Part 2 (1/2)

The girl doesn't stir.

”The pencil, Bint?” Thayer says, and he recalls, as he must several times a day, that the girl speaks no English. Daoud Pasha offered to replace her with one who does, but Thayer has never accepted or rejected the proposal, not even making a gesture to indicate his indifference. Now, with his hands still on the compa.s.s, he dips his head toward the carpet and asks for the pencil again.

She doesn't follow the movement of his head. He looks into her eyes and then down at the pencil, then back at the warm deep pools of her eyes and again at the pencil. When he returns to her face, she's still looking directly into his. She offers the faintest, most respectful suggestion of amus.e.m.e.nt. Perhaps it's there, perhaps it's not.

Thayer laughs despite his frustration. He puts down the compa.s.s and goes to his knees. He'll have to redraw the diagram from scratch.

”Pencil,” he says, holding it up to her face. ”Pencil.”

Perhaps she has now learned the word for pencil. Or perhaps she believes she's learned the word for raising an object before someone's face, or the word for the color of the pencil, which is in fact vermilion, or the word for recovering an object that has fallen, or the word for the flush that the exertion has brought to Thayer's temples, or the word for laughing in frustration. She doesn't repeat the word.

But she holds his stare. He studies her face with the idea that he will see it for the first time. He doesn't succeed. Something veils her aspect, a cloud or a shadow.

Nine.

Thayer's health continues to improve, but Miss Keaton keeps her office near his quarters. Through one of the dragomen, she instructs Bint that he must take his quinine without fail.

Having returned from Point B, Ballard sourly notes the secretary's protectiveness, which reminds him why he doesn't like having ladies involved in engineering projects. Even when they don't interfere directly in the endeavor, they project their fears and weaknesses onto their men. Thayer will benefit from an evening without Miss Keaton's company.

Ballard suggests that he join him after dinner. A severely water-rationed hammam has been established on the far side of the encampment, hard by the diggers' quarters, within a complex of mud-brick structures that tend to the laborers' necessities, including their basest. Parallel facilities for white men lie adjacent and include a tea room that serves as the Club, some of whose furnis.h.i.+ngs Ballard has seen to himself: Anatolian kilims, water pipes, and a Bedouin saddle hung on the wall alongside an antique astrolabe. The engineer knows the astronomer usually enjoys an evening among men, whether they're the world's most distinguished astronomers or, at Point A, the Equilateral's engineers and overseers, some of whom have been under Ballard for decades and took heroic part in the construction of the great new barrage-dam at Aswan.

When they arrive at the tea room, Ballard and Thayer receive respectful, if wary, acknowledgments from the men, followed by a deep bow from the proprietor, Daoud Pasha. The Turk serves the new guests himself, attentive to information or any gesture or sign that he might turn to profit. Besides tending to the hammam and the tea room, Daoud Pasha has his hand in most of the Equilateral's provisioning, under arrangements that remain obscure.

Ballard thinks the astronomer's health has been compromised by too many nights in his tent with his astronomical charts and tables. His solicitations are sincerely tendered, but he also knows that his friend's fatigue and pallor threaten the project's completion as much as the marshes on Side AC do. The lavish expenditures of capital, the stupendous tonnage of machinery hauled to this wasteland, and the exhaustive outlay of physical effort dedicated to the excavations depend on immaterial theory and desire: Thayer's. The Concession's real investment lies primarily in the flesh-and-blood astronomer. Keeping him whole is the chief engineer's responsibility, no less than it is Miss Keaton's.

Thayer in turn likes Ballard but suspects that for him the Equilateral is no more than another civil engineering project and, preoccupied with the impediments, he fails to regard its grandeur. Ballard is an unreflective man. His decades in the desert haven't left him with much of an affinity for quietude-he smokes, but not for him the contemplative drag on the hookah. Now he leans over his tumbler of gin, about to make a point. He's had too much to drink already. Thayer wonders whether, in a life under cloudless night skies, Ballard has ever thought about the stars and their secrets. As they led him across the burning sands of the Empty Quarter, did he listen to their murmurings? Did he dwell on their hidden and contradictory desires? Thayer is baffled that for modern men astronomy has lost its ancient status as the princ.i.p.al art, on which depend all other occupations, including engineering. Those who raised the pyramids knew the stars and kept in their good graces.

Yet Ballard has succeeded in driving the project forward, when the most renowned engineers of his age were intimidated by its ambitions. Sir John Hawkshaw declared that without a railroad it would be impossible to transport the necessary equipment into the Western Desert. Istvan Turr predicted that windblown sands would obscure the figure long before it was completed. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Le Grand Francais, the Builder of Suez, announced that the Equilateral could not be accomplished, neither for twice the price nor with five times the number of laborers. The single task of keeping nine hundred thousand men alive in the Western Desert, bringing them their every swallow of water and morsel of food, had daunted the greatest military men of the world's greatest powers. Ballard has shown them that it can be done. Thayer recognizes that history will regard the Equilateral as much Ballard's achievement as his own.

Now the engineer declares, ”Sanford, I've heard rumors of war. It was a blunder to stop at the Atbara River, thank Whitehall, but reinforcements are on the way. Warwicks and the Cameron Highlanders. Surely this year's campaign will strike directly at Omdurman. The khalif will be ground into dust, don't you think?”

”I suppose,” Thayer says vaguely. Fatigued by his illness, he's drinking only tea tonight. ”I haven't seen the newspapers.”

”This isn't in the newspapers,” Ballard says, further deepening the creases around his sun-damaged eyes. ”This is confidential information, the troops have been seen disembarking in Alexandria, and it has some bearing on our enterprise. The troops are welcome, if the reports are true, for there's not a single regiment between us and the Sudan. I don't think you'd fancy having a thousand of those dervish boys showing up in camp tomorrow.”

”No, I wouldn't,” Thayer concedes. ”Not unless they come with spades.”

Ballard's nod is grim. They had come with rifles to the Aswan Barrage-antiques, no match for the Maxims, but still, it was a nasty business, horses and men dead in the Nile, so bloated in the heat they could barely be distinguished from each other. Ballard has no Maxims here.

In the concluding decade of the nineteenth century, Egypt is a land where political power rests on semiviscous sands. The long-dying Ottoman Empire's suzerainty has given way to British occupation. While the British consul general, Lord Cromer, exercises his nation's control of Suez and the s.h.i.+pping lanes to India, just beyond Egypt's borders the Sudan remains unsettled, under the sway of fanatics devoted to the Messiah they call the Mahdi. For years the Mahdists have been making trouble, but now rifles have been brought into play and railroads and telegraphs have hastened the spread of religious infection. Europeans in Khartoum face brazen hara.s.sment. Raiders from the rebel capital, Omdurman, cross the Twenty-second Parallel without impediment. The savage beheading of General Charles Gordon and the destruction of his troops, sent to Khartoum to restore order, still aggrieves civilized sentiment nine years later.

In feverish, corrupt Cairo, the Khedive Abbas Hilmy II, technically an Ottoman viceroy, maintains a palace and an army under Lord Cromer's supervision. He has granted the Mars Concession in exchange for certain material considerations and in the private belief that Egypt's destiny enfolds the Equilateral. At dusk the military-trained son of Tewfik and the great-great-grandson of Mehmet Ali, the first khedive, steps from his palace chambers onto a marbled terrace and gazes upon the distant Platonic solids in Gizeh, their stones as soft as halvah in the guttering light. The strength and ambition of youth run in his blood on these melancholy evenings; he also senses, coursing through him, his people's millennia, majestic and submissive, enigmatic and frequently catastrophic.

Ten.

The brothel operates invisibly, though its presence is as palpable as the chill of the desert night. Thayer knows the brothel, the bagnio, is here, even if he's ignorant of its precise location within the encampment. The girls are never witnessed outside its doors, neither in the dining halls nor within the labyrinth of paths and alleys that emanate from Vertex BAC. Smoking with Ballard, who can't help vexing them both with talk of war and politics, Thayer believes that he hears a sigh, or a grunt, or a rustle behind the fabric of things, but these sounds can easily have been made by Daoud Pasha, who stares into s.p.a.ce while he cleans a gla.s.s or pipestem. Thayer listens deeply, trying to gain information from these whispers, yet the brothel remains no more than a speculation. In the darkness we speculate. From the darkness we draw hypotheses that conform less to observation than they do to our needs, especially our need for companions.h.i.+p. We presume every desire is complemented by its object, somewhere.

But eventually, as the night deepens, Thayer's observations are confirmed and the hypothesis is proven.

The engineer stands abruptly and hitches his trousers. He returns his gla.s.s to the table with force, as if unsure that it will stay there. When he winks he betrays uncharacteristic embarra.s.sment. His face colors. Without another word he strides off through a canvas flap, opposite the tea room's entrance. A few moments later Thayer hears a girl's bright, explosive laugh.

Other girls dwell in the shadows beyond, scores of them within the dormitory located a few hundred yards away, one of Point A's few buildings constructed of stone, at Miss Keaton's insistence. The Equilateral's labor force is overwhelmingly male, but women have been brought to the points to do char work and serve in the infirmaries. Bint presumably retires there when she's not caring for Thayer. The entrance to the residence hall is protected by a detachment of Nubian guards, who regularly draw on the honor they are meant to protect. In any event these unchaperoned, unmarried females will be considered no less ruined than their sisters in the bagnio once the Equilateral is completed and they are sent back to their villages.

Sipping the tea, which has gone cold, and touched by a corresponding chill in the small of his back, Thayer antic.i.p.ates the return of his fever. Ballard's departure has taken the last of his vitality with him. In return the engineer has left Thayer the dervishes. The dervishes are known to infiltrate themselves among the fellahin, watching, waiting, striking once our guard is down. The dervishes will slit our throats and then vanish into the night, leaving no tracks in the sand. Thayer has never met or spoken with a dervish, nor, for certain, seen a dervish, but their existence has been conclusively established.

He must have fallen asleep because his next moment of awareness comes abruptly, threatening stark revelation, even though the hand that touches his shoulder is a gentle one.

”Effendi.”

It's Bint. Framed in a white headdress, her face is small, dark, and oval. Her eyes dart nervously like little birds.

Daoud Pasha stands behind her, showing concern, yet his lips curl. He has learned one or two things in the last few hours. ”She will take you back to your apartments, sir.”

Bint has been dispatched by Miss Keaton, who, as a lady, would not be welcome in the tea room. Miss Keaton will later ask herself if she has cause to regret this expedient.

Now the astronomer suspects that he's smoked has.h.i.+sh in the pipe with Ballard; when he tries to stand his lower body gives way. He leans against Bint. She's a slight, almost frail girl, but she takes his weight without complaint. The body beneath the folds of her gown is warm, soft, and pliant. The two stagger from the tea room, past the fellahin waiting near the entrance to the hammam. The men turn away as they leave, as if to deny seeing Thayer impaired.

Thayer and the girl move forward several hundred feet and the lights and sounds of the hammam recede. Thayer is gradually refreshed by the night air, making him even more aware of an excitement that has begun to churn through his clotted being, radiating from Bint's touch. The time in the tea room, with its talk of troops and dervishes, evaporates as quickly as a desert puddle. Although he's aware that their closeness has already come up against the borders of propriety, he doesn't pull away.

The stars are out, as they've been every night for the past two years and in the hushed ages before them, dependably in their places as the seasons rotated through the crystal empyrean. Now it's the month of April, well into the night. The Great Bear has begun to lumber beneath the horizon, making way for the Virgin and the lush lactic wash of the Milky Way. The planets tumble through their epicycles. The moon has already set. That makes it just past three. The seeing is excellent, eight or nine of ten on the Dougla.s.s Scale, marred only by some s.h.i.+fting currents in the upper atmosphere. Nights like these always intoxicate him with their possibility. Half the universe hangs above the desert floor, each star its own sun, each sun circled by worlds composed of the same elements that animate matter on Earth. The sky may be as alive as a deep warm pond in a sunny glade.

In the east the luminous star in Aquila draws his attention. He lifts his arm to it.

”That is Alpha Aquilae,” he says. ”Otherwise known as Altair.”

He's surprised when this provokes an open smile, as strong an expression of Bint's sentiments as he's ever witnessed. As she puts his things in order or brings him his meals, her gestures are more likely to be demure and self-contained. She tends to hover into visibility and then, before he can establish her presence, she vanishes. Now she repeats the star's name, casting it with a foreign inflection, ”Al-tair.”

”That's originally Arabic,” Thayer concedes. ”Altair, 'the flying eagle.' Or vulture.”

”Al-nasr al-tair,” she declares. This is the star's full appellation, in Arabic. She raises her arm abruptly and points not far from Altair, to an even brighter star. ”Wega,” she says.

Bint speaks so rarely that the sound of her voice is like the disclosure of a secret. The syllables emerge softly and resonant. He gazes with her at the second star, white with a touch of sapphire, so radiant they can almost be warmed by it.

”Vega,” he confirms. ”So you know some of the sky.”

She extends a long finger with clipped, unvarnished nails at another blue-white first-magnitude star, about twenty degrees from Vega. It's the most prominent object in Cygnus and also commands an ancient name that has survived intact its pa.s.sage through the Greek and Latin cosmologies. ”Deneb,” she says.

How many Arab girls in camp, or fellahin in the work crews dozing tonight alongside their excavations, can identify the vertices of the conspicuous, nearly equilateral triangle, Altair-Vega-Deneb, that dominates the Northern Hemisphere's sky on spring mornings and summer evenings? For the most part they never look upward, their attention fixed on the immediate and the mundane, the terrestrial.