Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile

And it was from the top deck, apparently, that she had disappeared. Late, quite late, someone had called up to her, asking when she was going to come down. Some time after, not having received a reply, they had sent the eunuch to fetch her. He had found the top deck empty.

At first he had assumed that she had climbed down to the lower deck and gone forward. Some members of the crew had been sitting in the bows and it was only when they denied having seen her that he began to search seriously.

‘The steersman?’ said Mahmoud. ‘Surely the steersman must have seen?’

On a dahabeeyah the steersman was placed aft, immediately behind the cabin. He usually stood on a little platform raised high enough to enable him to see over and past the cabins when the boat was moving.

After the boat had stopped for the night there was always some work still to be done on the platform. The rudder bar had to be lashed and the ropes stowed. The eunuch said, however, that the steersman had finished his work and gone forward before all this happened.

The eunuch had made a cursory search and then had reported the matter to Prince Narouz. Narouz had been angry, first with the girl for playing the fool and then with the eunuch for not finding her.

He had searched the boat himself. Gradually he came to realize that something was seriously amiss.

By now, of course, it was dark and hard to see anything on the water. The Prince had had all the men up on deck scanning the river with the aid of oil lamps. Meanwhile the eunuch had been concluding a search below.

When he had gone up on deck again he found that the Prince had lowered two small rowing boats and was systematically scouring the river. This had continued all night. As soon as it was light the dahabeeyah had sailed down river with everyone on deck keeping an eye out. They had seen nothing.

In the end they had abandoned the search, set the Prince down so that he could report the incident at once, and sailed on to Bulak.

‘I shall need to speak to the Ship’s Captain, the Rais,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Also to the crew. One by one. Also to the servants. Those girls, of course. Then the harem.’

‘The harem!’ said the eunuch, shocked. ‘Certainly not! What sort of boat do you think this is?’

The dahabeeyah was moored across the river from the main port. This was the traditional mooring place for dahabeeyahs and in the old days, before Mr Cook had come with his steamers, there would have been over two hundred of them nudging the bank. They were the traditional way for the rich to travel by water—and in Egypt everyone travelled by water. The Nile was the main, the only, thoroughfare from north to south and the dahabeeyah was its Daimler.

It was a large, flat-bottomed sailing boat rather like a Thames barge or, as tourists were over-prone to comment, a College houseboat, except that its cabins were all above deck and all aft. This gave it a weird, lop-sided look and might have made it unstable had that not been compensated for by putting the hold forward.

From the point of view of the tourist the arrangement had an additional delight. There was a railed-off space on top of the cabins which served as a kind of open-air lounge, sufficiently high to allow passengers both to enjoy the breeze and to see over the bank. This was important, as in some stretches of the river Mr Cook’s customers might not otherwise have benefited from the remarkable views he had promised them.

Owen himself rather enjoyed the views but he had been a little surprised to learn that they had also drawn the Prince.

‘ How long was he up there?’ he asked the Rais, the Ship’s Captain, disbelievingly.

‘Two hours.’

‘Of course, it was cool up there.’

‘Yes.’

‘And he was keeping the women company.’

‘They were already up there,’ said the Rais. There was a note of disapproval in his voice.

‘Really? By themselves?’

Mahmoud clucked sympathetically.

‘By themselves.’

‘That’s not right!’

‘They shouldn’t have been up there at all!’ said the Rais. ‘There’s a place for women. And it’s the harem.’

‘Ah, but these weren’t—I mean, they weren’t properly in the Prince’s harem.’

‘They ought to have been. And they ought to have stayed there.’

‘Were they flaunting themselves?’ asked Mahmoud, commiserating.

The Rais hesitated.

‘It was enough to be there, wasn’t it? My men could hardly take their eyes off them.’

‘Unseemly!’ said Mahmoud.

‘It wasn’t proper,’ said the Rais. ‘The Prince should have known better. Though it is not for me to say that.’

‘Have you captained for him before?’

‘He’s never been on the river before. At least, as far as I know.’

‘So you didn’t know what to expect?’

‘All he told us was that he wanted to go up to Luxor. With the Prince Fahid. He was very particular about that. The Prince had his own room, of course, and Narouz wanted a cabin next to him. He didn’t even want to be with the harem.’

‘Strange! And then, of course, there were those other women.’

‘He didn’t say anything about them. Not until we were nearly at Beni Suef.’

‘They were foreigners, weren’t they?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘They must have been. Our women wouldn’t have behaved like that.’

‘Indecent!’

‘Did they wear veils?’

‘They wore veils,’ the Rais conceded grudgingly. ‘But they showed their ankles!’

‘Oh!’ said Mahmoud, shocked.

‘How could Hassan be expected to steer when they were flaunting their ankles in front of him?’

‘Impossible,’ Mahmoud agreed. ‘Impossible!’

They were standing in the stern of the vessel looking up at the back of the cabins. The steersman’s platform, with the huge horizontal rudder bar he used for steering, was right beside them.

‘But I don’t understand!’ said Mahmoud. ‘The woman who stayed up there alone—’

‘Shameless!’ said the Rais.

‘Shameless!’ agreed Mahmoud. ‘But she was right in front of him. Surely he would have seen if she had—well, fallen off.’

‘Ah, but it was dark, you see. We had stopped for the night.’

‘So the steersman wasn’t there?’

‘No.’

‘Where was he?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Rais. ‘You’d better ask him.’

‘And where were you?’ asked Mahmoud.

‘I was up here,’ said the steersman. ‘We’d finished for the day, so I tied the rudder and then came up forward.’

They were sitting in the shade of the cook’s galley. It was a small shed, rather like a Dutch oven in shape, set well up into the prow to remove it as far as possible from the passengers’ cabins. The cook stood up on the forward side, so that the shed protected him when there was a favourable wind. They could hear him there now.

The spot was clearly a favourite one with the crew and there had been several men dozing there when Owen and Mahmoud had appeared. They had gone aft to leave them to talk to the steersman in private, but one of them, the cook presumably, had disappeared into the galley.

‘She was still up there at that point?’

‘Yes.’ The steersman’s wrinkled face broke into a smile. ‘I reckoned the midges would soon drive her down.’

‘It was dark by then?’

‘Just. They were up there admiring the sunset but I wanted to stop while there was still a bit of light. There are one or two things you have to do and you can always do them better if you can see what you’re doing. Besides, the Prince didn’t want us to go too far. He wanted another night on the river!’

‘Oh, he did, did he? And why was that?’

‘Why do you think? Perhaps he likes it better on the water.’