"You wish to go hunting, sir? Not far from here can be found lion, gazelle, oryx:"
"What I shall hunt I have not yet decided," I told the man. "Is there a boatman here who took the philosopher Iphicrates of Chios on his monthly expeditions?"
The man looked puzzled, but he turned and addressed the bargemen in Egyptian. One man stood and stepped off his craft. He exchanged a few words with the foreman, who turned back to me.
"This man took Iphicrates out three times."
"Tell him I want to go where Iphicrates went." There was a bit more talk and we agreed upon a price. Hermes and the bargeman transferred our gear into the little vessel while I made myself comfortable in the prow. The man went to the stern and picked up his pole. Soon we were off, drifting silently by the awakening city.
The bargeman was a typical Egyptian of the riverine sort. He had short, bowed legs and had probably seldom ventured onto land in his life. His command of Greek was uncertain and he had not a word of Latin. He poled his craft along with quiet serenity, looking like a picture on a wall.
Soon we were in the tunnel that passed through the lake wall, its great double portcullis raised for the day.
The bulk of the canal traffic was coming into the city at that hour. There was very little leaving it. We passed the entrance to the Nile canal and headed toward the lake.
I turned and called out to the bargeman.
"Didn't Iphicrates go to the Nile to measure its rise and fall, and to examine the shores?" I wasn't sure he understood the whole question, but he understood enough.
"He went to the lake," he said. Soon we were on the quiet waters of Lake Mareotis.
Its shores were low and marshy, lined with papyrus. The reeds were alive with waterfowl, wild ducks and geese and gulls, herons and the occasional wading ibis. We passed wallows where hippos disported themselves, their smiling mouths and comically wiggling ears belying their essentially hostile and ill-tempered nature. Hermes's eyes grew round when he saw these huge, wild beasts so close.
"Will they attack us?" he asked.
"They never scared you before," I said.
"We were on a bigger boat then. Those things could swallow us with one gulp."
"If they were so inclined. But they eat grass. As long as we stay clear of them, they won't bother us. Now that"-I pointed at something that looked like a floating log-"will definitely eat you, should you fall in." As if hearing me, the thing turned and regarded us with a glistening eye. Hermes grew paler.
"Why don't they exterminate those monsters?" he said.
"Crocodiles are sacred to the god Sobek. They mummify them and put them in temple crypts."
"Egyptians! Is there anything they don't worship and make into mummies?"
"Slaves," I told him. "There is no god of slaves."
"Or Romans either, I'll bet," was his rejoinder.
We drifted eastward in the direction of the delta until the sun was nearly noon-high. Then we came around a low headland to a place where a stone dock protruded into the water. The bargeman turned the nose of his craft toward the wharf.
"What is this?" I asked him.
"This is where the man from the Museum went."
In the distance I could see a large house amid tilled fields.
"Whose estate is this?"
He shrugged. "The king's, or some great noble's." A safe guess, since everything belonged to the king or some great noble.
"Keep going," I instructed him. "I'll tell you where to put in to shore."
He turned away from the wharf. I saw nobody manning the pier. As far as I could tell, we were unobserved. That was of little importance in any case, since we were for from the only watercraft on the lake that morning. Fowlers and fishers were at their work, and boats carried produce from the plantations fringing the lake. Barges like ours carried huge bundles of papyrus reeds for the paper factories of Alexandria. It was not exactly crowded, but one more boat should attract no attention.
About a mile east of the pier I saw a small inlet that cut through the reeds to the shore. "Put us in there."
The barge nosed aground on a sandy bank surrounded by palm trees. We unloaded our gear and set it among the trees. The bargeman looked around with a dubious expression.
"Not much hunting here, I think."
"We'll chance it," I told him. "Come back for us here at this time tomorrow and I'll pay you double what you got today."
It was all one to him, so he agreed. People everywhere assume that all foreigners are insane. Thus, when you are in a strange land, it is easy to get away with eccentric behavior. He poled his barge away from the shore and was soon out of sight. We carried our gear to a spot sheltered from view by high bushes and rested beneath the shade of the palms.
"All right," Hermes demanded. "Why are we here? It certainly isn't for hunting." He started at a sound in the nearby bushes. When he saw that it was just an indignant ibis, he relaxed.
"Iphicrates was in the habit of taking monthly journeys, supposedly to measure the Nile waters and observe the banks. As I've just learned, he went nowhere near the river. He came instead to this estate, and I propose to find out what he was doing here."
"If he was lying about where he went, he had a reason for it," Hermes said, with a slave's grasp of subterfuge. "Couldn't this be dangerous?"
"It most certainly is. That is why I am taking as few chances as possible. Many travelers go hunting in the Egyptian wilds, so our leaving the city should have aroused no suspicion. I intend to explore this estate, but I shall do it cautiously. It's too early now. We'll set out when the sun gets lower."
"We?" Hermes said.
"Yes, we. You'll enjoy this, Hermes, it's just your sort of activity."
"You mean I should enjoy getting caught and tortured for spying?"
"No, Hermes. Not getting caught is what you like."
So we made ourselves as comfortable as possible and dozed away the forenoon and a good part of the afternoon. In the cool of early evening we kindled a small fire in which I charred some pulpy, rotted palm-wood. Then we immediately extinguished the fire lest the smoke betray our presence.
Some years before, I had served under my kinsman Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius in Spain, during the rebellion of Sertorius. I had seen no open, set-piece battles, but instead had fought guerrillas in the mountains. This was considered poor campaigning by most, since conventional leadership of soldiers in glorious battles was considered a necessity for political advancement at home. But it had taught me some valuable skills. Our Iberian mountaineer scouts had taught me the rudiments of their craft, and these skills I was about to put to good use in Egypt.
By the time we made out preparations, Hermes was eager to go. He had spent hours in a near-panic. A true child of the metropolis, he was certain that open country was alive with wild, ravenous beasts hungering for his flesh. Every disturbance in the water was a crocodile coming ashore. Every quiet rustle in the bushes was a cobra. The louder rustles had to be lions. The scorpions that infested Alexandria probably represented a far greater danger to him, but they were commonplace. For some reason, most people fear being slain in an exotic manner. This is not peculiar to slaves.
With soot from the charred wood I streaked my face, arms and legs and directed Hermes to do the same. Then we daubed ourselves liberally with reddish clay from the bank. Egyptians divide their nation into the Red Land and the Black Land. The Red Land is Upper Egypt, to the south, but anywhere in Egypt away from the river and the delta is tolerably red. With our streaked limbs and faces and our dark red tunics, we would blend well with our surroundings in the fading light.