TWENTY-THREE

Harriet and Louisa had been waved off by Yael from the station at Alexandria at nine in the morning. Now a great clock, marked in both Arabic and Roman numerals, indicated that it was four in the afternoon. Wrapped in her pink shawl, perching on the lid of her trunk while Louisa and Fouad went to find assistance, Harriet felt disoriented. In just hours, she had arrived in another world, a busier, more thoroughly foreign one than that she had left behind.

The Europeans among the urgent travelers that rushed across the tiled concourse of Cairo station looked not as grand or consequential as the Eastern people. The Turkish men were white-skinned, opulently clad in embroidered cloth, looped strings of amber prayer beads dangling from their fingers and silver-tipped sticks held under their arms. Shrouded women took little steps behind them, dressed in more somber hues than their male counterparts, like a species of bird where a drab female attends on a vivid-feathered mate.

Breathing in air heavy with fumes from the train engines, mingled with the sweet scent of jasmine from baskets of flowers that ragged-looking children were pressing on parties of German and French travelers, Harriet found herself scanning the passersby for someone she knew. She was looking, she realized with surprise, not for Eyre Soane but for the long limbs, crumpled suit, and pale straw hat of the man with the piano. The disappointment she’d felt on not seeing his face had stayed with her.

She wondered where, in all the vast continent that lay to the south of here, the instrument had come to rest. Whether the man was playing it now, transporting himself to his homeland through its resonant chords. Picturing his angular body bent over its keys, his hands ranging across them, Harriet heard in her head a wistful piece of music that evoked the wind blowing between the stones in a graveyard.

The haunting notes continued to play in her head as, with a strength disproportionate to his skinny frame, Fouad lifted her bodily into a sedan chair, and from there into another dusty cab. With Louisa looking anxiously out of the window, the three of them set off for the hotel, rattling past domed mosques with needle-like minarets, under the shadow of dark buildings, the upper windows covered in latticed woodwork screens, and along narrow alleys lined with shops that looked as if they and their goods had been there since the dawn of time.