THIRTY-THREE

The crew had cleared the luncheon table and the three passengers were lingering over coffee, Eyre smoking a cigar and Effie Simpson retelling the story of their wedding day while Jim nodded in confirmation. It was past the heat of the day and the breeze off the water was cool. Mrs. Simpson interrupted her reminiscing to complain of a chill and her husband went below to the cabin to retrieve her wrap.

Eyre, prompted in equal measure by the sound of a disturbance up ahead and by a desire to avoid being alone with Mrs. Simpson, rose and went to the edge of the deck. The river was in a meander and the bank on the left side loomed high overhead, a cliff of dried black mud. Heading toward them at a clip from around the bend, propelled by the water’s fast flow, was a rusty hulk, lying low in the water.

Eyre’s first impression was not of the likelihood of imminent collision, although the captain of their dahabeah was heaving on the rudder, shouting at the crew. Eyre was transfixed by the cargo of the craft that was heading straight at them. It was loaded, not with cotton bales or sugarcane but with men. Hundreds of them, packed like sheep, on an unshaded deck. There wasn’t sufficient space to allow a single one of them to lie down or even to sit. The babel that rose from the wretches on seeing the dahabeah—the screams and cries and invocations to Allah—was deafening.

Clad in the ragged robes of peasant farmers, most of the men had their wrists bound. The few free men held in their hands long whips, the korbaj, or scourge of hippopotamus hide, that was offered for sale on occasion to tourists. As the shouts and beseeching cries increased in volume, the overseers began setting about the captives, lashing them across the heads and faces and backs, cursing them as sons of dogs. Profanities were the one part of the Arabic language that it had amused Eyre to pick up.

“Christ,” said Jim Simpson, standing beside Eyre, holding a lace mantilla in his large hands. “Bloody thing’s going to run into us.”

Moments later, a juddering shock ran through the timbers of the boat, sending the coffee cups skidding off the table and prompting screams from Effie Simpson. Irritated, Eyre tossed the end of his cigar into the water. The collision could mean only two things: delay and further expense.

The captain, Rais Mohammed, sprang into action, pushing the two vessels apart with his bare hands, inspecting the damage to the dahabeah, and issuing orders to the crew. His commands went unheeded. The sailors were in shouted conversation with the unfortunates on the hulk, who were still being belabored by the whips of their captors. One man had fallen overboard and was thrashing about in the water, his hands bound. His head sank and rose and sank again.

Eyre turned away.

“Can’t we get going, Rais?”

“In good time,” said the captain. “These poor fellows are sending messages to their families, with the men.”

“Instruct the crew to get on with their duties,” said Eyre. “I’m not paying them to act as go-betweens.”

It was risky to get involved with natives in large numbers. He’d made that mistake on one of his previous trips, when a Scotsman attached to their party had shot a small child, mistaking it for a gazelle in the reeds. The boy had lived, but they’d been obliged to pay blood money, and even then things had almost turned ugly.

The hulk floated on around the bend, taking its strange cargo with it. A part of the bow of the dahabeah had been damaged. Rais Mohammed began to explain the details of what had occurred, wanted to show Eyre the problem and, worse, engage him on the subject of forced labor. They were peasants, fellaheen from the south, he said, and had been rounded up like goats, taken off their own fields to be transported two hundred miles to the delta to work on someone else’s, without reward.

Eyre cut the loquacious fellow short.

“Just tell me, old chap, when will we be on the move again?”

Rais Mohammed looked at him, then shrugged in the way they did when they had no idea of the answer to a question but didn’t want to admit it.

“Tomorrow, God willing,” he said, his face dark and reserved. “We shall leave tomorrow, Mr. Soane. Or after tomorrow.”

•  •  •

In the evening, Eyre opened some red wine from the case he’d brought and began drinking it from the bottle. Jim was cleaning his guns. He sat in his shirtsleeves, humming, surrounded by greasy rags, elongated brushes, abrasive pads, and tins of stinking grease. His feet were bare on the wooden deck and his wedding ring gleamed in the light from the hurricane lamps swinging overhead. Jim’s absorption, his unself-conscious contentment, made Eyre, for a minute, loathe his old friend.

They were awaiting the completion of the repair, the boat moored at some village in the middle of nowhere, a mile upriver from where they’d had the collision. Most of the crew had gone off to bake bread, to supply themselves for the rest of the journey. Two remained, squatting on the bank at a short distance from the dahabeah, smoking a hubble-bubble improvised from an old tin can and a length of rubber tubing. Eyre could hear the long, dying gurgle as the smoke passed through the water, the voices of the sailors murmuring in the still twilight. The captain had ordered them to stay, to make sure the khawagat, the foreigners, weren’t murdered, Eyre supposed.

The low-slung canvas chair enforced an attitude of relaxation that he didn’t feel. Pulling himself to his feet, he began pacing the rectangle of deck. It had been a stroke of luck to learn from the Coxes that Louisa and her daughter were going south. Without the aunt, as well, which made matters easier. The aunt could get in his way, he had an instinct.

The danger was that the Herons would leave before he ever arrived. Or, worse, pass him on their own dahabeah, traveling downstream, shouting cordial greetings across a stretch of fast-moving water. He pictured Louisa behind a pair of green glass spectacles—she would adopt them, he was certain—her white-gloved hand raised in a wave.

Leaning on the railing, he looked upriver in the direction of Luxor. The sky on the west bank was crimson and vermilion and madder, brighter and more luminous than even gouache had ever been; if he depicted the sunset as it was, no one would believe it.

He resumed pacing, holding the bottle in one hand. He would tackle Rais Mohammed when the fellow returned from the village. They would leave in the morning, repair done or not done, and whether or not there was any wind. If the crew had to tow the dahabeah all the way to Luxor, then so be it.

Taking another swig, putting down the bottle, Eyre climbed down the companionway to the cabin and brought out his paintbox from the overhead cupboard. He felt easier as he returned to the deck. In the few minutes he’d been in the cabin, it had shifted from dusk to night. Darkness fell quickly in Egypt. The moon was up, bright and almost full; he could see the turbans of the two sailors moving like two great white poppies as they squatted at the top of the bank, the pipe finished and the smell of roasting coffee beans drifting on the air. The fellows lived for the duration of the voyage on tobacco and coffee, with a ration of hard bread and dried dates. When the wind dropped, they were capable of pulling the dahabeah all day and all night. Eyre felt a grudging admiration for them.

Sitting in one of the yellow pools of light shed by the storm lamps, he opened out the tiered lid of his paintbox and began removing metal tubes, china water saucers, brushes and scrapers and bottles of turpentine and poppy oil, arranging them in a circle around him on the wooden deck. He set about cleaning the saucers, arranging the colors, considering which hues he would need for the complexion of Miss Heron, so white it was nearly blue. He would prepare the canvas with zinc white. It would pass the time until they arrived.

Eyre pictured the girl in his mind’s eye. She was not in any way his type, insofar as he had one. His tastes, he liked to think, were catholic. He’d felt irritated when Mrs. Sarah Cox had told him the girl longed to see him. Mrs. Cox had showed him the words, apparently written in Miss Heron’s own handwriting, under a London address, which he’d memorized.

He intended to seduce her. He would take her body and her heart, then abandon her. Louisa would taste the bitterness of seeing someone she loved destroyed. The symmetry of it pleased him. He felt in his pocket for his cigar case, then thought better of it and let it remain where it was. He was running low. There was a danger that he would be reduced to smoking local tobacco.