Chapter Thirty-One
The Nile, March 1923
Their cruise boat chugged slowly upriver through the stunning colorscapes of Egypt: the deep sapphire-blue of the Nile, the lush green of the date palms in the fertile strip irrigated by the river, and then the shimmery golden desert beyond. The weather was pleasantly warm with a slight breeze. Sitting on deck with a glass of guava juice, chatting with Arthur and Winifred, was a delightful way to spend a few days. Eve could see her father winding down. His complexion looked healthier and the sparkle was back in his eyes. He was only fifty-six years old but he’d suffered bouts of poor health since a car accident in 1909 when the Panhard rolled over, crushing his ribs.
They hired a guide to show them around the sites in Aswan: the Qubbet el-Hawa tombs of nobles from the Old Kingdom; the botanical garden on Kitchener’s Island; the Aswan Dam, Kitchener’s pet project to stop the Nile floods from destroying farmlands every year; and the temple complex of Isis, located on the island of Philae in the upper Nile.
While at Philae, Eve slipped away from their party and wandered down to the water’s edge to look out across the lake formed by the dam. She knew some villages had been deliberately flooded and lay beneath the twinkling water, but there was no sign of them now—just a wide, choppy lake. Tiny waves made a slapping sound against the shingle where she stood.
Suddenly a shout rang out and she turned to see their guide running toward her, waving his arms wildly. “Rujiet!” he was repeating. “Rujiet!”
When he got close, he grabbed her arm and yanked her roughly back from the water’s edge, hurting her. She gave a yelp. He had spoken English earlier but his words were incoherent in his agitation.
“What is it?” she cried, rubbing her wrenched shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
“Crocodile!” he shouted in English and pointed to what she had thought was a log of wood floating on the surface of the water just a few yards away.
Eve started shaking. Now she looked closely, she could see the wide slit of the mouth and the languid blink of a yellow eye just above the waterline. It had been gliding toward her. One lunge and she would have been in its jaws. She turned and ran to her father and threw her arms around him.
“Let’s get out of here,” she begged. “Please!”
Pups was furious with the guide. “Incompetent fool! Why didn’t you warn us? If anything had happened . . .” He didn’t specify what he would have done, because he was too busy consoling Eve.
She just wanted to get as far away as she could in case the crocodile waddled ashore. The guide assured them it wouldn’t but she didn’t have much faith in him because he seemed very shaken.
As they got a carriage back to the Cataract Hotel, where they were staying in Aswan, she couldn’t stop shivering despite the heat. If it had lunged at her and dragged her into the water, she doubted the men of the party would have been able to save her. She thought of that menacing yellow eye and knew she’d had a narrow escape.
When she wrote to Brograve that night she decided to turn the incident into a joke, so as not to alarm him, but that eye continued to haunt her.
* * *
It was hotter in Aswan than Luxor, a scorching heat that sapped their energy. The air cooled as soon as the sun set, but then mosquitoes surrounded them in a whining swarm. Their guide had taken Eve and Winifred to a market earlier where a stallholder sold them a lemon-scented oil that he guaranteed would keep mosquitoes away, and all of the party had applied it to their exposed skin. It seemed to work, because they sat out in the hotel garden for dinner without any of them getting bitten.
An old Bedouin man came to perform a coffee ceremony for them. He roasted the beans over an open flame, ground them, boiled, then sieved them, before pouring each of them a small cup from a spout held high in the air.
Eve sniffed her cup. There was some herbal ingredient besides coffee.
“Cardamom,” Winifred told her, after taking a sip. “It’s delicious!”
The old man explained through a translator that they must each drink three cups: one for the soul, one for the sword, and one because they were guests. It was tradition. He had brought a hookah and the men puffed on it while the women watched, amused. The smoke smelled sweetly herbal, like scented hay.
On their last night in Aswan, Pups was careless in closing his mosquito net when he went to bed and got a large, itchy mosquito bite on his cheek. Eve’s lemon oil must have rubbed off on the pillow.
“It looks like a teenager’s blemish!” Eve teased him over breakfast in the grand dining room. “At your age, Pups, you should be rather proud of that.”