The Daughters of Mars (34 page)

That pale word again.

Charlie Condon was already on the lower steps. Coming, Charlie? asked Honora, who obviously knew him.

Just a tick, Miss Slattery, he called, raising an arm and an index finger up the stairs to beg indulgence. The others ascended.

Well, he said, it was a fine thing somehow. Meeting you again in such altered circumstances. Look, Miss Durance, you’ve been to Giza, haven’t you? I bet you’re a veteran of Giza?

I was there earlier this year. No, it’s last year now.

Yes, well, it’s all new to me. You can’t believe it when you first see it, can you? You can’t believe you’re there, sharing the same air with it.

Yes, I think I felt
exactly
like that.

Now there’s another one I want to see. It’s up the river. Sakkara. The first pyramid of all—King Djoser. I wondered, would you do me the honor of visiting it with me? Not a huge distance. Hour or two on the truck. Or there’s a bus. We could take a picnic.

For the first time since she had come to Egypt, she had been asked to go somewhere she wanted to go and in the smallest party possible. The chance of an excursion without being swamped by conversation—after so many continuous nights of such conversation—was welcome.

If you will excuse me, he said, I will go up to the roof garden. I’m new here. This year is likely to be my initiation in military matters.

• • •

Condon suggested they try the adventure of an Egyptian bus to Sakkara. It was a novel idea since everyone else she knew tried to cadge lifts in army trucks or ambulances or commandeer a car when on a jaunt. People had told him they could get a truck back to Cairo or even Heliopolis without difficulty that afternoon. Sakkara was on the south–north road from Aswan. To her it counted for little that soldiers might smirk at picking up an officer and a nurse from the side of the road.

Catching the tram from Heliopolis and the bus from the railway station seemed a genuine adventure. It bemused the bus-traveling effendis—the Egyptian gentlemen in heavy European suits and tarbooshes—and the shy fellahin, laborers and small farmers, Nile cow-cockies as Condon would say, who frowned and stared as if the universal order had been upset.

As she watched unaccustomed quarters of the city sweep by, she realized that her elated feeling that the world had altered was because she and Condon had for a few hours moved beyond military reach. They rolled out into the irrigated countryside and its strips of cultivation and she assessed that the day was like a warmer autumn day at home and the sky wide open and vast. Occasional trucks going northwards showed unwelcome glimpses of khaki.

It’s a little mean of me, said Charlie as they sat and the bus engine whined and dragged them along at perhaps twenty miles an hour. I know all the travel guides at Sakkara try to make a living. But I think I’d rather not have a guide. I mean, some of them talk you blind and distract you when you see something marvelous and try to sell you rubbish.

He wanted to know—of course—whether this was agreeable to her. She said it was. He assured her he had a Murray guidebook with him—people preferred them over the German Baedeker guides—and somehow she knew that he had absorbed it conscientiously and would reliably tell her everything she needed to know at Sakkara.

As they traveled he confessed he’d been studying in a Sydney art school which emphasized sketching as the building block of all art, and whose motto was that it was better to sketch well for a lifetime than to paint badly for twenty years. He didn’t like to bring out his pad when there were lots of people around. But the reason he liked sketching was not just that a sketchpad was so much more portable. It began to show you—as one of his teachers had argued—that light is everything. Color was a mere servant to light. Light is everything
to
everything, and
in
everything too. It was, of course, the first time she
had heard a discourse on these matters. She was as impressed with this reflection as with the bus—which seemed in part Condon’s own conception.

When they got off in the flat-roofed oasis town of Sakkara, a dozen men came up and mobbed them and tried to rent them donkeys and offer themselves as guides. Children milled and plucked garments and called Charlie “effendi” and “sir.”

No guides, no guides, called Condon, right or wrong, just or unjust. No, no guides. Just ponies.

He went down the line of those available. He turned to Sally and said, These two look good, pointing to two beasts who looked to her little different from the other sinewy creatures. Their owner shook his head sadly as if his animals were too precious to him for lease. How many piastres? Condon began. Though new to the place, and inexperienced, he brought an air of casual worldliness to his transactions.

Sally and Condon—once atop the ponies—rode off. Children ran behind praising the bey (a term of praise above effendi) and lady for their horsemanship. This ferment of applause was the product of poverty, and she and Charlie had already committed the crime of depriving a local of a tour-guide fee. Yet they had all they wanted—Condon carried in his kitbag water, boiled eggs, and canned salmon, and some flatbread from a bakery stall in Cairo. Condon amiably telling them,
Imshi,
the tail of children faded beyond the edge of town. Their ponies scurried across gravel and left the last little irrigated green plot of Egyptian clover behind.

Very soon the pyramid began to rise in huge steps before them. It ascended to a blunt apex in the sky. She could sense and shared in Condon’s zeal to walk along the remaining colonnade in front of the pyramid. They tied up their ponies to rings embedded in a low stone wall for the purpose. Then they got down and were alone. No Scots in kilts. No slouch hats. No British officers in tropic-weight tailored uniforms. No one. Small gusts of wind sounded enormous as they turned over pebbles in the great, silent dome of the day.

Condon was carrying a battery torch. They might be able to visit the burial chamber, he said, and see the frescoes. He let go of his knowledge easily. He seemed no pedant. This ancient tumulus involved an architect named Imhotep, he said, who used limestone for the first time in history here—in Djoser’s stairway to heaven. Charlie Condon was more interested in the four-thousand-year-old cleverness of Imhotep—which had lasted—than in the power of Djoser, which was lost. This columned approach, he said, must have been crammed with people—image makers, butchers, money changers, wine sellers. For this was the great market of the necropolis of Memphis. One of the tombs was, in fact, said Condon, of Djoser’s butcher.

Charlie Condon populated the place without effort—a man who wanted to see the total present in the light of the entire then. But they found the entrance to the burial chamber padlocked—a guide would have no doubt fetched a key to open it. As a further exercise of his stylishness as a traveler, he picked the lock with a penknife. Sally laughed—but in part for fear of the winding chambers he was so keen to enter with her.

Do you know where I learned to pick locks? he asked her as they entered darkness and he switched on the torch. Newington College. It’s an excellent place to go if you want a criminal career.

There were vivid, graceful human figures painted on the walls, she saw as Condon’s torchbeam lit the way down the first dark passage. Some of the painted shapes had their faces chipped away as if by chisel. Condon wondered was this the work of Christian iconoclasts? No, he decided. I believe they really got to work in Greece and Turkey. Here it could only be the Muslim iconoclasts. Mohammed had approved of his iconoclastic brethren but had asked them to spare a painting of Jesus and Mary.

Smelling the dim must of centuries, feeling the closeness of the walls, Sally was tempted to say ironically that she was pleased he had made that clear. They took turns into further passages and Condon marveled. Sally thought, however, that no one knew they were here
beneath Imhotep’s limestone. The passages, she suspected, had been designed to confuse those who entered. Charlie Condon—in sketcher’s raptures—praised his ancient colleagues. We know they thought like us, he told her, because they drew like us. To her they seemed to draw very differently. But he was the expert. At last—to her great solace—he said they should go out again. He assured her he had the map worked out in his head but it might become confused if he took more turns. He half chided himself on the way out for not having brought a guide. But how could you tell which ones were good?

At last they reached the sunlight. We did excellently, he told her and shook his head. But this is an astounding trinity, when you think of it—the oldest remaining stone building. The most potent pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. And the oldest building of which we know the name of the architect.

To the side of the pyramid lay a lower, stepped building and Condon led her in there. It was not as disturbing as the long passages of the pyramid, and lit up a statue of Djoser. Someone had been at his nose with a chisel but the rest was so immediately human—including the tight, unhappy mouth and low forehead and braided hair.

They had absorbed and been absorbed sufficiently to need to seek a pause when they emerged again. Condon spent a little time reconnoitering for the stone floor of an early Coptic monastery, said to be near the pyramid, and complained that the man who’d discovered it had cleared out all sign of it and given or sold it to museums. So they found a fragment of wall which cast shade and sat on stones, Condon producing the food from his kitbag, Sally a tablecloth she had brought with her in her satchel. They sat on a stone surface and ate the fresh, appetizing flatbread.

They tell me, Charlie murmured, chewing, that you and Honora were on a ship that was sunk.

We were fortunate, she said. And it seems a very long time ago.

What is it all like? When everything starts. The other fellows don’t even try to tell a person.

They can’t tell you. It’s like a new world where there aren’t any words. As for me, I’ve only worked around the edges. But even I can’t explain . . .

I was ready to come away in November 1914 and got scarlet fever—had a dreadful time talking doctors into letting me get here now, but of course a person thinks all the time, What is it really like? And even—what it’s like when men die around you?

I can’t remember screams, she said. By the time they got to us on the ships or the island, most of them were quieter than you would think they should be. Morphine might have helped. If they’re our patients, we see them go—sometimes it’s hemorrhage. But twenty paces away no one in the ward hears anything.

You must think my questions are absurd, he admitted.

No, she hurried to tell him. I would ask them myself if I were where you are. But don’t forget pneumonia and typhoid and dysentery. They can bring a fellow low too.

Thank you for being so frank, he said, his head on the side. The men aren’t as frank as that.

Well, it’s true you seem to be a different person when these things happen. Not your daily self. You’ll find that. I wasn’t my ordinary self when the ship sank. I was another creature. And that creature finds it hard to explain things.

There
was
something fragile about him which made her remember the war shocked, the men of bad dreams and waking fears. Was it the fundamental delicacy of his face? His passion for the ancient sketching?

Suddenly he was on another tack. Have you ever looked at the black fellows? he asked.

What do you mean by
looked
? she asked.

Well, I mean, taken a chance to have a good gaze at their faces?

I don’t think anyone does that, she admitted. I haven’t. Gazing? People don’t
gaze
at them. Sometimes it’s politeness—they’d be embarrassed to be gazed at. And fair enough—some of it’s fear too. Our
fear. And, I mean, the blacks at home seem a pretty desperate lot, don’t they? And that puts us off looking at them.

Well, I used to gaze at them when I was a kid. I got in trouble from grown-ups for it. I played with our abo laundry woman’s kid in the yard in Rudder Street. I wasn’t at my gazing stage then. Gazing came later. This building . . .

He nodded his head towards the pyramid.

They’re older than this, you know. The Aborigines. You see it in the face. If I find the courage, I might go one day and negotiate man to man with one of them and try to sketch his face. They say at the art class it’s easier to do if you go to the desert—one of the teachers has done it by train and camel. It’s easier to gaze at them there than it is at home. But I’d like to gaze at them at home. Where they’re not romantic figures. Where they’re living in misery.

The mention of art teachers serious enough to penetrate the interior seemed to suggest to her that these were no fly-by-night art classes he attended. She asked him what school it was.

It’s run by an artist, Eva Sodermann. She was worried when the war started she might get interned. But we all petitioned the government. Up to the time I left, it had worked. Anyhow, one of the men who comes there, who teaches with Eva, quite a jaunty sort of fellow—he studied in Paris. Even sold a few paintings to the Royal Academy in London. We used to look at him in awe. You know what he told us? All the paintings he did in Melbourne in the 1890s . . . no one bought them. Now they have. But he still has to earn his bread teaching. So . . . God help the rest of us.

I wish you’d brought your sketchbook with you though, she said.

Oh, he said, I’m no good at it in company. I won’t mind showing off when I succeed. But on the way I need to fail and I like to do that bit privately.

But I wouldn’t be critical, she assured him.

You should be critical, that’s the point. There’s no art even at my level unless people are critical. Art doesn’t exist until someone says,
That’s good. Or else until someone says, That’s on the nose. I’m too proud to be on the nose in public. As an artist I’m still tentative, even if I talk as if I know what I’m doing. In fact, I was a law student taking a bit of a break to go to an art school. And I’ll probably study law again if no one buys my work. Or at least if no one employs me as an art teacher.