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: 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.
Under the same sun Nita would be moving now about their little yard growing heavy with what Waldetar hoped would be a boy. A boy could even it up, two and two. Women outnumber us now, he thought: why should I contribute further to the imbalance?
"Though I'm not against it," he'd once told her during their courtship (part way here - in Barcelona, when he was stevedoring at the docks); "God's will, is it not? Look at Solomon, at many great kings. One man, several wives."
"Great king," she yelled: "who?" They both started to laugh like children. "One peasant girl you can't even support." Which is no way to impress a young man you are bent on marrying. It was one of the reasons he fell in love with her shortly afterward and why they'd stayed in love for nearly seven years of monogamy.
Nita, Nita . . The mind's picture was always of her seated behind their house at dusk, where the cries of children were drowned in the whistle of a night train for Suez; where cinders came to lodge in pores beginning to widen under the stresses of some heart's geology ("Your complexion is going from bad to worse," he'd say: "I'll have to start paying more attention to the lovely young French girls who are always making eyes at me." "Fine," she'd retort, "I'll tell that to the baker when he comes to sleep with me tomorrow, it'll make him feel better"); where all the nostalgias of an Iberian littoral lost to them - the squid hung to dry, nets stretched across any skyglow morning or evening, singing or drunken cries of sailors and fishermen from behind only the next looming warehouse (find them, find them!
voices whose misery is all the world's night) - came unreal, in a symbolic way, as a racketing over points, a chuff-chuff of inanimate breath, and had only pretended to gather among the pumpkins, purslane and cucumbers, date palm, roses and poinsettias of their garden.
Halfway to Damanhur he heard a child crying from a compartment nearby. Curious, Waldetar looked inside. The was English, eleven or so, nearsighted: her watering eyes swam distorted behind thick eyeglasses. Across from her a man, thirty or so, harangued. Another looked on, perhaps angry, his burning face at least giving the illusion. The girl held a rock to her flat bosom.
"But have you never played with a clockwork doll?" the man insisted, the voice muffled through the door. "A doll which does everything perfectly, because of the machinery inside. Walks, sings, jumps rope. Real little boys and girls, you know, cry: act sullen, won't behave." His hands lay perfectly still, long and starved-nervous, one on each knee.
"Bongo-Shaftsbury," the other began.
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.
Under the same sun Nita would be moving now about their little yard growing heavy with what Waldetar hoped would be a boy. A boy could even it up, two and two. Women outnumber us now, he thought: why should I contribute further to the imbalance?
"Though I'm not against it," he'd once told her during their courtship (part way here - in Barcelona, when he was stevedoring at the docks); "God's will, is it not? Look at Solomon, at many great kings. One man, several wives."
"Great king," she yelled: "who?" They both started to laugh like children. "One peasant girl you can't even support." Which is no way to impress a young man you are bent on marrying. It was one of the reasons he fell in love with her shortly afterward and why they'd stayed in love for nearly seven years of monogamy.
Nita, Nita . . The mind's picture was always of her seated behind their house at dusk, where the cries of children were drowned in the whistle of a night train for Suez; where cinders came to lodge in pores beginning to widen under the stresses of some heart's geology ("Your complexion is going from bad to worse," he'd say: "I'll have to start paying more attention to the lovely young French girls who are always making eyes at me." "Fine," she'd retort, "I'll tell that to the baker when he comes to sleep with me tomorrow, it'll make him feel better"); where all the nostalgias of an Iberian littoral lost to them - the squid hung to dry, nets stretched across any skyglow morning or evening, singing or drunken cries of sailors and fishermen from behind only the next looming warehouse (find them, find them!
voices whose misery is all the world's night) - came unreal, in a symbolic way, as a racketing over points, a chuff-chuff of inanimate breath, and had only pretended to gather among the pumpkins, purslane and cucumbers, date palm, roses and poinsettias of their garden.
Halfway to Damanhur he heard a child crying from a compartment nearby. Curious, Waldetar looked inside. The was English, eleven or so, nearsighted: her watering eyes swam distorted behind thick eyeglasses. Across from her a man, thirty or so, harangued. Another looked on, perhaps angry, his burning face at least giving the illusion. The girl held a rock to her flat bosom.
"But have you never played with a clockwork doll?" the man insisted, the voice muffled through the door. "A doll which does everything perfectly, because of the machinery inside. Walks, sings, jumps rope. Real little boys and girls, you know, cry: act sullen, won't behave." His hands lay perfectly still, long and starved-nervous, one on each knee.
"Bongo-Shaftsbury," the other began.
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