Topic: Setting Sail (AT)

Charlie’s stomach gurgled and rumbled ominously.  No doubt something he ate was about to make a return appearance.  He hadn’t been able to keep anything down for days.  An embarrassing predicament, but at least one he did not have to endure alone.  Indeed, nearly everyone on the tour was suffering to a greater or lesser extent from some sort of gastrointestinal distress.  Personally, he blamed the salad at the restaurant the first night out in Cairo.  It had looked like a nice enough place so he had ignored the advice of myriad guide books to eat only cooked food and had dived in, experiencing the local flavors of the meal with a gusto that was coming back to haunt him with disturbing regularity now.  His theory about the salad specifically stemmed from the observation that his daughter, Alicia, and her friend, who both refused to eat anything green and leafy as a general rule, were the only ones not suffering any ill effects.

The girls were bounding ahead of them now, deftly dodging the vendors and street performers that littered the main tourist streets of the Egyptian city.  The vendors seemed magnetically attracted to the girls’ blonde hair. He felt a fleeting worry for them but they were street smart for a couple of teen girls, well traveled and versed in the culture.  They had even picked up a fair amount of conversational Arabic in the week since they had arrived to better to fleece the good merchants of Egypt out of their wares.  

The road they were on now was narrow, more of an alley really.  Charlie let his stride go into auto pilot, pacing the shorter feminine form of their Egyptian guide beside him so as not to outdistance the group.  He suppressed the gathering nausea and let the sights and sounds of the market wash over him.  Low level chatter came to his ears in what could have been a thousand languages as various vendors sized up their group and made their own best guess as to which tongue was most likely to make a sale.  Smells of barbequed meat, spices, incense, perfume and the musk and dung of donkeys, cart horses, camels and feral dogs all vied for the attention of his olfactory sense.  Tapestries, posters of pop stars and the best soccer players in Europe enlivened the otherwise drab salmon colored mud brick walls of the market stalls.  The flowing Arabic script he found so enchanting was juxtaposed with the hieroglyphics that so many tourists expected.

The group reached the end of the alley and the market, emerging onto a broad cobbled roadway crammed with every conceivable sort of wheeled conveyance.  Small taxies honked their way into and out of impossibly tight gaps, tourist busses ignored everything smaller than they were, minibuses didn’t even seem to slow down as savvy locals hopped on and off at street corners.  A gaggle of running Egyptian youth penetrated their tight formation and he reached a hand down almost by instinct to cover the pocket containing his ready cash.  A few members of the group had learned the hard way that this was not a place to let one’s guard down.  A traffic cop helped them to cross the street, sublimely ignoring the sound of horns and raised voices as he held up white gloved hands to a stream of traffic that was mostly stopped anyway.  Their guide slipped the officer some small money in a much practiced exchange a less observant man might not have noticed but which everyone here expected.

And then they were there.

The Nile in all its glory spread before them.  Close to a mile wide, it looked like a lake that reached for infinity in both directions.  Stacks of four story tall river cruise ships tied against the bank looked tiny relative to the expanse of water in which they waited their turn at the locks an hour’s sail upriver.  Smaller boats ferried people and goods across to their fields on the other side.  Somewhere nearby a 2-stroke diesel pump that coughed like a dying smoker sucked the lifeblood of a nation from its slow muddy reverie and expelled it across acres of cotton and corn.

The blazing orange sun began to slide towards the horizon casting long shadows on the far bank amidst ruins so old they required imagination to fill in most of their detail.  Their guide ushered the group down a ramp to the edge of the water and separated them into small, triangular sailed boats.  This was the moment Charlie had been waiting for this trip. He corralled Alicia whose usual smile and exuberance were notably absent and arranged for them to have their own vessel.  She looked up at him, an expression of concern in her face and her eyes as moist as he suddenly found his own.  They boarded their boat and despite its small size it seemed large and empty with just the two of them and the solid looking Nubian at the tiller. 

“Are you ready dad?” Alicia asked, placing a slender arm around his shoulders as he sat on one of the benches near the rail.  He nodded mutely and the big man pushed the tiller to one side, nosing the front of the boat away from the bank and into the open water of the river, setting the sail so that it ruffled then snapped full, harnessing the evening breeze.

“Where dad?” his daughter prompted him.  He pointed mutely.

“There. In the shadow of the ruins.” Alicia looked up at the boatman but he was already adjusting their course to the indicated spot.  Charlie dragged his hand in the cool green water.  Small wavelets lapped against the hull with a soothing rhythm. Other triangular sails moved across the orange horizon in the middle distance but they had this small piece of river to themselves.  This was as close as he could come to where he had met her 33 years ago.  That trip had been a whim of grad student fantasy.  In fact, he had had to sell most of what he owned to get here but it had been worth it in ways he could never have imagined when he boarded the plane with a camera, a notebook, and the clothes on his back.  It was here on a boat just like this, on an evening just like this, with the sun setting just so that he had shared a boat ride with another grad student group and she had been there.  And they had laughed together for the first time.  They had shared the rest of the trip, and then the rest of her life.  Cancer could not take that history from them.  Their beautiful daughter looked up at him silently, a monument to that history, like the pillars on the shore were to the history of a nation.  He took the small rectangular box out from under his arm and felt its smooth texture under his fingers as he had many times since the day of the funeral.

This is how she would have wanted it.  Exactly.  Charlie stood, nausea forgotten, carful not to hit his head on the sail, and stepped to edge of the boat.  His daughter stood beside him, her shoulder pressed tightly against his.  Slowly, he removed the lid and tipped the contents of the box out over the rail.  Some of the fine grey ash floated off in the evening breeze but most fell down and mingled with his tears in the water of the Nile.