TALES FROM THE CUCKOO CLUB ARCHIVE, Vol. 1
Five Short Stories by Lee McAulay
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Copyright 2011 Lee McAulay. This work is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
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INDEX
There are five stories in this collection:
- All Roads Lead To The River
- King Of The Sea
- Kittens In The Emu Field
- The Ballad Of Charlemagne's Clerk
- William Rufus
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ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE RIVER
The night before he first beheld the Nile, Louis Beauregard slept in the Libyan desert on the plateau above Giza, tense with anticipation, listening to dogs whining far off in the darkness under the crackling stars.
In the firelit encampment the Arab couriers broke their Ramadan fast and retired to their tents while the three Englishmen, Louis and Smyth and Petherick, sat by the fire talking over their plans for the following day, and beyond. When the other two left for their own tents Louis sat thinking long into the night, writing his journal, wondering if 1850 would be a more purposeful year for him.
So much of the previous decade had been spent travelling, since he'd left England, but all along he'd avoided Egypt. The opportunity had always been there, of course, for a man of his means, but other places had always drawn him aside, as if he were avoiding the country for some reason he couldn't quite articulate. Then Smyth and Petherick had crossed his path and invited him along on their expedition, and he accepted. He was growing tired of Europe and its petty revolutions, and he'd heard so much about Egypt by then that he could find no reason to defy his curiosity.
The journey through Libya had been odd. His fellow Englishmen observed how the desert seemed empty of life or sound but for the sanded wind. Not to Louis. At night it seemed great beasts swept overhead; in the daytime, their offspring swirled around the dusty tents like dust-devils until the travellers broke camp and set off, then they scampered around the camels' cloven footsteps on the sand. No mischief, he thought. Just curiosity, like a child seeking a new playmate. He understood that, felt a pang of recognition as the couriers exchanged snatches of talk in their own dialect, and Louis's solitary status began to vex him.
After his previous adventures on the Grand Tour – carousing around the Greek islands with playboys and poets, jousting with brigands in the hot Spanish plains, criss-crossing the Apennines with Garibaldi for the London newspapers – the time he'd spent in Africa thus far had been ascetic, as he followed Belzoni's footsteps across the desert in mufti. He'd come away from England after the duel which saw him kill a man; but everywhere he went, if he spent long enough in his own company, he felt the tug of duty calling him back. And something more.
He sat wrapped in his robes by the camel-dung fire and hugged his knees. He had found that he wasn't like Smyth or Petherick. His grasp of language was poor, even when conversing with the educated Arabic speakers of the cities, and the local dialects confounded him, so he stuck to schoolboy French much of the time. His couriers were mainly older men, elders who'd learned their French in the time of Napoleon I and spoke it rustily. It tickled him, to have a lingua franca thus, but his frustrations were paramount when it came to the basics of Arabic.
Coming to Egypt was a mistake, he saw now. He should have pressed on, to Persia, to India and beyond, out to the Great Dominions. He'd come because they said he should, those poets – and because they said it was dangerous. Bandits in the hills. Pickpockets in the streets. Death to the infidels. He took to the idea like he had his other adventures, seeking thrills and a possibility of conflict.
The reality, in comparison, had been somewhat mundane. Coffee-shops in the coastal towns of Libya where the arak flowed and the women danced with veils and shimmers long into the night; souks and bazaars filled with trinkets, brassware and beads, that would rob unwary travellers more sweetly than any hashishim; long stretches of scarce fertile land split into tiny farms just large enough to support a family. They struck inland to explore ancient sites left by dead empires strung out along the desert trade routes. In the ruins Louis found echoes of a sadness he thought he'd abandoned. And all roads led to the river.
As the caravan had left the last oasis two days earlier, Louis noticed a wild dog following them at a distance. After they'd struck camp early that morning, he observed all day how it came closer to the camels as they plodded on, and that night it came right into the camp and sat with him.
In the firelight it looked a narrow beast, long ears erect and pointed muzzle framing eyes intelligent and watchful. At first the couriers tried to chase it, but it showed none of the cowardliness of the usual curs and refused to slink away. Louis told them to let it be and it lay at his fireside, paws outstretched, watching him with those keen eyes. When he threw it a scrap of food it let the titbit fall onto the sand and sniffed at it, but no more. It would not respond to coaxing, either, and refused to let anyone touch it. At bedtime the couriers tried to get Louis to let them shoo it away lest it attack him in the night in his sleep, but he wouldn't let them.
He chose to sit out under the stars, rolled in blankets, alone with the dog by the fire. He watched the lights of a distant village wink out one by one until the camp-fires were the only source of light, and his fellows all turned in. When he lay down, the animal got up and he spotted two rows of pink teats proud against its tawny belly as it stood sniffing the air before it trotted off, dark against the night, into the darkness beyond the camp. No dreams came to him that night.
At sun up when he woke he thought the dog had vanished, but the courier who made his rough coffee said he'd seen it on a dune a way off, slumped with its head between its paws, still watching the camp. The other dogs and camels seemed not to notice it, nor care.
All morning as they travelled it tracked them at a distance, trotting along like a cur. Then the group crested a rise in the dunes and the splendour of the Nile revealed itself and Louis forgot all else. When he remembered to look for the animal, much later, it had vanished.
That first shimmering brilliance of the great river took Louis's breath away. But he sensed beneath that glittering surface lay a sullen beast grown fat with wickedness and sloth. It seemed to point out to him all his shortcomings, to laugh at him like a monstrous George IV, bloated and spoilt and mocking. When he finally tore his gaze away from its glamour, at the insistence of his couriers he unlocked his eyeglass and scanned the horizon for the sharp tip of the Great Pyramid on the Giza plateau. He shuddered at the thought of crossing that great greasy river. It disgusted him.
The trek to the foot of the pyramids took longer than anticipated, distance shrunk by the effect of the Nile in flood covering half the plain. It was gone noon by the time they arrived at the plateau, the camels irritated by flies and attracting the attention of a drove of peasants who stopped their road building to stare at the caravan.
Above them the Great Pyramid towered, solid, growing more massive with each stride they took towards it until it filled the sky and the group stopped at its base, broke the camels at the knee and dismounted, tired and dusty. Louis was breathless, daunted by the sheer scale of the landscape and the vast human monuments that seemed to shake a fist into the desert.
“You all right, Beauregard?” It was Smyth who asked.
Louis nodded and unwrapped the trailing end of his turban from across his face. “Fine, I think. It's amazing.” The heat was 102 degrees. Inside his robes he sweated fiercely, growing used to it like a native, but it wasn't the heat that left him gasping.
“It's not heatstroke?”
“No.” Louis was sure of that. “When can we begin the ascent?”
Smyth said he didn't know, and went off to ask Petherick. Louis took a swig from his waterskin, the water hot and tainted with the taste of leather. He strolled over to rest in the shade of one of the statues, double life-sized, that stretched in a line down to the water's edge almost a mile away. How far away it would be when the Nile was not in flood, Louis could not calculate.
The French excavations had uncovered a whole series of these statues, ranked in rows along broad avenues that seemed to suggest a pathway for the giant gods in stone that were commonplace across Egypt. Louis watched the peasants working on the dirt road until Smyth returned.
“Petherick's men reckon we should start in about an hour,” Smyth said, and looked at his pocket-watch. “The easiest route will be in shade then.” He glanced up at the pyramid and tipped his head back, shading his eyes with his hand. “The entrance is about two thirds of the way up.”
Louis looked at the nearest block of sandstone and the men beside it for scale. Louis was of a height with the fellahin rather than the other Englishmen. The block came up to the fellahin's shoulders. They would have to scramble up, using all their skills with rope and rock-pick.
“In about an hour, then,” Louis said.
Smyth peered at him. “Are you sure you're all right?”
Louis snorted and waved the concern away without reply as he strode off. He took his sketchpad from the pack on his camel and headed up to the back of the great Sphinx to make some sketches, determined to prove himself of some worth to the expedition.
From his vantage point Louis could see some of the ceremonial layout of the plateau and he itched to see it from somewhere higher up. If only he had a hot-air balloon to make a proper survey! His sketches were only vague outlines of something greater. He'd need a team of men, with surveying poles and theodolites and about a hundred years, to map out what he could see. Never mind that which was buried.