Ashraf and I rode in that direction because no sane man would. We passed first through Cairo’s City of the Dead, the Muslim beehive tombs as white as ghosts in the night. Then we trotted quickly through a ribbon of green farmland that followed the Nile, dogs barking as we passed. Long before sunrise we were dots on an arid plain. The sun rose, blinding as we angled east, and arced so slowly that it became a pitiless clock. The saddles of our captured mounts had canteens that we made last until noon, and then thirst became the central fact of existence. It was so hot that it hurt to breathe, and my eyes squinted against desert whiteness bright as snow. Powdery dust caked lips, ears, clothes, and horses, and the sky was a weight we carried on our shoulders and the crowns of our heads. The chain of the medallion burnt into my neck. A mirage of a lake, the cruel illusion all too familiar by now, wavered just out of reach.
So this is Hades, I thought. So this is what happens to men without proper direction, who drink, fornicate, and gamble for their daily bread. I longed to find a scrap of shade to crawl into and sleep forever.
‘We must go faster,’ Ashraf said. ‘The French are pursuing.’
I looked back. A long plume of white dust had been caught by the wind and spun into a lazy funnel. Somewhere under it was a platoon of hussars, following our hoof prints.
‘How can we? Our horses have no water.’
‘Then we must find them some.’ He gestured ahead at undulating humps of hills that looked like cracked loaves.
‘In a bed of coals?’
‘Even in a bed of coals a diamond can hide. We’ll lose the French in the canyons and wadis. Then we’ll find a place to drink.’
Kicking our tired horses and tightening our cloaks against the dust, we pressed on. We entered the uplands, following a maze of sandy wadis like a snarl of string. The only vegetation was dry camel thorn. Ashraf was looking for something, however, and soon found it: a shelf of bare, sun-blasted rock to our left that led to a choice of three canyons. ‘Here we can break our tracks.’ We turned off, hooves clacking, and picked our way across the stone table. We took the middle limestone canyon because it looked narrowest and least hospitable: perhaps the French would think we went another way. It was so hot that it was like riding into an oven. Soon we could hear the frustrated shouts of our pursuers in the dry desert air, arguing about which way we’d gone.
I lost all sense of direction and docilely followed the Mameluke. Higher and higher the crests reached, and I could begin to see the jagged lines of real mountains, the rock black and red against the sky. Here was the range that separated the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea. Nowhere was there a spot of green or glisten of water. The silence was unnerving, broken only by our own clop and creak of leather. Was this desert – the fact that ancient Egyptians could walk from the fertile Nile to absolute nothingness – the reason they seemed so preoccupied with death? Was the contrast between their fields and the ever-encroaching sand the origin of the idea of an expulsion from Eden? Was the waste a reminder of the brevity of life and a spur to dreams of immortality? Certainly the dry heat would mummify corpses naturally, long before the Egyptians did it as religious practice. I imagined someone finding my husk centuries from now, my frozen expression one of vast regret.
Finally the shadows seemed to be growing longer, the sounds of pursuit fainter. The French must be as thirsty as we were. I was dizzy, my body sore, my tongue thick.
We stopped at what looked like a rock trap. High cliffs rose all around us, the only exit being the narrow canyon we’d just ridden through. The towering walls were finally so high, and the sun so advanced, that they cast welcome shadow.
‘Now what?’
Ashraf stiffly got down. ‘Now you must help me dig.’ He knelt on the sand at the base of a cliff, at a cleft where a waterfall might have pooled if such an absurdity could exist here. But perhaps it did: the rock above was stained dark as if water occasionally flowed down. He began burrowing into the sand with his hands.
‘Dig?’ Had the sun driven him mad?
‘Come, if you don’t want to die! It rains a torrent once a year, or perhaps once a decade. Like that diamond in coals, some water remains.’
I joined in. At first the exercise seemed pointless, the hot grit burning my hands. Yet gradually the sand grew gratefully cool and then, astonishingly, damp. Smelling water, I began throwing sand away like a terrier. At last we reached true moisture. Water oozed, so thick with sediment it was like coagulating blood.
‘I can’t drink mud!’ I reached to dig again.
Ashraf grabbed my arm and rocked us back on our heels. ‘The desert asks patience. This water may have come from a century ago. We can wait moments more.’
As I watched impatiently, sweet liquid began to pool in the depression we’d dug. The horses snorted and whinnied.
‘Not yet, my companions, not yet,’ Ash soothed.
It was the shallowest bowl I’d ever seen, and as welcome as a river. After an eternity we bent to kiss our puddle, like Muslims bowing to Mecca. As I lapped and swallowed the dirty leakage it gave me a shiver and a glow. What bags of water we are, so helpless if not constantly replenished! We slurped until we’d drained it back to mud, sat back, regarded each other, and laughed. Our drinking had made a circle of clean wetness around our lips, while the rest of our face was painted with dust. We looked like clowns. There was an impatient wait for our meagre well to refill and then we cupped some for the horses, guarding that they didn’t drink too much too soon. As dusk settled this became our job, carrying water in a saddlebag to the thirsty mounts, sipping ourselves, and slowly mopping the rest of the grit from our heads and hands. I began to feel faintly human again. The first stars popped out, and I realised I hadn’t heard any sounds of French pursuit for some time. Then the full panoply of the heavens blossomed, and the rocks glowed silver.
‘Welcome to the desert,’ Ashraf said.
‘I’m hungry.’
He grinned. ‘That means you’re alive.’
It grew cold but even if we’d had wood, we dared not light a fire. Instead we huddled and talked, giving each other small comfort by sharing our grief about Talma and Enoch, and small hope as we talked about vague futures: with Astiza for me, and with Egypt as a whole for Ash.
‘The Mamelukes are exploitive, it is true,’ he admitted. ‘We could learn things from your French savants, just as they learn from us. But Egypt must be ruled by the people who live here, Ethan, not pink-skinned Franks.’
‘Can’t there be a collaboration of both?’
‘I don’t think so. Would Paris want an Arab on its town council, even if the imam had the wisdom of Thoth? No. This is not human nature. Suppose a god came down from the sky with answers to all questions. Would we listen, or nail him to a cross?’
‘We all know the answer to that one. So each man to his place, Ash?’
‘And wisdom to its place. I think this is what Enoch was trying to do, to keep Egypt’s wisdom locked away where it belongs, as the ancients decided.’
‘Even if they could levitate rocks or make people live forever?’
‘Things lose value if they’re done too easily. If any nation or man could make a pyramid with magic, then it becomes no more remarkable than a hill. And live forever? Anyone with eyes can see that this goes against all nature. Imagine a world full of the old, a world with few children, a world in which there was no hope of advancement because every office was filled with patriarchs who had got there centuries ahead of you. This would not be a paradise, it would be a hell of caution and conservatism, of stale ideas and shopworn sayings, of old grudges and remembered slights. Do we fear death? Of course. But it is death that makes room for birth, and the cycle of life is as natural as the rise and fall of the Nile. Death is our last and greatest duty.’