Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney

Author:Rosemary Mahoney [MAHONEY, ROSEMARY]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: TRV000000
ISBN: 9780316007320
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

When I woke the next morning, Amr was sitting propped against the mast in the withering sunlight with a doleful look on his face.

“Rose,” he said.

“What is it, Amr?”

A long torpid silence followed. “You has any aspring tablets?”

I looked at him — the squirrel’s hair, the chipmunk cheeks. He had drunk three cans of beer and two glasses of whiskey, and his hangover had taken the form of a headache so large it was, from where I sat, nearly audible. The whites of his eyes, always a bit yellowish, this morning were the color of mustard and were laced through with scarlet fractures. His eyes looked scorched. His mouth looked bruised. White hairs had begun to sprout on his dark chin. It was another utterly windless day, and I knew that Amr had long, hot, tedious hours of drifting and fruitless tacking ahead of him.

I rummaged in my bag for aspirin. My rear end was sore from so many hours spent on the hard seat of the rowboat the day before, and my neck was stiff. I gave Amr two aspirin and took two myself.

As I walked up the beach past the line of feluccas to find a place where I could wash with a bottle of water, I heard a voice behind me say, “You don’t say good morning to me, Miss Rose?” I looked over my shoulder and saw that it was Hussein, the man who looked like Jimi Hendrix, unreeving his mooring line and grinning insolently at me.

“I didn’t see you,” I said.

“Unfriendly lady.”

It was too early in the morning for this silly nonsense. “Well, Hussein,” I said, “since you didn’t say good morning to me either, I think it might be fair for me to say ‘unfriendly man.’”

“Well met,” he said tartly, parroting what I had said to him the day before, and again we both laughed at the stupidity, and at the strange intimacy, of our exchange.

I went off up the beach thinking, So much for maritime etiquette, and within half an hour I was back in the rowboat pulling myself down the river once more.

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