all. Half the battle, thought Max. Out in the street he touched Porpentine's sleeve and began an apologetic denunciation of Cook's. Victoria skipped ahead across rue Cherif Pacha to the hotel. Behind them a closed carriage came rattling out of the drive beside the Austrian Consulate and dashed away hell-for-leather down rue de Rosette.
Porpentine turned to watch it. 'Someone is in a hurry,' Bongo-Shaftsbury noted.
'Indeed,' said Goodfellow. The three watched a few lights in the upper windows of the consulate. 'Quiet, though.'
Bongo-Shaftsbury laughed quickly, perhaps a bit incredulous.
'Here. In the street . . .'
'A fiver would see me through,' Max had continued, trying to regain Porpentine's attention.
'Oh,' vague, 'of course, I could spare it.' Fumbling naively with his wallet.
Victoria watched them from the curb opposite. 'Do come along,' she called.
Goodfellow grinned. 'Here, m'dear.' And started across with Bongo-Shaftsbury.
She stamped her foot. 'Mr. Porpentine.' Porpentine, five quid between his fingertips, looked around. 'Do finish with your cripple. Give him his shilling and come. It's late.'
The white wine, a ghost of Alice, first doubts that Porpentine was genuine; all could contribute to a violation of code. The code being only: Max, take whatever they give you. Max had already turned away from the note which fluttered in the street's wind, moved off against the wind. Limping toward the next pool of light he sensed Porpentine still looked after him. Also knew what he must look like: a little halt, less sure of his own memories' safety and of how many more pools of light he could reasonably expect from the street at night.
IV
The Alexandria and Cairo morning express was late. It puffed into the Gare du Caire slow, noisy, venting black smoke and white steam to mingle among palms and acacias in the park across the tracks from the station house.
Of course the train was late. Waldetar the conductor snorted good-naturedly at those on the platform. Tourists and businessmen, porters from Cook's and Gaze's, poorer, third-class passengers with their impedimenta - like a bazaar - what else did they expect? Seven years he'd made the same leisurely run, and the train had never been on time. Schedules were for the line's owners, for those who calculated profit and loss. The train itself ran on a different clock - its own, which no human could read.
Waldetar was not an Alexandrian. Born in Portugal, he now lived with a wife and three children near the railroad yards in Cairo. His life's progress had been inevitably east; having somehow escaped the hothouse of his fellow Sephardim, he flew to the other extreme and developed an obsession with ancestral roots. Land of triumph, land of God. Land of suffering, also. Scenes of specific persecution upset him.
But Alexandria was a special case. In the Jewish year 3554 Ptolemy Philopator, having been refused entrance to the temple at Jerusalem, returned to Alexandria and imprisoned many of the Jewish colony there. Christians were not the first to be put on exhibition and mass-murdered for the amusement of a mob. Here Ptolemy, after ordering Alexandria's Jews confined in the Hippodrome, embarked on a two-day debauch. The king, his guests and a herd of killer elephants fed on wine and aphrodisiacs: when all had been up to the proper level of blood-lust, the elephants were turned loose into the arena and driven upon the prisoners. But turned (goes the tale) on the guards and spectators instead, trampling many to death. So impressed was Ptolemy that he released the condemned, restored their privileges, and gave them leave to kill their enemies.
Waldetar, a highly religious man, had heard the story from his father and was inclined to take the common- sense view. If there is no telling what a drunken human will do, so much less a herd of drunken elephants. Why put it down to God's intervention? There were enough instances of that in history, all regarded by Waldetar with terror and a sense of his own smallness: Noah's warning of the Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, Lot's escape from annihilated Sodom. Men, he felt, even perhaps Sephardim, are at the mercy of the earth and its seas. Whether a cataclysm is accident or design, they need a God to keep them from harm.
The storm and the earthquake have no mind. Soul cannot commend no-soul. Only God can.
But elephants have souls. Anything that can get drunk, he reasoned, must have some soul. Perhaps this is all 'soul' means. Events between soul and soul are not God's direct province: they are under the influence either of Fortune, or of virtue. Fortune had saved the Jews in the Hippodrome.
Merely train's hardware for any casual onlooker, Waldetar in private life was exactly this mist of philosophy, imagination and continual worry over his several relationships - not only with God, but also with Nita, with their children, with his own history. There's no organized effort about it but here remains a grand joke on all visitors to Baedeker's world: the permanent residents are actually humans in disguise.This secret is as well kept as the others: that statues talk (though the vocal Memnon of Thebes, certain sunrises, been indiscreet), that some government buildings go mad and mosques make love.
Passengers and baggage aboard, the train overcame its inertia and started off only a quarter of an hour behind schedule toward the climbing sun. The railway from Alexandria to Cairo describes a rough arc whose chord points southeast. But the train must first angle north to skirt Lake Mareotis. While Waldetar made his way among the first-class compartments to gather tickets, the train passed rich villages and gardens alive with palms and orange trees. Abruptly these were left behind. Waldetar squeezed past a German with blue lenses for eyes and an Arab deep in conversation, in time to enter a compartment and see from the window momentary death: the desert. The site of the ancient Eleusis - a great mound, looking like the one spot on earth fertile Demeter had never seen, passed by to the south.
At Sidi Gaber the train swung at last toward the southeast, inching slow as the sun; zenith and Cairo would in fact be reached at the same time. Across the Mahmudiyeh Canal, into a slow bloom of green - the Delta - and clouds of ducks and pelicans rising from the shores of Mareotis, frightened by the noise. Beneath the lake were 150 villages, submerged by a man-made Flood in 1801, when the English cut through an isthmus of desert during the siege of Alexandria, to let the Mediterranean in. Waldetar liked to think that the waterfowl soaring thick in the air were ghosts of fellahin. What submarine wonders at the floor of Mareotis! Lost country: houses, hovels, farms, water wheels, all intact.
Did the narwhal pull their plows? Devilfish drive their water wheels?
Down the embankment a group of Arabs lazed about, evaporating water from the lake for salt. Far down the canal were barges, their sails brave white under this sun.
