Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER SEVEN

Victory is sometimes more untidy than battle. An assault can be simplicity itself; administration an entangling nightmare. So it was in Alexandria. Bonaparte quickly accepted the surrender of ruling sultan Mohammed el-Koraim and swiftly unloaded the rest of his troops, artillery, and horses. The soldiers and scientists rejoiced for five minutes upon reaching dry land, and then immediately began grumbling about the lack of shelter, shortage of good water, and confusion of supply. The heat was palpable, a weight one pushed against, and dust covered everything with fine powder. There were three hundred French casualties and more than a thousand Alexandrian dead and wounded, with no adequate hospital for either group. The wounded Europeans were tucked into mosques or confiscated palaces, the comfort of their regal surroundings marred by pain, heat, and buzzing flies. The Egyptian injured were left to take care of themselves. Many died.

Meanwhile, the transports were sent back to France and the battleships placed in defensive anchorage at nearby Abukir Bay. The invaders still feared the reappearance of Nelson’s fleet.

Most debarking soldiers found themselves either camping in the city’s squares or in the dunes outside. Officers were luckier, appropriating the finer homes. Talma and I shared, with several officers, the home I’d helped capture from Astiza’s master. Once the slave woman had recovered her senses she seemed to accept her new situation with odd equanimity, studying me out of the corner of her eye as if trying to decide if I was entirely a calamity or perhaps some new opportunity. It was she who took some coins, bartered with neighbours, and found us food, even while murmuring about our ignorance of Egyptian ways and barbaric habits. As if acquiescing to destiny, she adopted us as we’d adopted her. She was dutiful but wary, obedient but resigned, watchful but skittish. I was intrigued by her, as I am by too many women. Franklin had the same weakness and so, indeed, did the entire army: there were hundreds of wives, mistresses, and enterprising prostitutes. Once on land, the French women discarded their male disguises for dresses that displayed more of their charms, much to the horror of the Egyptians. The females also turned out to be at least as tough as their men, enduring the primitive conditions with less complaint than the soldiers. The Arab men regarded them with fear and fascination.

To keep his troops occupied, Napoleon sent some marching southeast toward the Nile by land, a seemingly simple sojourn of sixty miles. Yet this first step toward the capital at Cairo proved cruel, because what had been promised to be rich delta farmland was stunted at this end of the dry season, just before the Nile flood. Some wells were dry. Others had been poisoned or filled with stone. Villages were mud brick and thatch, and farmers tried to hoard their few scrawny goats or chickens. The troops initially thought the peasants exceedingly ignorant because they’d disdain French money and yet reluctantly trade food and water for the soldiers’ buttons. Only later did we learn that the peasants expected their ruling Mamelukes to win, and that while a French coin would signal collaboration with the Christians, a button would be assumed to have been cut from European dead.

Their stifling march could be tracked by its pillar of dust. The heat exceeded one hundred degrees and some soldiers, depressed and crazed by thirst, committed suicide.

Things were not quite so grim for those of us back in Alexandria. Thousands of bottles of wine were unloaded alongside the tack of infantry rations, and bright dress uniforms filled the streets like an aviary of tropical birds, rainbow plumage highlighted by epaulettes, braid, frogging, and stripes. The dragoons and fusiliers were in green coats, the officers were wrapped at the waist with brilliant red sashes, the chasseurs had upright tricolour cockades, and the carabiniers boasted plumes of scarlet. I began to learn something about armies. Some branches took their name from their weapons, such as the light musket called a fusil that had originally equipped the fusiliers, the grenades apportioned to the heavy infantry called grenadiers, and the short carbines distributed to the blue-clad carabiniers. The chasseurs, or chasers, were light troops equipped for rapid action. The red-jacketed hussars were light cavalry or scouts, who took their name from cousin units in central Europe. The dragoons were heavy cavalry who wore helmets to ward off sabre strokes.

The general plan of battle was for light infantry to disrupt and confuse the enemy as artillery pounded, until a line or column of heavy infantry with massed firepower could deliver the decisive blow to break the opposing formation. Cavalry would then swoop in to finish the destruction. In practice, the tasks of these units sometimes blurred together, and in Egypt the French army’s task was simplified by the Mameluke reliance on cavalry and the French shortage of same.

Added to the French force was the Legion of Malta, recruited when that island was taken, and Arab mercenaries like Achmed bin Sadr. Napoleon already had plans to enlist a company of Mamelukes, once he had defeated them, and to organise a camel corps of Egyptian Christians.

The land force totalled thirty-four thousand, of which twenty-eight thousand were infantry and three thousand each were cavalry and artillery. There was an acute shortage of horses that would be remedied in Egypt only slowly and with difficulty. Bonaparte did unload 171 cannon, ranging from twenty-four-pounder siege guns to light field pieces capable of getting off up to three shots per minute, but again, the lack of horses limited how many he could immediately bring along. Rank-and-file infantry were even more ill equipped, suffering in the heat from heavy 1777 muskets, leather backpacks, blue Alpine wool uniforms, and bicorne hats. The dragoons boiled in their brass helmets, and military collars became stiff with salt. We savants were not as rigidly dressed – our jackets could come off – but we were equally dazed by the heat, gasping like landed fish. Except when travelling, I went without the garment that had given me the nickname ‘green coat’ (as well as ‘the Franklin man’) from the soldiers. One of Bonaparte’s first orders was to secure enough cotton for new uniforms, but they wouldn’t be ready for months and, when they were, proved too cold for winter.

The city itself was a disappointment, as I’ve said. It seemed half-empty, and half-ruined. There was no treasure, little shade, and no Ottoman temptresses. The richest and most beautiful Arab women were cloistered out of sight or had escaped to Cairo. Those few who did appear were usually shrouded head to foot like Inquisition priests, peering at the world over the brim of veils or through tiny slit-holes in their hoods. In contrast, peasant women were immodestly dressed – some of the poor showed their breasts as casually as their feet – but looked scrawny, dusty, and diseased. Talma’s promise of lush harems and exotic dancing girls seemed a cruel joke.

Nor had my companion found any miracle cures yet. He announced he was succumbing to new fevers within hours of debarking, and disappeared into the souk seeking drugs. What he returned with were quack remedies. A man who gagged at red meat gamely tried such ancient Egyptian medicines as worm’s blood, ass’s dung, pounded garlic, mother’s milk, hog’s tooth, tortoise brain, and snake venom.

‘Talma, all you’re getting is a case of the runs,’ I lectured.

‘It’s purging my system. My druggist told me of Egyptian priests a thousand years old. He looks venerable himself.’

‘I asked and he’s forty. The heat and his poisons have wrinkled him like a raisin.’

‘I’m sure he was joking. He told me that when the cramps go away, I’ll have the vigour of a sixteen-year-old.’

‘And the sense, apparently.’

Talma was newly flush with money. Though a civilian, his role as journalist made him essentially an adjunct of the army, and he’d written an account of our assault so flattering that I scarcely recognised it. Bonaparte’s chief of staff, Berthier, had accordingly quietly slipped him some extra pay as reward. But I saw little in Alexandria’s markets worth buying. The souk was hot, shadowy, swarming with flies, and poorly stocked after our capture of the city. Even so, through shrewd bargaining, the wily merchants fleeced our bored soldiers more thoroughly than their own city had been pillaged. They learnt clumsy French with astonishing rapidity. ‘Come, look my stall, monsieur! Here is what you want! Not you want? Then I know you need!’

Astiza was a happy exception to our disillusion. Picked out of the rubble and given a chance to clean herself, she wrought a wondrous transformation. Neither as fair as the fierce Mamelukes nor as dark as common Egyptians, her features, bearing, and complexion were simply Mediterranean: skin of sun-polished olive, hair jet but streaked with strands of copper, lavish in its thickness, eyes almond shaped and liquid, her gaze demure, her hands and ankles fine, her breasts high, waist thin, hips transfixing. An enchantress, in other words, a Cleopatra, and I relished my luck until she made clear she viewed her rescue as dubious, and me with distrust.

‘You’re a plague of barbarians,’ she announced. ‘You’re the kind of men who belong nowhere, and thus go everywhere, disrupting the lives of sensible people.’

‘We’re here to help you.’

‘Did I ask for your help, at the point of a gun? Did Egypt ask to be invaded, to be investigated, to be saved?’

‘It’s oppressed,’ I argued. ‘It invited rescue by being backward.’

‘Backward to whom? My people were in palaces when yours were in huts. What about your own home?’

‘I have no home, really.’

‘No parents?’

‘Deceased.’

‘No wife?’

‘Unattached.’ I grinned, fetchingly.

‘I shouldn’t wonder. No country?’

‘I’ve always liked travel and had a chance to visit France when I was still a youth. I finished growing up there with a famous man named Benjamin Franklin. I like America, my native land, but I have wanderlust. Besides, wives want to nest.’

She looked at me with pity. ‘It’s not natural, how you spend your life.’

‘It is if you like adventure.’ I decided to change the subject. ‘What’s that interesting necklace you wear?’

‘An eye of Horus, homeless one.’

‘Eye of who?’

‘Horus is the hawk god who lost his eye battling the evil Seth.’ Now I remembered! Something to do with resurrection, brother-and-sister sex, and this Horus as the incestuous result. Scandalous stuff. ‘As Egypt battles your Napoleon, so did Horus battle darkness. The amulet is good luck.’

I smiled. ‘Does that mean it’s lucky you now belong to me?’

‘Or lucky that I live long enough to see you all go away.’

She cooked us dishes I couldn’t name – lamb with chickpeas and lentils, it tasted like – serving it with such grim duty that I was tempted to adopt one of the stray dogs to test each meal for poison. Yet the food was surprisingly good and she refused to take any pay. ‘If I’m caught with your coins I’ll be beheaded, once the Mamelukes kill you all.’

Nor did her services extend into the evenings, even though coastal Egyptian nights can be as cool as the days are hot.

‘In New England we bundle together to ward off the chill,’ I informed her that first evening. ‘You’re welcome to come closer if you’d like.’

‘If not for the invasion of our house by all your officers, we wouldn’t even be in the same room.’

‘Because of the teachings of the Prophet?’

‘My teachings come from an Egyptian goddess, not the Mameluke women-haters who rule my country. And you’re not my husband, you’re my captor. Besides, all of you smell of pig.’

I sniffed, somewhat discouraged. ‘So you’re not Muslim?’

‘No.’

‘Nor Jewish or Coptic Christian or Greek Catholic?’

‘No.’

‘And who is this goddess?’

‘One you’ve never heard of.’

‘Tell me. I’m here to learn.’

‘Then understand what a blind man could see. Egyptians have lived on this land for ten thousand years, not asking, or needing, anything new. We’ve had a dozen conquerors, and not one has brought us as much contentment as we originally had. Hundreds of generations of restless men like you have only made things worse, not better.’ She’d say little more, since she considered me too ignorant to comprehend her faith and too kind to beat anything out of her. Instead she complied with my orders while carrying herself like a duchess. ‘Egypt is the only ancient land in which women had rights equal to men,’ she claimed, meanwhile remaining impervious to wit and charm.

It baffled me, frankly.

Bonaparte was having equal trouble winning over the population. He issued a proclamation of some length. I can give a sense of its tone, and his political instincts, by quoting its start:

In the name of God, the clement and the merciful. There is no divinity save Allah, He has no son and shares His power with no one.

In the name of the French Republic, founded on liberty and equality, the commander-in-chief Bonaparte lets it be known that the beys who govern Egypt have insulted the French nation and oppressed French merchants long enough: the hour of their punishment has come.

For too many years the Mameluke gang of slaves, purchased in Georgia and the Caucasus, has tyrannised the most beautiful region of the world. But Almighty God, who rules the Universe, has decreed that their reign shall come to an end.

People of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. Do not believe it! Answer back to those imposters that I have come to restore to you your rights and to punish the usurpers; that I worship God more than the Mamelukes do and that I respect His Prophet Muhammad and the admirable Koran…

‘Quite a religious beginning,’ I remarked as Dolomieu read this with mocking drama.

‘Especially for a man who believes completely in the utility of religion and not at all about the reality of God,’ the geologist replied. ‘If the Egyptians swallow this load of stable dung, they deserve to be conquered.’

A later clause in the proclamation got more to the point:

All villages that take up arms against the army will be burnt to the ground.

Napoleon’s religious entreaties soon came to naught. Word reached Alexandria that the mullahs of Cairo had declared all of us to be infidels. So much for revolutionary liberalism and the unity of religion! A contract for three hundred horses and five hundred camels that had been negotiated with local sheikhs immediately evaporated, and sniping and harassment increased. The seduction of Egypt was going to prove more difficult than Bonaparte had hoped. Most of his cavalry would march the early stages of his advance on Cairo carrying their saddles on their heads, and he would learn much in this campaign about the importance of logistics and supply.

Meanwhile, the people of Alexandria were disarmed and ordered to wear the tricolour cockade. The few who complied looked ridiculous. Talma, however, wrote that the population was joyful at their liberation from their Mameluke masters.

‘How can you mail such rubbish back to France?’ I said. ‘Half the population has fled, the city is pockmarked with cannonball holes, and its economy has collapsed.’

‘I’m talking about the spirit, not the body. Their hearts are uplifted.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Bonaparte. Our benefactor, and our only source of orders to get back home.’

It was on my third night in Alexandria that I realised I hadn’t left my pursuers behind at the Toulon coach.

It had been hard enough to get to sleep. Word was starting to filter back of atrocities committed by the Bedouin on any soldier caught alone from his unit. These desert tribesmen roamed the Arabian and Libyan Deserts like pirates roam the sea, preying indiscriminately on merchants, pilgrims, and army stragglers. Mounted on camels and able to retreat back into the waste, they were beyond the reach of our army. They would kill or capture the unwary. Men were raped, burnt, castrated, or staked out to die in the desert. I’ve always been cursed with a vivid imagination for such things and I could envision all too clearly how throats might be cut while troops slept. Scorpions were slipped into boots and backpacks. Snakes were concealed between jars of food. Carcasses were thrown into tempting wells. Supply was a tangle, the scientists were restless and grumpy, and Astiza remained as reserved as a nun in a barracks. Moving in the heat was like dragging a heavy sled. What madness had I enlisted in? I’d made no progress in deciphering what the medallion might mean, seeing nothing like it in Alexandria. So I brooded, troubled and dissatisfied, until I was finally exhausted enough to drift off.

I came awake with a jolt. Someone or something had landed on top of me! I was groping for a weapon when I recognised the scent of cloves and jasmine. Astiza? Had she changed her mind? She was straddling me, a silken thigh locked on either side of my chest, and even in my sleepy stupor my first thought was, Ah, this is more like it. The warm squeeze of her legs began to awaken all parts of me, and her tumble of hair and enchanting torso were delectably silhouetted in the dark. Then the moon moved from a cloud and enough light sifted in our grilled window to see that her arms were high over her head, holding something bright and sharp.

It was my tomahawk.

She swung.

I twisted in terror but she had me pinned. The blade whistled by my ear and there was a sharp thunk as it bit the wooden floor, joined by a hiss. Something warm and alive slapped the top of my head. She freed the tomahawk and chopped again, and again, the blade thunking next to my ear. I stayed paralysed as something leathery kept writhing against my crown. Finally it was still.

‘Serpent,’ she whispered. She glanced at the window. ‘Bedouin.’

She climbed off and I shakily stood. Some kind of viper had been chopped into several portions, I saw, its blood spattered on my pillow. It was as thick as a child’s arm, fangs jutting from its mouth. ‘Someone put this here?’

‘Dropped through the window. I heard the villain scuttling like a roach, too cowardly to face us. You should give me a gun so I can properly protect you.’

‘Protect me from what?’

‘You know nothing, American. Why is Achmed bin Sadr asking about you?’

‘Bin Sadr!’ He was the one who delivered severed hands and ears, and whose voice had sounded like the lantern bearer in Paris, as nonsensical as that seemed. ‘I didn’t know he was.’

‘Every person in Alexandria knows you have made him your enemy. He’s not an enemy you want to have. He roams the world, has a gang of assassins, and is a follower of Apophis.’

‘Who the devil is Apophis?’

‘The serpent god of the underworld who each night must be defeated by Ra, the sun god, before dawn can return. He has legions of minions, like the demon god Ras al-Ghul.’

By Washington’s dentures, here was more pagan nonsense. Had I acquired a lunatic? ‘Sounds like a lot of trouble for your sun god,’ I quipped shakily. ‘Why doesn’t he just chop him up like you did and be done with it?’

‘Because while Apophis can be defeated, he can never be destroyed. This is how the world works. All things are eternally dual, water and land, earth and sky, good and evil, life and death.’

I kicked aside the serpent. ‘So this is the work of some kind of snake cult?’

She shook her head. ‘How could you get in so much trouble so quickly?’

‘But I’ve done nothing to Bin Sadr. He’s our ally!’

‘He’s no one’s ally but his own. You have something he wants.’

I looked at the chunks of reptile. ‘What?’ But of course I knew, feeling the medallion’s weight on its chain. Bin Sadr was the lantern bearer with his snake-headed staff who somehow had a dual identity as a desert pirate. He must have been working for Count Silano the night I’d won the medallion. How had he got from Paris to Alexandria? Why was he some kind of henchman for Napoleon? Why did he care about the medallion? Wasn’t he on our side? I was half tempted to give the thing to the next assailant who came along and be done with it. But what annoyed me is that no one ever asked politely. They shoved pistols in my face, stole boots, and threw snakes at my bed.

‘Let me sleep in your corner, away from the window,’ I asked my protectress. ‘I’m going to load my rifle.’

To my surprise she assented. But instead of lying with me, she squatted at the brazier, fanning its coals and sifting some leaves into it. A pungent smoke arose. She was making a small human figure out of wax, I saw. I watched her push a sliver of wood into the figure’s cheek. I had seen the same thing in the Sugar Isles. Had the magic originated in Egypt? She began to make curious marks on a sheet of papyrus.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Go to sleep. I’m casting a spell.’

Since I was anxious to get out of Alexandria before another serpent landed on my head, I was more than happy when the scientists gave me an early opportunity to move on toward Cairo without having to cross the hot delta of land. Monge and Berthollet were going to make the journey by boat. The savants would sail east to the mouth of the Nile and then ascend the river to the capital.

‘Come along, Gage,’ Monge offered. ‘Better to ride than walk. Bring the scribe Talma, too. Your girl can help cook for all of us.’

We would use a chebek, a shallow-draft sailing craft named Le Cerf, armed with four eight-pounders and skippered by Captain Jacques Perree of the French navy. It would be the flagship of a little flotilla of gunboats and supply craft that would follow the army upriver.

By first light we were underway, and by midday we were skirting Abukir Bay, a day’s march east of Alexandria. There the French fleet had anchored in line of battle, in defence against any reappearance of Nelson’s ships. It was an awesome sight, a dozen ships of the line and four frigates moored in an unbroken wall, five hundred guns pointed at the sea. We could hear the bosun whistles and cries of the sailors float over the water as we passed. Then on we went toward the great river, sailing into the brown plume that curled into the Mediterranean and bouncing over the standing waves at the river bar.

As the day’s heat rose I learnt more about the genesis of the expedition. Egypt, Berthollet informed me, had been the object of French fascination for decades. Sealed from the outside world by the Arab conquest of A.D. 640, its ancient glories were unseen by most Europeans, its fabled pyramids known more by fantastic story than fact. A nation the size of France was largely unknown.

‘No country in the world has history as deep as Egypt,’ the chemist told me. ‘When the Greek historian Herodotus came to record its glories, the pyramids were already older to him than Jesus is to us. The Egyptians themselves built a great empire, and then a dozen conquerors made their mark here: Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Libyans, Nubians, Persians. This country’s beginning is so old no one remembers it. No one can read hieroglyphics, so we don’t know what any of the inscriptions say. Today’s Egyptians say the ruins were built by giants or wizards.’

So Egypt slumbered, he related, until in recent years the handful of French merchants in Alexandria and Cairo had come under harassment from the arrogant Mamelukes. The Ottoman overseers in Constantinople who had governed Egypt since 1517 had shown little desire to intervene. Nor did France wish to offend the Ottomans, its useful ally against Russia. So the situation simmered until Bonaparte, with his youthful dreams of Oriental glory, encountered Talleyrand, with his grasp of global geopolitics. Between them the pair had seized upon the scheme of ‘liberating’ Egypt from the Mameluke caste as a ‘favour’ to the sultan in Constantinople. They would reform a backward corner of the Arab world and create a springboard to contest British advances in India. ‘The European power that controls Egypt,’ Napoleon had written to the Directory, ‘will, in the long run, control India.’ There was hope of recreating the ancient canal that had once linked the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The ultimate goal was to link up with an Indian pasha named Tippoo Sahib, a Francophile who had visited Paris and went by the title ‘Citizen Tippoo,’ and whose palace entertainment included a mechanical tiger that devoured puppet Englishmen. Tippoo was fighting a British general named Wellesley in southern India, and France had already sent him arms and advisers.

‘The war in Italy more than paid for itself,’ Berthollet said, ‘and thanks to Malta, this one is guaranteed to do so as well. The Corsican has made himself popular with the Directory because his battles turn a profit.’

‘You still think of Bonaparte as Italian?’

‘His mother’s child. He told us a story once of how she disapproved of his rudeness to guests. He was too big to paddle, so she waited until he was undressing, unclothed enough to be embarrassed and defenceless, and pounced on him to twist his ear. Patience and revenge are the lessons of a Corsican! A Frenchman enjoys life, but an Italian like Bonaparte plots it. Like the ancient Romans or the bandits of Sicily, his kind believes in clan, avarice, and revenge. He’s a brilliant soldier, but remembers so many slights and humiliations that he sometimes doesn’t know when to stop making war. That, I suspect, is his weakness.’

‘So what are you doing here, Doctor Berthollet? You, and the rest of the scholars? Not military glory, surely. Nor treasure.’

‘Do you know anything at all about Egypt, Monsieur Gage?’

‘It has sand, camels, and sun. Beyond that, very little.’

‘You’re honest. None of us know much about this cradle of civilisation. Stories come back of vast ruins, strange idols, and indecipherable writing, but who in Europe has really seen these things? Men want to learn. What is Maltese gold compared to being the first to see the glories of ancient Egypt? I came for the kind of discovery that makes men truly immortal.’

‘Through renown?’

‘Through knowledge that will live forever.’

‘Or through knowledge of ancient magic,’ amended Talma. ‘That is why Ethan and I were invited along, is it not?’

‘If your friend’s medallion is truly magical,’ the chemist replied. ‘There’s a difference between history and fable, of course.’

‘And a difference between mere desire for a piece of jewellery and the ruthlessness to kill to possess it,’ the scribe countered. ‘Our American here has been in danger since winning it in Paris. Why? Not because it’s the key to academic glory. It’s the key to something else. If not the secret to real immortality, then perhaps lost treasure.’

‘Which only proves that treasure can be more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘Discovery is better than gold, Berthollet?’ I asked, trying to feign nonchalance at all this dire talk.

‘What is gold but a means to an end? Here we have that end. The best things in life cost nothing: knowledge, integrity, love, natural beauty. Look at you here, entering the mouth of the Nile with an exquisite woman. You are another Antony, with another Cleopatra! What is more satisfying than that?’ He lay back to nap.

I glanced at Astiza, who was beginning to pick up French but seemed content to ignore our chatter and watch the low brown houses of Rosetta as we sailed by. A beautiful woman, yes. But one who seemed as locked and remote as the secrets of Egypt.

‘Tell me about your ancestor,’ I suddenly asked her in English.

‘What?’ She looked at me in alarm, never anxious for casual conversation.

‘Alexander. He was Macedonian like you, no?’

She seemed embarrassed to be addressed by a man in public but slowly nodded, as if to concede she was in the grasp of rustics and had to accede to our clumsy ways. ‘And Egyptian by choice, once he saw this great land. No man has ever matched him.’

‘And he conquered Persia?’

‘He marched from Macedonia to India, and before he was done people thought he was a god. He conquered Egypt long before this French upstart of yours, and traversed the pitiless sands of our desert to attend the Spring of the Sun at the oasis at Siwah. There he was given tools of magic power, and the oracle proclaimed him a god, son of Zeus and Amon, and predicted he would rule the entire world.’

‘Must have been a convenient endorsement to have.’

‘It was his delight with this prophecy that convinced him to found the great city of Alexandria. He marked out its limits with peeled barley, in the Greek custom. When birds flocked to eat the barley, alarming Alexander’s followers, his seers said this meant that newcomers would migrate to the new city and it would feed many lands. They were right. But the Macedonian general needed no prophets.’

‘No?’

‘He was a master of destiny. Yet he died or was murdered before he could finish his task, and his sacred symbols from Siwah disappeared. So did Alexander. Some say his body was taken back to Macedonia, some say to Alexandria, but others say Ptolemy took him to a secret, final resting place in the desert sands. Like your Jesus ascending to Heaven, he seems to have disappeared from Earth. So perhaps he was a god, as the Oracle said. Like Osiris, taking his place in the heavens.’

This was no mere slave or serving girl. How the devil had Astiza learnt all this? ‘I’ve heard of Osiris,’ I said. ‘Reassembled by his sister Isis.’

For the first time she looked at me with something resembling true enthusiasm. ‘You know Isis?’

‘A mother goddess, right?’

‘Isis and the Virgin Mary are reflections of each other.’

‘Christians wouldn’t care to hear that.’

‘No? All kinds of Christian beliefs and symbols come from Egyptian gods. Resurrection, the afterlife, impregnation by a god, triads and trinities, the idea a man could be both human and divine, sacrifice, even the wings of angels and the hooves and forked tail of devils: all this predates your Jesus by thousands of years. The code of your Ten Commandments is a simpler version of the negative confession Egyptians made to profess their innocence when they died: ‘I did not kill.’ Religion is like a tree. Egypt is the trunk, and all others are branches.’

‘That’s not what the Bible says. There were false idols, and the true Hebrew god.’

‘How ignorant you are of your own beliefs! I’ve heard you French say your cross is a Roman symbol of execution, but what kind of symbol is that for a religion of hope? The truth is that the cross combined your saviour’s instrument of death with our instrument of life, the ankh, our ancient key of life everlasting. And why not? Egypt was the most Christian of all countries before the Arabs came.’

By the ghost of Cotton Mather, I could have paddled her for blasphemy if I hadn’t been so dumbfounded. It wasn’t just what she was claiming, but the casual confidence with which she claimed it. ‘No Biblical ideas possibly came from Egypt,’ I sputtered.

‘I thought the Hebrews escaped from Egypt? And that the infant Jesus resided here? Besides, what does it matter – I thought your general assured us yours is not an army of Christians anyway? Godless men of science, are you not?’

‘Well, Bonaparte puts on and takes off faiths like men do a coat.’

‘Or faiths and sciences have more unity than Franks care to admit. Isis is a goddess of knowledge, love, and tolerance.’

‘And Isis is your goddess.’

‘Isis belongs to no one. I am her servant.’

‘You truly worship an old idol?’ My Philadelphia pastor would be apoplectic by now.

‘She is newer than your last breath, American, as eternal as the cycle of birth. But I don’t expect you to understand. I had to flee my Cairo master because he finally didn’t either, and dared corrupt the old mysteries.’

‘What mysteries?’

‘Of the world around you. Of the sacred triangle, the square of four directions, the pentagram of free will and the hexagram of harmony. Have you not read Pythagoras?’

‘He studied in Egypt, right?’

‘For twenty-two years, before being taken by the Persian conqueror Cambyses to Babylon and then finally founding his school in Italy. He taught the unity of all religions and peoples, that suffering was to be endured bravely, and that a wife was a husband’s equal.’

‘He sounds like he saw things your way.’

‘He saw things the gods’ way! In geometry and space is the gods’ message. The geometric point represents God, the line represents man and woman, and the triangle the perfect number representing spirit, soul, and body.’

‘And the square?’

‘The four directions, as I said. The pentagon was strife, the hexagram the six directions of space, and the double square was universal harmony.’

‘Believe it or not, I’ve heard some of this from a group called the Freemasons. It claims to teach as Pythagoras did, and says the ruler represents precision, the square rectitude, and the mallet will.’

She nodded. ‘Precisely. The gods make everything clear, and yet men remain blind! Seek truth, and the world becomes yours.’

Well, this scrap of the world, anyway. We were well into the Nile, that wondrous waterway where the wind often blows south and the current flows north, allowing river traffic both ways.

‘You said you fled Cairo. You’re an escaped slave?’

‘It’s more complicated than that. Egyptian.’ She pointed. ‘Understand our land before you try to understand our mind.’

The pancake plainness of the country outside Alexandria had changed to the lush, more biblical picture I had expected from stories of Moses among the reeds. Brilliantly green fields of rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and cotton formed rectangles between ranks of stately date palms, as straight as pillars and heavy with their orange and scarlet fruit. Banana and sycamore groves rustled in the wind. Water buffalo pulled ploughs or lifted their horns from the river where they bathed, grunting at the fringe of papyrus beds. The frequency of chocolate-coloured mud-brick villages increased, often topped by the needle of a minaret. We passed lateen-rigged felucca boats moored on the brown water. Measuring twenty to thirty feet long and steered by a long oar, these sailing craft were omnipresent on the river. There were smaller paddle skiffs, barely big enough to float an individual, from which fishermen tossed string nets. Harnessed and blindfolded donkeys drudged in a circle to lift water into canals in a scene unchanged for five thousand years. The smell of Nile water filled the river breeze. Our flotilla of gunboats and supply craft paraded past, French tricolour flapping, without leaving any discernible impression. Many peasants hardly bothered to look up.

What a strange place I’d come to. Alexander, Cleopatra, Arabs, Mamelukes, ancient pharaohs, Moses, and now Bonaparte. The entire country was a rubbish heap of history, including the odd medallion around my neck. Now I wondered about Astiza, who seemed to have a more complicated past than I’d suspected. Might she recognise something in the medallion that I would not?

‘What spell did you cast back in Alexandria?’

It took a moment before she reluctantly replied. ‘One for your safety, as a warning to another. A second for the beginning of your wisdom.’

‘You can make me smart?’

‘That may be impossible. Perhaps I can make you see.’

I laughed, and she finally allowed a slight smile. By listening to her, I was getting her to let me inside a little. She wanted respect, not just for her but for her nation.

That languid night, as we lay at anchor and slept on the deck of the chebek under a desert haze of stars, I crept close to where she was sleeping. I could hear the lap of water, the creak of rigging, and the murmur of sailors on watch.

‘Keep away from me,’ she whispered when she woke, squeezing herself against the wood.

‘I want to show you something.’

‘Here? Now?’ She had the same tone of suspicion Madame Durrell used when we discussed payment of my rent.

‘You’re the historian of plain truths. Look at this.’ I passed the medallion to her. In the glow of a deck lantern it was just discernible.

She felt with her fingers and sucked in her breath. ‘Where did you get this?’ Her eyes widened, her lips slightly parted.

‘I won it in a card game in Paris.’

‘Won it from whom?’

‘A French soldier. It’s supposed to come from Egypt. Cleopatra, he claimed.’

‘Perhaps you stole it from this soldier.’ Why would she say that?

‘No, just outplayed him at cards. You’re the religious expert. Tell me if you know what it is.’

She turned it in her hand, extending the arms to make a V, and rubbed the disc between thumb and forefinger to feel its inscriptions. ‘I’m not sure.’

That was disappointing. ‘Is it Egyptian?’

She held it up to see in the dim light. ‘Very early, if it is. It seems primitive, fundamental… so this is what the Arab lusts for.’

‘See all those holes? What do you think they are?’

Astiza regarded it for a moment and then rolled on her back, holding it up toward the sky. ‘Look at the way the light shines through. Clearly, they are supposed to be stars.’

‘Stars?’

‘Life’s purpose is written on the sky, American. Look!’ She pointed south toward the brightest star, just rising on the horizon.

‘That’s Sirius. What about it?’

‘It’s the star of Isis, star of the new year. She waits for us.’