The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace

watched them, ever come so purposefully to sit with them, as if—it seemed to her now—he had some mission that he had not declared.
    The man had imprinted himself on her mind. Each time she remembered the way he’d looked at her after she and Louisa left the table, a current of an unfamiliar feeling ran through her and left her disturbed.
    Pushing her way in between the crowd, Harriet looked down over the railing. Brightly painted boats crowded under the prow, with barefoot men standing up in them, holding out their hands to receive trunks and parcels, calling for business in a soup of languages. Half a dozen or more of the little crafts had their sails hoisted and were tacking back toward the quay with their passengers. Mr. Soane had disappeared.
    “Miss Heron!”
    Looking to starboard, she saw a red boat bobbing on the translucent sea, the painter seated in it. He raised his head from the match cupped in his hand and lifted his arm in a wave.
    “Good morning,” he called over the water in a pleasant voice, as if they were old acquaintances.
    “Good morning, Mr. Soane,” she called back.
    “Welcome to Egypt. Tell your mother I shall visit you.”
    Too surprised to speak, Harriet nodded, reaching automatically for her journal in the pocket around her waist. As the boat carried Eyre Soane toward the dock, she watched, feeling the strong beat of the sun on her face, breathing in air that smelled of salt and sun, that carried a trace of cigar smoke.

FOURTEEN

    Harriet sat on one side of the worn leather seat, Louisa in the middle, and Yael at the far end. The horse slowed to a walk as they passed along a narrow alley, past dark cavelike shops stocked with bolts of cloth, glassware, tinned goods. Over everything was a geometric pattern of light and shade, cast by lengths of sacking stretched overhead between the roofs of the buildings. The streets teemed with people, with color, with life and the cries of voices and animals.
    Harriet felt the strangeness physically, like heat or cold; every part of her body tingled with impressions, as if the surroundings were both more real than any she had ever experienced in her life and at the same time utterly unreal.
    “Arab town, Sitti,” Mustapha shouted, turning his head to them from where he sat at the front of the cab, next to the driver. Mustapha had met them on the quay and introduced himself as their housekeeper.
    “Pleased to meet you,” said Yael. “How did you know it was us?”
    “Three ladies,” he’d announced, helping them up, hitching his robe to display narrow, scarred ankles, naked feet clad in pointed slippers. “I know he is three ladies.”
    A girl was hurrying beside them, squeezed into the gap between the carriage and the mud walls. Her eyes, half closed, oozing a yellow secretion, were trained in their direction and she held out a palm, calling for baksheesh.
    “That poor child,” Yael said. “Can you see her, Louisa?” The driver touched the horse with his whip, and as the animal broke into a trot, the girl caught hold of the armrest and was pulled along. “Slow down, driver,” Yael cried, reaching forward and tapping the man on the shoulder. “Stop.”
    Mustapha issued instructions in a strange, harsh tongue and with a yank of the reins the driver pulled up the horse. Yael began fumbling in her bag. Extracting two English pennies, she leaned down from the cab, pressed them into the girl’s hand.
    “God bless you, dear,” she said as the child darted away.
    “The guidebook advises against giving alms on the street,” Louisa said.
    “She was half starved,” Yael said, closing up her Gladstone bag. “And did you see her eyes?”
    “Poor,” Mustapha said, turning his head to them, smiling, showing a row of the whitest teeth Harriet had ever seen. “She is poor.”
    He laughed and the carriage moved off again.
    “We have poor children in London, Mr. Farr,” Yael said loudly. “But they do not go naked as the day they were