The Girl in the Nile Read Online Free PDF

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 traveled 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 overprone to comment, a College houseboat, except that its cabins were all above deck and all aft. This gave it a weird, lopsided 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 woman 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