The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 35

He began another long letter to Bouilhet by describing the brownish-red rash that had appeared in irate blotches on the backs of both legs. My bodily doom is sealed, he wrote. I suppose it was just a matter of time until the disease caught me out. But his mind, he told Bouilhet, was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ideas, and he had begun furiously jotting them down, along with character sketches. Spurred in part by Rossignol's aspirations and Trout's secret love affair, he'd been thinking again about a female protagonist. It rankled to admit it, but Max-d.a.m.n him for a perspicacious critic!-was right: there was much to explore and even exploit in an ordinary female. He sent one scenario to Bouilhet: A Young Unhappy Woman A provincial who has read too many romances, she expects her life to resemble them, full of galas and velvet gowns, champagne toasts and steamy love affairs. In short, she is bored. She must select her lovers from among the locals (the druggist, doctor, blacksmith, grocer, etc.) or from travelers (a merchant, soldier, veterinarian, notary). The best she can hope for is an illicit liaison with the son of the richest landowner in the county. Once a year he throws a ball at the manor for his poorer neighbors, a scattering of crumbs that she mistakes for jewels. . .

In a real bed for the first time in months, he closed his eyes and drifted toward somnolence, oars dipping in water just beyond the walls, his mattress steadily rocking as the blue cange sailed on in his landlocked body.

When he wasn't sleeping or writing letters or postulating the future of humanity, he contemplated Miss Nightingale, though he delayed writing to her. It struck him as odd that in her absence, she was Miss Nightingale, but in person, she was Rossignol. Though she, too, had renounced marriage, Miss Nightingale embodied all that he despised about convention. But Rossignol! She was a rare creature-an Oryx, a black leopard, a vibrantly plumed parrot from the Amazon who spoke multiple languages while retaining the ability to sing like a bird. And like an exotic animal, no one knew her mind. That was what he had come to desire as much as her body-to know her mind. For it was the mind of a man in the body of a woman. Wrong, he corrected himself. It was not the mind of a man; he would have recognized that. It was the mind of a rebel, a revolutionary.

He tried to imagine her as a wife (not his), and immediately sensed it would ruin her. The inst.i.tution would chafe at her until she either surrendered-not likely-or was eroded to a bitter nub of a woman. Her sharp intelligence must be kept occupied, or like a surgeon's scalpel, it would grow dull and dangerous with disuse. Even friends.h.i.+p would be beyond the capacity of Rossignol the bored and bitter wife. No. They had no future together except as Egyptian adventurers, and that chapter, sadly, was nearing its end.

Cautioning him to be less noticeable than a shadow, he sent Joseph to inquire at the Hotel d'Orient. She was indeed registered there, scheduled to depart within the week. He vowed to write to her. But not yet. He could not approach her yet.

His legs, his poor legs! He hid them from Max, could barely tolerate seeing them himself. The scourge had spread to the soles of his feet, a leprous bloom of white and red patches. Otherwise he felt fine, his mind supple and clear after weeks of la.s.situde.

Tanned by the desert sun and dressed as natives, he and Max pa.s.sed for Mahometans to visit Mamaluke sites where they made more squeezes and photographs. The city seethed with feral cats. Early summer was their breeding season, and their near-human cries in the alleys and gardens at night sounded like torture.

At the end of the week, Max got bad news. The graphic letter he'd sent to a lover in Paris had been intercepted by her husband, who had thrashed her and banished her from the house. Max moped through the rooms.

"Will they divorce?" Gustave asked.

"G.o.d, I hope not!" Max paused his pacing. "Married women make the best lovers. They are more experienced and less demanding."

Gustave nodded, agreeably, to this plat.i.tude, though his history with Louise contradicted it.

Of course, Max said, he loved her.

Gustave discovered his sympathies lay not with Max but with the ruined wife. What would become of her if the husband refused to reconcile? Max would not step in. For a woman to have a love affair was far more dangerous than Gustave had realized. Yet, to his mind, it seemed the only way a sensitive woman other than a crusader like Miss Nightingale could a.s.sert her independence.

After a day, Max dropped the subject. Rogue. b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Yet who could blame him? Why was s.e.x such a boon to men, and for women, such a disgrace? Surely, mankind had erred, configuring s.e.x as a commodity, a matter of owners.h.i.+p and property instead of simple delight. The premium on virginity sentenced every woman to just one lover. He couldn't imagine living with this restriction.

Joseph's wife, whose desperate pleas for money had filled her "love letters" for months, met him at Bulak in a new dress and hat, though the cupboard was empty and she had not prepared dinner. Joseph appeared at the hotel the next day in a fog of jasmine and sandalwood. He had bathed. "She is ruin me!" he told Gustave proudly.

On May 29, Gustave and Max decided to extend their stay in Cairo to attend the Ritual of Treading before heading north to Alexandria, where they'd catch a packet for Beirut the second week of June. Joseph was glad to have a few more days of work.

That night, Gustave wrote her a lengthy letter. He'd settled on "her" and "she" rather than Miss Nightingale or Rossignol until she was replaced by the next fascination, should there be one.

He decided to tell her everything, to make a clean breast of it. Indeed, it was an autobiography of sorts, tracing his life back to age nineteen. Surely if anyone could understand his obsessions, she could. It was a loving letter, without a return address. When he finished it, he sent Joseph to deliver it by hand.

At dawn on the third of June, he perched atop a wall on the Street of the Faithful alongside Max and Joseph. By eight an enormous crowd had gathered, milling about like angry bees.

Doseh, or the Ritual of the Treading, was performed in Cairo several times a year to commemorate a miracle. A Mahometan saint had once ridden his horse through a street filled with clay jars of food without breaking a single one. Strangely, over the years, the ritual had modulated into a menacing key. It was no longer a celebration but a test of faith, with lives instead of jars at stake.

With every minute that pa.s.sed, the crowd enlarged. After two more hours, a sheik clad in dazzling white robes appeared on a black mount with a lavish saddle and bridle embellished with gold ta.s.sels, bells, and embroidery. At his signal, the crowd arranged itself in the street to form a thoroughfare of flesh-men p.r.o.ne on their bellies in ranks so close together they looked like herrings packed in a tin. Not a brick of the street was visible. Locusts and mummies, Gustave thought. Now living men.

Wild music commenced, played on flutes and drums. It drove the spectators to a frenzy. Eunuchs beat the crowd back in a storm of cudgeling unlike any he'd seen for speed and vigor. When they were done, the river of bodies was immured by a wall of spectators, both eerily silent. Gustave trembled with expectation and dread.

It was trial by happenstance. An injury in the treading was a reflection of sin. "Why not throw them in the river to see if they float?" he asked Max.

Max lit his pipe, puffing until the tobacco glowed. "I don't think injury is the idea but the power of faith." He exhaled a long plume of smoke. "Of the mind."

"Or of the heart," Gustave added, genuinely glad for Max's company just then. He could not have attended so strange a spectacle alone. For a change, he found Max's detachment, his coolly dispa.s.sionate powers of observation, calming. Since a benevolent crowd was a rarity anywhere, he felt safer with Max, too, though his fear was nothing compared to the excess tenderness and empathy. He suspected that the almost paralyzing vulnerability he felt was not the result of his own pain and sadness, but of Rossignol's, at his hands. How she must have suffered when she received the letter! He dreaded the coming days for her. He felt sad, he felt guilty, he felt sorry. He felt altogether too much.

At noon the sheik entered the street. His mount was so spirited, prancing sideways and backward, skittering with high, dressagelike kicks, that the rider had to restrain him. Either the beast simply wished to have his head, or the sight and smell of the helpless men had spooked him.

It was not the first spectacle Gustave had seen in Cairo. Eight months earlier, he and Max had watched magicians and mountebanks perform tricks and snake charmers tempt vipers from baskets. Fortune-tellers in varied guises had promised him a hodgepodge of fates: wealth, health, many women, and an early death by water. Most impressive were the spinning dervishes. They had plunged spikes through their chests and mouths, then affixed oranges on the sharp end and continued to whirl, their long, tan skirts floating up in perfect disks. Surely that had been a clever illusion. A man would perish on the spot from such an insult to the body. And he did not believe in miracles.

The sheik began his pa.s.sage through the street. A deafening cacophony of cheers and songs erupted from the spectators as the steed picked his way on skulls, smalls of backs, tender napes, the thin-skinned backs of knees. From the flattened men a cataract of anguished excitement issued in the form of prayers and ululations.

He couldn't bear it, even with Max beside him, meditatively puffing on a short-stemmed meerschaum. "I am leaving," he cried out, hardly audible over the throng. He leaped to the ground on the other side of the wall.

"Wait!" Max called to him. "Wait for me." He and Joseph dropped down and caught up with him.

"Surely some of them will die," said Gustave, walking rapidly away from the scene. He began to cry.

Max put his arm around Gustave's shoulder as they entered a quiet lane shaded by plane trees with their trunks painted white. "If that is true, they knew the risks."

"Still."

Max felt his neck for heat. "Has the fever returned?"

"No. I'm just feeling sensitive."

"Could you be coming down with something else? Perhaps it's a simple case of exhaustion." He patted Gustave's back.

"No, I am well." He was. He was more himself than ever, a sensitive fellow with a big bluff. Max, he knew, grasped this, but it was not in his nature to speak of it. Instead, they continued back to the hotel arm in arm.

The next morning, Joseph reported that there had been no injuries from the Doseh. Gustave hoped he was telling the truth. He was dead tired, having spent much of the night imagining himself flat on his belly while a hoof hovered above, threatening to smash his neck. He wished to be like a plant, existing without awareness of the past or future, simply breathing in and out, feeling nothing.

The next day, still hollowed out, he rambled with Joseph through the bazaars one last time, without desire: perfume sellers, chandlers, goldsmiths, olive and date vendors, spice merchants, booksellers, bakers, tailors. He engraved the scenes in his mind against the likelihood he would not return. When tradesmen approached, he held up a weary hand and they retreated to their covered booths like a sea to its depths.

The next morning, the last before they left for Alexandria, he indulged his nostalgia once more-for women drawing water and fellahin from the countryside selling grain in their distinctive long blue tunics and white turbans.

On the day of departure, he gave a big gratuity to M. Bouvaret, who had helped twice with the luggage and generously drawn maps to sites in and around the city. His most painful farewell would be to Joseph, loyal, love-besotted Joseph. He would hold off until the last moment, when he and Max boarded the s.h.i.+p for Alexandria.

"Wait," said the innkeeper, pocketing his baksheesh. "You must not depart yet." He followed them out the door, helping again with their possessions.

Moments later, he returned, lugging a large tin pot. "Y'allah," he said, urging them toward the street. "Now, messieurs, this is how friends say good-bye in the Orient." Beaming, he pitched the potful of water at their feet.

"What?" exclaimed Gustave. He checked his valises. Not a drop had touched them or him despite the big splash.

Bouvaret clapped the pot. "Revenez avant que cette eau ne seche!" he shouted. Come back before this water dries.

Once again, the dam broke and tears rolled over Gustave's cheeks. He had to stifle himself. To be so easily moved was unnerving. First, the men at the treading and now a little water. A rainbow on a strand of hair. Or the memory of Trout holding her hat atop the dune while Max gathered moonlight into his lens. The whole evanescent display of life in all its depravity, all its glory. Because the water had been, above all, glorious as the sunlight sparked it. It had hung in the air like a liquid marquee announcing, anointing the moment with a homespun grandeur. Water from the Nile, no doubt. He wanted to embrace the innkeeper for the aptness and sweetness of the gesture, but the man had already turned toward the door.

31.

THE TWELFTH ROOM.

She recognized the birdsong-redstarts, thrushes, finches-that punctuated the cool air. Bordered with tall cedars and thick-boled pines, the grounds were orderly, with gravel paths and flower beds, not a profusion, but enough to acknowledge that beauty had a place among the poor and sick. Flowers, in good measure, promised a future, added hope, though a superabundance of blooms could deny suffering, enforce a rote cheerfulness. At home they often had just this obliterating, chastising effect: how dare you be ill or poor when the snapdragon and lily of the valley lift their perfumed throats and offer their silent bells to the wind? No, Kaiserswerth was a practical place, she saw that right away-and her true destination after eight months of wandering. For the first time in her life, she was on her own-no family, no chaperones or maid.

She did her best to put Egypt behind her. On a good day, it was as if she had never been there-never walked along the beach at Aboukir Bay, where Lord Nelson vanquished the French, or saw the s.h.i.+ps left to rot, their hulls bleached and bitten like the bones of giant, mythical birds. A different Flo had struck up a conversation with a stranger thoughtlessly discharging a gun in public. Better not to remember any of it.

Here is what I most wish as I write this, my songbird-that I could be with you in Cairo.

Her first impulse was to throw his letter away, but she relented and read it, then reread it, first to freshen her grief, and later for comfort on the long journey from Egypt to Prussia.

Please forgive me for the silence you have had to endure; I know that from silence, as from pain, one can make nothing. I have been ill in various degrees since we parted, often too ill to write. For days, I was quite delirious; I remember only Joseph bringing me tea and brandy with soft, tasteless bread.

A trove of letters had acc.u.mulated in Cairo during the remainder of Flo's Nile voyage-ten in all, five from Parthe. The voices of loved ones from a distance const.i.tuted the best sort of homecoming. They professed to miss her, and she believed them. But she was no longer the person they missed. After knowing Gustave, she realized that she was not the singular freak it had suited them to believe. There were other monsters. Even two made a group. Two made her almost . . . ordinary. Run-of-the-mill Flo.

After Cairo, the family scanted on letters. Parthe claimed to have posted letters addressed to Trieste, Poste Restante, and to Flo's hotels in Dresden and Berlin. They never reached her, while Selina and Charles received packets without interruption. Was the blood mob punis.h.i.+ng her in advance? Had they guessed her secret plan?

The trip to Greece was improvised and panoramic. They st.i.tched a crazy quilt through the Mediterranean and Adriatic on a thread of bad weather, with delays for quarantine and diplomatic disturbances. Twice they set forth from Trieste and were refused entry at Grecian ports. Remarkably, it took thirteen days instead of three to steam from Alexandria to Corfu, and ten days from Corfu to Patras. We are going to Greece by way of New York once the isthmus of Panama is cut through, she wrote WEN in a rare moment of jocularity. At last, they traversed the Gulf of Corinth and reached Athens, where the Bracebridges had a villa.

Dear Selina, determined that Flo love Greece as much as she did, insisted she wait for a sunny day to view the Acropolis. Yet even under blue skies Greece was a disappointment. Abu Simbel had evoked G.o.d for her, while the Parthenon deified man, its stone divinities poor facsimiles of the great philosophers and dramatists. Her hopelessness persisted.

Charles was ailing. Egypt, he claimed, had induced neuralgic headaches along with acc.u.mulations of phlegm and coughing spells. She applied leeches to his forearm with her customary care, glad for a task to divert her from dreaming and panic. He booked a reservation at Bad Pyrmont, in lower Saxony, for three weeks in the baths and vapor cave, first in salt, then in steel. On July 2 they departed for the north.

The meander through Europe was a revelation. Everywhere, from Vienna to Prague and on through Germany, tempers were flaring after the clashes of 1848. Berlin and Prague were in shambles, with soldiers garrisoned in civilian homes. The scent of gunpowder stung the air with the threat of armed confrontation. In every crowd, Flo saw flashes of steel and the dull glow of military braid, reminders of the fragile truce.

But O, her desespoir! The only way to fight it was by doing. Something. Anything. She visited galleries, churches, and museums. She walked and tended Charles. Sundays at unfamiliar churches anch.o.r.ed her, though expatriates latched on like hungry fleas.

In Prague she began to improve. The best distraction of all turned out to be hospitals. The Brothers of Mercy and Sisters of Mercy ran two exemplars of hygiene and compa.s.sion. Protestant establishments, they proved that women could serve like nuns outside a monastic order. In Berlin a trio of progressive inst.i.tutions inspired her: the New Model Hospital; the Elizabeth Hospital; and most amazing, the Rauhe Haus, where delinquent boys apprenticed in the trades lived in cottages with deacons as a kind of family. The kindness wealthy Germans bestowed on their poorer brethren lifted her mood.

The second-best distraction was making f.a.n.n.y squirm with letters that pretended to innocent motives. She pointedly described the new hospitals, contrasting them with one in Hamburg run in the English style by dissolute doctors and therefore full of bad women. From Berlin she lauded spinsters who had founded charities. With her private fortune, Mlle. de Sieveking had established a home for fallen daughters, and Mlle. de Bulow, an infants' hospital and school for scrofulous children. Though the implication was clear, Flo spelled it out: if they were serious, WEN and f.a.n.n.y could undertake genuine charity instead of hunt b.a.l.l.s and poor-peopling. If Florence had funds, she certainly would.

She let drop that the women in Berlin were more liberated than their English sisters. Solitary fraus and frauleins moved through the streets without risk to reputation. They shopped alone, spent afternoons reading in the free libraries, and attended evening concerts unescorted. "I have just turned thirty," she wrote her mother, "the age Jesus was when he began his real work, and I hope to become useful in the world." Though f.a.n.n.y would be outraged, Flo knew she would not respond to these gibes.

While Charles recuperated in the spa, she and Selina sauntered arm in arm, companionable as ever. To Flo's relief, Selina correctly construed Flo's silence on the subject of Gustave as a large red KEEP AWAY sign. Otherwise Flo would have borne the untenable burden of defending the man just when she was trying to forget him.

She had less time to brood because her mind was working round the clock, absorbing information, formulating schemes she might undertake at home. Her Ragged School teaching, the work closest to the German mold, must certainly continue. But what of England's major wasted resource-the indolent upper-cla.s.s women who counted their lives in cross-st.i.tch and bore children in a world teeming with orphans merely to keep occupied? What if they could make their way without footmen and chaperones, unenc.u.mbered by hooped and trained gowns too voluminous to pa.s.s through a gate or doorway? Fas.h.i.+on was nothing more than a pretty cage.

These women were bored, whether they knew it or not.

It rankled to think of how much suffering they could abate, were it respectable to do so. She began a tract called Ca.s.sandra, about the oppression of daughters. The upper-cla.s.s English family uses people. If it wants someone to sit every day in the drawing room, she must comply, even if she may be destined by G.o.d for science or education. This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery. In a renewed frenzy, she filled the pages of Lavie with daily notes and tirades: July 20, Berlin: Suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting around a table, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books. How we should laugh!

Despite the displacements of travel, time pa.s.sed rapidly. The German trains were efficient, with private sitting rooms in addition to sleeping cars in first cla.s.s. Best of all, she dreamed less. Somewhere north of the Alps, the antic.i.p.ation of Kaiserswerth began to outweigh her sadness.

Max was sure I'd recover, and ordered the cange to Beni Hasan, but the winds had curled up in their caves. Every day we were becalmed he ranted.

But no, it is foolish to delay what I wish to say with journalistic ramblings.

Let me begin again.

Three weeks by herself. No maid to launder or lay out clothes, dress her hair, or keep her calendar. Her own labor, she saw immediately, was the price of freedom, which was fitting, as Kaiserswerth was an experiment in communalism, with identical privations for all.

What did Kaiserswerth not grapple with? Infants, orphans, troubled adolescents, the old, the ill, the criminal, the homeless, the hopeless. Pastor Fliedner and his wife, whom she was asked to call "Mother," were the epitome of methodical devotion. Familiar to them through Baron Bunsen and her own enthusiastic letters, she was welcomed as one of their own. Language was no problem: she spoke German, but wrote notes in French, which they read with ease.

Did she wish to be treated like a visitor or a probationer? A probationer, she said. She roomed in the dormitory, expecting austerity, but finding instead utilitarian plenitude: simple furniture, latchhooked rugs, kerosene lamps, and books. Books everywhere-medical texts, proposals for legal reform, reports from the Kaiserswerth colonies abroad. Manuals on teaching the deaf and blind and reforming delinquents. Accouchement for Midwives.

With Pastor Fliedner's approval, she decided to write a pamphlet about the deaconesses for an English audience. If she penned it anonymously, WEN would print and distribute it.

First, I want to tell you something that only one other human being, my dear friend Louis Bouilhet, knows. (If you ever saw him, you would be struck by our resemblance. We are doppelgangers of each other. This was our first bond, not enough to sustain a friends.h.i.+p, but later, a constant emblem of our shared love of literature and writing.) It was to Bouilhet I confided when I was nineteen that I was considering castrating myself. No doubt, you will find this idea engoue, if not horrific. Surely you must be thinking, "Why is he telling me this? And why has he broken his word to me?" Bear with me, Rossignol.

You see, I am an epileptic, though my family won't admit it. They treat it as a dark secret, like a murder among the ancestors. I thought if I gave up gratification, I might be free of seizures. The idea appealed to me for another reason-the purity of renouncing the pleasures of the body. If I had done it, I believe I would have become a religious man and-dare I say it?-in that regard rather like you.

The probationers numbered one hundred and twenty, most studying to become deaconesses, a smaller number, nurses, like Flo. Nursing was a decent profession at Kaiserwerth, with standards of deportment and actual techniques to master. The hospital's one hundred beds were always full. She learned all manner of care-bandaging, applying tinctures, the treatment for burns, for suppurating infections, for whatever wounds a body could sustain and survive. A man's horse had crushed him; an aged deaconess was dying of tuberculosis; a child had almost frozen to death in a pond. A doctor from the village prescribed the protocol, and the nurses and probationers carried it out.

Real work, every day. She was so occupied and met so many people that her brief notes in Lavie did little more than track the blur of activity. Walked the bad eyes and the bad chest along the Rhine. An itchy family was admitted. Poison oak? Each morning she awoke eager for the day's accomplishments.

Not that we are so different in other ways. Everyone thinks that only women are hysterics, while I believe that men are, too. Myself, for example! Often, for no reason at all, my heart beats like a tribal drum. I become emotional over trifles. Sometimes I begin to choke, or odd pains shoot through the back of my head. Other times I am in a state of exaltation. As for boils, I could write a book about the way they come and go like demons battling for my soul. In this intensity of feeling, we are, I know, alike. (Not that you suffer from boils!) Everything troubles and agitates me. A zephyr to others is the harsh north wind to me. I have become more vache, more beastly and yet more sensitive, more capable of torment. (Does this sound familiar?) Also, it goes without saying that the characters I create, such as Saint Anthony, drive me crazy. I live inside them and they in me. I suffered every agony Anthony did, but mine were self-imposed. Do you see this, dear Rossignol-that the same bells call out to us?

The Fliedners allowed her to a.s.sist at a major operation, a leg amputation set for August 1. The day before, she met the patient, Herr Fuer, a carpenter with sugar in the blood. A nail puncture on his s.h.i.+n had festered into gangrene. He was forty-five, with thick blond hair that stuck out from his head like shocks of wheat, giving him a clownish demeanor at odds with his grave condition. "I am frightened, fraulein," he kept saying. "I need to pray." She prayed with him. She wrote two letters for him and sang hymns. He joined in, his voice quavering with anxiety. Pastor Fliedner stopped by to pray with him, too, though Fuer was a Catholic. What higher purpose, she wrote that night, can there be than saving a life or a soul?

The next morning, she impatiently rolled bandages until summoned to the surgery. For the next five hours, she and Sister Sophie attended the surgeon in the small, brightly lit operating room. Using a circular saw, the doctor removed the leg as high as possible to forestall spread of the poison. The cutting was grisly but brief.

She hadn't expected beauty-there was no other word for it-in such a dire circ.u.mstance. The reek of rotting flesh, the gore, even the patient's suffering mattered less than the continual awe. Awe for the incision, the steel blade entering the flesh with an unparalleled and G.o.dly presumption of intimacy. Awe for the beautiful taking up of the blood vessels. She watched the arteries flex like molten canes still hot from the gla.s.s furnace. When they straightened, filling up with fresh bright blood, the surgeon tied them off with seven waxed threads. The room was a slaughterhouse, but she paid no notice. They packed the wound. The white gauze bloomed and bloomed, not sapping Fuer's vitality but stanching the spillage as if with a crafty abstract rendering of bouquets.

In the afternoon and evening, Fuer suffered greatly. She prayed with him when he was conscious. What made the operation so arduous and prolonged, the doctor said that evening, was the insufficiency of healthy skin to fold over the wound. They dressed the stump a second time with collodium strips, but they proved too small to be protective. The surgeon removed them and she helped st.i.tch up the wound with black silk, then put on a Maltese cross bandage. Cold water compresses every five minutes, one of us always with him. Flowerpots on the windowsill from Sister Ernestine. She fell asleep with her pen in hand.

Friday, 2 August 1850 1212:30 Took my place by Fuer, who was going on well. In the afternoon I read to the dying man and the disfigured man in the garret, who are not allowed to join the others.

2 P.M. Cupped Margareta.

34 P.M. Making up powders, decoctions, infusions, etc., under Sister Ernestine's direction at the apothecary.

6 P.M. Men's ward. The amputated man.

7 P.M. Pastor's cla.s.s with the seminarists. They practiced telling him the story of Isaac and Elisha and the angels, which they will relate to the children tomorrow. He teaches like Socrates. Questions and answers, never outright lecturing or correction.

Early the next morning, while scrubbing gla.s.s vials at the apothecary, an extraordinary paradox about Abu Simbel occurred to her: at the heart of Ramses's monumental splendor was complete anonymity. The pharaoh who ruled for sixty-six years would never be forgotten as long as his name, Ramses or, in Greek, Ozymandias, issued from the lips of the living, which his monument at Abu Simbel ensured. But he, too, like Osiris and the primeval traveler before him, the dying sun, had pa.s.sed through the twelve rooms in the hours between sunset and dawn. He'd sailed the infernal river, past ogres and tormentors, ravenous snakes and crocodiles, while priests made sacrifices and recited spells from the "Book of Going Forth by Day." At the Hall of Two Truths in the seventh room, Osiris weighed his heart against the feather of truth while the monster Ammit-she loved that name, which meant "bone crusher"-waited to devour the failures. Presumably the golden scales had balanced, and he rejoined Ra in the Barque of Millions of Years, sailing toward the glorious dawn of eternal life. But none of it was possible without the mult.i.tude of nameless artisans-the jewelers, cooks, embalmers, priests, stonemasons, bricklayers, painters. Their names, Bunsen said, survived more quietly, not in the mouths of people like her and Gustave and Selina, but buried with them, inscribed on parchment and protected by the magical rope of the cartouche.

She'd written a third note at Philae, she suddenly recalled. Not a plea to die, but a bargain offered to G.o.d. I am prepared to serve without reputation.