Pharaoh's Wife Read online

  When Ahmed was introduced to the Duchess and the two mages, he bowed respectfully and put himself under the American woman’s orders, having divined immediately that she was the yacht’s owner.

  “You seem to me to be an experienced man,” said Diana. “We plan to go up the Nile as far as Cairo, where our automobiles will be waiting for us, with which we shall explore the shores of the river. When the opportunity presents itself, we’ll come aboard, whenever an interest calls upon us to cross from one bank to the other. As much as possible, you’ll keep pace with us, at every stage, in order that we don’t have to search for you. Is that all right?”

  “Perfectly, Milady.”

  “Good! Reïs, you’ll have lunch with us on the yacht, before we go to your vessel.”

  The travelers were soon aboard the dahabieh, the Ibis. The Egyptian dahabieh has varied very little since ancient times, save for those of European construction, which, with their iron hulls, are reminiscent of motor-boats. The Ibis had a wooden hull, and the interior consisted simply of a single large cabin whose ceiling was the deck. The two extremities of the boat, which were very high, were ornamented with figures and lotus-flowers that were quite well-carved. There were two masts planted at the two ends, supporting two enormous sails fixed on long, slightly curved yard-arms. Such sails are not furled, but can be lowered and folded up. The wind was good and warm, but ten boatmen could move the long and heavy vessel against a contrary wind, using oars or sculls.

  The Delta is the most fertile region of Egypt; trees, fruits, flowers and cereals all grow there in splendid abundance. Between Alexandria and Cairo the Nile passes through a country that varies little but whose monotony is rich in colors and perfumes, of which one does not tire. In that feast for the eyes, five or six different kinds of acacias mark out the route; from time to time, alternating with cypress or Alep pines, clumps of almond-trees, orange-trees, lemon-trees, fig-trees and quince-trees fill the air with vehement scents. And above everything, a profusion of climbing roses flows over anything that gives them a point of support, embalming the atmosphere, adding a divine drunkenness to the inebriation of other essences.

  Immense date-palms laden with enormous clusters of fruit, coconut-palms and bananas border the route. There are also carobs, the feast of the Arab nomad, nahea, with delicate fruits that taste like apples, and gechtahs, from which one obtains a delicious creamy fluid. Arab huts disseminated along the route, constructed of dried wood and camel-dung and painted in vivid colors—blue, yellow, orange, almost always surrounded by apricot-trees, add their picturesque realism to the calmly moving landscape.

  Vast fields of cotton cover the open ground. On the road to Abukir an Arab leads a few camels attached in Indian file. Half way to Abukir, an automobile passes by rapidly, striping the charm of the Egyptian spring: a fire-red limousine coming from the palace of Montazah, where King Fuad I resides in summer.

  A few water-buffalo are bathing in the Nile, and near the enormous beasts, a little naked Arab girl, like a supple and slender bronze statuette, is playing and paddling in the water.

  The Ibis glides over the quivering waves unhurriedly, and the villages established on the shore everywhere that an elevation of the ground above the level of the annual flood permits file past the passengers’ eyes: to the east, El Bazreh, Berinhat, and Matvabis; to the west, Mohallet, Edfinah, and Dai Proutsh—at which they make a halt.

  A dragoman responsible for food supplies purchased supplies throughout the voyage. The dragoman, a Hindu named Mojah Singh, had joined the dahabieh at Berinhat. The Duchess having opened unlimited credit, Mojah paid no heed to expense and bought everything he could find of the highest quality. At Beïrout, linked by two broad canals to Lake Edkou, fishermen came to offer fish whose trumpet-shaped noses give them a comical appearance—uncommon fish brought in summer by the flood. Henri, the French cook, prepared them perfectly, according to Ahmed’s instructions, and they were declared excellent.

  As they were drinking the coffee, the sound of a frantic gallop was heard on the bank. An imperative voice shouted: “Where is the Reïs? Let him show himself.”

  Ahmed, who was smoking at the prow, turned his head and saw a perfectly-harnessed horseman. “What do you want?”

  “To tell you to take someone aboard.”

  “Impossible! I have passengers.”

  “Beware of my courbache!” He cracked a long whip with leather thongs, a part of which was looped around his wrist.

  The handsome Ahmed reddened with anger. He leapt ashore, armed with a cane, and ran at the man who had insulted and threatened him. The latter turned his horse and kept his distance.

  “Hey there!” said another horseman, arriving at a gallop. “Put down your stick, fellow. I’ll pay fifty piastres for my passage. I have business in Chindiyoum and need to cross the river, nothing more.”

  Attracted by the noise, Diana and her companions looked at the new rider through the window of the cabin. Save for a tarboosh, he was dressed in the European manner, very elegant in his appearance.

  “If the gentleman only wants to cross the Nile,” said Ormus, “it won’t delay us much.”

  “Certainly,” said Diana. “Go on, Reïs, take the traveler across; we’ll take a turn around Beïrout while we wait.”

  The man in the tarboosh got down from his horse and threw the bridle to the Arab. “Go away,” he said. Then, approaching the bank, he said: “If I’m not mistaken, it’s Madame the Duchess of Rutland that I have the honor of greeting?”

  “You know me?”

  “I’ve only seen you once before, ten years ago in Constantinople, at the British embassy.”

  “I did indeed make a voyage to the Orient at that time, but...”

  “You don’t recognize me? I would be very proud if it were otherwise, but I could not forget a woman as beautiful as you.”

  The Duchess started laughing. “I haven’t come to Egypt in search of compliments.”

  “In that case, Duchess, you must do what our women do and hide your face. And be sure that if important business did not oblige me to go to the other side of the river, I would be reluctant to take advantage of your kindness—but I’m awaited, you see.” With his hand, he indicated a compact group on the opposite bank, which was growing progressively. Again he bowed and leapt into the dahabieh, which drew away rapidly, propelled by the ten oarsmen.

  “I don’t remember that gentleman at all. If he was at the embassy, he must be some pasha.”

  “Ah!” said the Mage Ormus, who had aimed his binoculars. “It seems to me that he’s getting a warm welcome.”

  Half an hour later, the dahabieh returned. Ahmed seemed very embarrassed.

  “You seem to be annoyed, Reïs,” observed the Mage.

  “With good reason! I’ve just lacked respect for my sovereign. That’s Fuad I, the king of Egypt.”19

  “The descendent of the Pharaohs—of us!” said Ormus, smiling at Diana.

  The journey up the Nile continued. The wind was slightly stronger, and they made more rapid progress.

  “We’ll be in Kafrez-Laiya by nightfall,” said the Reïs. “Would you like to spend the night there, or would you prefer to go on? The wind is good; we could reach Cairo by tomorrow morning.”

  “Let’s travel through the night, then,” said Adsum. “We’ll arrive at our destination sooner. This commencement of civilization doesn’t interest me much. After the Egyptian sovereign, we’d be capable of encountering the true one—the British High Commissioner.”

  They passed another ten villages before reaching Kafrez-Laiya, the head of the railway line to Cairo. Beyond that town, the Nile and the Katatben Channel are bordered on the right by the Libyan desert. The landscape unfurls invariably, still as flourishing and spring-like on one side; sand-dunes and hills on the other. The wind had dropped completely, and they were obliged to continue by means of the oars, so they did not see the high minarets of Cairo appear until rather late the next day.

  III. Old Cairo


  On seeing the automobiles, the Reïs, who, out of a curiosity that might have been tactical, had followed the travelers to the garage, could not retain an admiring exclamation. Turning to Ormus, whom he considered as the director of the expedition, he said: “I see, my lord, by the equipment of your vehicles, that you have the firm intention of avoiding the great palaces. I suspected as much from a few words overheard on the way: you like the Orient for its intimate charm and ancient beauty. I share your taste, being one of the last of my race not to be Europeanized. If you will permit, I can show you a Cairo that not many foreigners see. My presence aboard is not necessary; the dragoman can take the dahabieh as far as El-Medinet, where we’ll catch up with it. What do you say to my proposal?”

  “We accept, Reïs Ahmed,” Diana replied.

  “Would you care to make a sacrifice to modernism, then, and take a tram?”

  “Yes,” said the Duchess. “That would be most amusing.”

  They went to the Mehidah El Ismaïlis square, where they took the tram, which took them via the El-Khoubri and Abdul Aziz Boulevards to Atabet-El-Hadra square. Until then, there was no reason to believe that they were in Egypt except for a few scattered architectural pretentions in imitation of Muslim art.

  Diana was delighted with the tram-ride; until then, in the course of her life as a billionairess, she had never boarded a public vehicle, and the promiscuity of the reduced-price travelers interested her.

  Directly facing her was a local woman dressed in a black silk sebleh. Her white veil, gently retained by a circular copper headband, indicated a coquette. In the mass of fabrics, all that could be seen of the woman was her eyes, but they were admirable eyes, which looked alternately at the Mage Ormus and the magnificent Reïs, whose handsome face had not influenced the Duchess. Evidently, the beauty—for she could not be ugly with such eyes—was making comparisons, and her choice appeared to fall definitively on Ormus, whose golden eyes seemed to her to be topazes; she then adopted a manner of draping herself in her ample vestment that showed off all the harmony of what was underneath.

  Diana congratulated his Mage jokingly in English on his success, but, to her annoyance, was interrupted by the indigene.

  “Have no fear, Madame. I make statuettes in the manner of the ancient potters of Tanagra. If I observe your friend’s eyes”—she emphasized the word friend—“it is solely as an artist. I do not make a habit of hiding my impressions and I admire beauty wherever I encounter it, is you as well as in these gentlemen.”

  Although Alexandria is a quasi-European city, Cairo has maintained, in spite of its trams, its broad avenues, electricity and the profusion of tourists and English soldiers, the undeniable cachet of a truly Oriental city. The exceedingly high sky does not always have the blue profundity that poets attribute to it, because of the breezes of Suez, the Nile barrage, and the Aswan irrigations, but all races and colors mingle there with a picturesque and variegated garishness. Extremes meet: alongside the agitation of the center there are profound silences. Avenues crackling with sunlight are in close proximity with somber and narrow side-streets, and that salad of squalor, luxury, civilization, antiquity, beauty and ugliness, the European and the Oriental, forms a fine exotic tableau.

  “I don’t know,” the Reïs said, “what the future has in store for my country, but it’s necessary to take it as it is. The English have the gift of transforming everything they touch in their own image. Once, we were unacquainted with rain; they built the barrage, and now it rains three or four times a year. Gradually, they are eating into the desert, converting it into palm plantations. I detest and admire those practical organizers. Cairo is becoming healthy; gardens are growing everywhere; circulation is easier, the roads better maintained.

  “Personally, I have renounced the struggle against these raptors who want to conquer the world. Germany hinders them and competes with them, but they will be able to defeat Germany, making use of France, by appearing to come to its aid. One rival beaten, another surges forth—America. Against that one, not much can be done. The eater will be eaten. Imperialism, which has been able to conquer by virtue of the force of money and every hypocritical means with long teeth, will escape it, and its emancipates will deny the mother-land.

  “England is like an overloaded vessel; it is low in the water and its hull is leaking. Will it sink to the bottom? A day will come when England, reduced to itself, will extend its hand to the other nations. On that day, it will not find a friend, and the people that it has lifted out of the rut will turn their backs on it, for it has taught everyone that selfishness in a law and a duty.”

  They had arrived at the Zuweila Gate, Byzantine in appearance, with its square bastions, its rounded vault, its covered passages and its two minarets.

  “Nasr, the assassin of Caliph El Haïr,” said the Reïs, “was captured by the Templars under that gate and delivered, for a large payment, to the women of the harem, who, after having tortured, mutilated and blinded him, sent him through the streets as far as here, the Bab al-Zuweila, in order to be nailed to it, alive. The vizier Dangam was decapitated there and thrown to the dogs for having had the audacity to take money from the mosques in order to pay his troops. Here too, Saladin had all the black troops who had dared to resist him executed, to the last man—and that extermination took two days. Here, again, the Mongol envoys were decapitated who had come to call on the city to surrender, and the mameluke Kutus then had the heads exposed on the wall. It required a great deal of blood, as you see, to make those two minarets sprout and grow.”

  Having got down from the tram, they were now walking through the city, and as they came into El-Naggar street they encountered a water-bearer. Once, the corporation was quite numerous, but today the city is sufficiently garnished with public drinking-fountains. Nevertheless, the Arabs of the old quarters continue to make use of the water-sellers, who carry it in a bladder equipped with a metal tube passed under the arm. It is doubtless the apparatus in question that gave the soldiers of the French army of Egypt the practical idea of the portable fountains of the old licorice-water merchants. The water-seller was holding a metal cup, which he offered to passers-by while intoning a kind of chant perhaps dating from the time of the Pharaohs.

  “O you who are thirsty, come! Let him who cannot pay drink all the same. Come and drink, free of charge!”

  The American woman thought that invitation so patriarchal and fraternal that she slipped a gold coin into the worthy man’s hand. He was so impressed that he forgot to replace his stopper, and the liquid washed the feet of the passers-by, to the great joy of the street-urchins who were escorting the travelers, crying: “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”

  Passing from street to street they reach the square where the largest of the mosques, that of Sultan Hassan, is located. Then, going through an inextricable tangle of side-streets and cul-de-sacs, swarming with a dense population of workers, merchants, porters, donkey-drivers with thin animals and people with petty ambulant trades, they pass other mosques of dilapidated munificence. They stop for lunch.

  Afterwards, on turning the corner of El Asrafiyeh, the principal street that continues El Nabayouyeh, they find the busiest quarter of Cairo in full activity. The cries of camel-drivers, street-vendors and donkey-drivers and the braying of donkeys overlap deafeningly.

  A bus full of tourists, harassed by the merchants advanced with difficulty through the crowd, which does not get out of its way. The driver, in a blue robe and a small striped waistcoat, and the dragoman, make every effort to clear a path: “Look out! Clumsy fool!” The tourists, tired and bewildered, are somnolent in the heavy heat and the dust, for the kamsin is blowing from the desert and the air is saturated with impalpable sand, which penetrates everywhere.

  Then there are the souks, where jewelers, wood-carvers and artists in metal work in the doorways of tiny boutiques. Here is the perfume bazaar, where, for twenty francs, one can get a minuscule bottle containing five or six drops of attar of roses. There is the spice-baza
ar, and cinnamon, vanilla, clove, nutmeg and aloes assail passer-by violently, who are imbibing assorted aromas without opening their purses. Then there is the carpet-merchant, who invites you to visit his emporium. And all these bazaars are swarming with the robes of men and women. In the harsh light, on little carts loaded with water-melons, oranges, lemons and juicy pomegranates, everything shines with varied colors. Long skirts in olive-green, royal blue, garnet or striped silk fabrics come and go, jostling one another, surrounding tourists and interpreters, who are calling out to one another, and clapping their hands to summon coffee-sellers—who bring them an aromatic and perfumed essence in a tiny cup.

  There are a great many bazaars, but the most curious is the one located near the Muhammad Ali mosque beside the citadel. There are gathered the merchants of gold and precious stones, and the engravers of copper plates. Marvelous hand-stitched kimonos imported from China or India swing on ropes. There is a heap of carpets in harmonious colors; prayer-rugs from Persia or Bukhara, as sickly as female tresses—in the times when women did not wear page-boy cuts that leaving the nape of the neck bare.

  Here is the merchant of glazed fruit, who accosts you, makes you taste, and slips a packet into your pocket in spite of our protests. There are hundreds of them, coming and going, calm and smiling, never getting annoyed, so amiable, so polite, that one dare not hurt their feelings, and one buys in order to be agreeable to them. The indigenes, especially the women, go from one shop to another, sitting down on the brick benches in the boutiques, chatting for hours, nibbling a fruit, drinking a sherbet bought from an ambulant seller.

  Thanks to the Reïs, the Duchess, Adsum and Ormus pass through that tumultuous crowd quite rapidly.