The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace Page A

born.”
    Her hands gripped each other in her lap as the carriage swayed on through the old town and out under a stone gateway and into a grand square, lined with gracious buildings, made of white stone and adorned with balconies and striped awnings. The strolling people wore European dress and red felt hats. Harriet saw an African boy, laden with packages, running behind a fashionable woman. She had a sick, certain feeling that she saw a slave.
    Minutes later, the driver drew up the horses outside a pair of high iron gates. A watchman scrambled to his feet and Harriet followed Louisa and Yael into a garden dominated by a huge tree. Its branches curled upward like the legs of spiders and its leaves were sharp and dark, as if they had been folded into triangles.
    “ Araucaria araucana ,” Yael announced, pausing to look up into it. “The monkey puzzle. We had one at home.”
    It didn’t resemble a living thing at all, Harriet thought, passing underneath it and along the path to a square stone house with shuttered windows. Mustapha ushered them through the double wooden door, across a vestibule, and into a courtyard in the center of the house that, she realized with delight, stood open to the sky.
    Louisa looked around her. She tilted back her head, the sun falling on her white face.
    “Where is the roof?” she said. “A house must have a roof.”
    In a large, airy bedroom with long wooden shutters at the window, Harriet undid her pocket from around her waist and slid her journal under the pillow on the bed. Kicking off her boots, she lay flat on her back on a mattress with a dip in the middle and breathed into her stomach.
    She felt filled with an unexpected happiness. She’d feared she was coming to Egypt to die, but now that she was here, she had the peculiar sense that her true life, the one that had always awaited her, had at last begun.

FIFTEEN

    Louisa entered the room to see Yael and Harriet sitting opposite each other at one end of a long table. She pulled up a chair next to Harriet’s.
    “Did you hear the racket?” Yael said. “Late last night and again before dawn? I thought it was a funeral but Harriet says it’s the priest.”
    “It’s the call to prayer,” Harriet said. “Mustapha explained it to me.”
    “You must have heard it, Louisa. Such a queer-sounding dirge and we’re to be subjected to it five times a day.”
    “I believe I did,” Louisa said, shaking out a napkin and spreading it on her lap. She smiled at Yael. “I can’t be sure, I slept so deeply.”
    It wasn’t true. She had slept badly, then risen early and taken a shower, standing under the trickle of water and looking up at a small, high bathroom window through which bright light poured. It was peculiar to be naked in a foreign country. She felt more exposed than if she were in her own bathroom, clothed by the familiarity of her house and city and country.
    Back in her bedroom, drying herself on a towel stiff as a board, she dusted talcum powder under her arms and put on her lightest dress. It was one of her favorites, a fitted jacket and skirt in emerald green with a darker, bottle-green train over the hips of the skirt, falling in a fishtail at the back, but once she’d fastened the jacket, draped the train over the bustle, it felt wrong. The fabric carried in its folds a whiff of fog, something sour and dirty, mixing with the smell of her soaped and powdered skin, the odors of salt and pine that drifted through the open window.
    Louisa surveyed the table. The cloth bore pale stains of days gone by and the food was spread on unmatched china plates. The fare consisted not of the raw sheep’s eyeballs she’d feared but slices of white cheese, flat round loaves the size of saucers, piled high, and a tall jug of what smelled like coffee, strong and aromatic.
    “Are these eggs?” she asked, reaching out and touching one.
    “Hard-boiled,” Yael said. “And perfectly edible.”
    Louisa sipped her coffee and listened to