conversation. Taking care of him seemed to have become