Free The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer Page A

circumstances.
    She opened her bag, removed her diary, and came across a recent entry: I had been feeling melancholy when we reached Aswan, but the sheer excitement brought me round. Riding up the rapids was one of the most delightful moments of my life—a moment that lasted four and a half hours! They’d navigated the cataracts with difficulty, she, Charles, and Trout on board for the thrilling ordeal while Selina continued overland by donkey. Six times the dahabiyah jutted out of the water like a vessel about to sink and was hauled by the main force of more than a hundred men up the granite rocks. . . . With unerring aim ropes were thrown from the poop to men on the rocks standing in the attitude of the Apollo Belvedere, their keen eyes glistening with eagerness. . . . I expected them to be dashed to pieces at every moment.
    Describing a thing was nearly as exhilarating as the thing itself. She smiled to herself, then uncapped her pen and smoothed a blank page.
Now, at Abu Simbel, I feel nothing but comfort, as if in the presence of God. I am as moved by the Egyptian ideas of the afterlife as by our Christian ones. Further, it seems to me that the Egyptian beliefs are not so different in mechanism than the story of Christ’s resurrection. Bunsen points out that in the original mythology, only the sun-god Ra journeyed to the afterlife. Each night, when he died in the west, he traveled through the underworld on an infernal river divided into twelve rooms, one for each hour of the night. Emerging each morning at sunrise, he assured the continuation of the world. For the next hundred generations, only the pharaohs joined Ra, sailing to the Field of Reeds. But after a thousand generations (about 200 B.C .), everyone in the kingdom of Egypt could journey to the golden dawn of eternal life. The similarities with Christian belief are striking: the passage through the twelve rooms of the night was, like the crucifixion, the earthly death. Jesus, like the pharaoh, was divine and the first man to attain heaven. If we accept Him, then like the Egyptians who worshipped Ra and Osiris, we receive the gift of eternal life.
    She closed her eyes and sat dragging her fingers through the sand. Writing her thoughts had always been calming, a way to weather her deepest storms and sort out her feelings. In fact, after Selina Brace-bridge and Mary Clarke, she thought of her diary as her best friend. She called it Lavie, which was short for La Vie de Florence Rossignol, begun as a French assignment when she was seven. Lavie was also the record of her struggles—with Parthe, with Fanny, and with herself.
    J’aime Mme. Gale, ma bonne d’enfants, was the first sentence she’d written in it. I love my nurse, Mrs. Gale. And then—she recalled this as clearly as if the words had left her pen twenty minutes rather than twenty years ago—“In English her name means a storm, but Mrs. Gale is “une femme très calme, très placide.” Writing in French made her feel adult and sophisticated, and she attacked it with relish. Je suis née le 12 mai, en l’année 1820. My mother, whom I love, is called Fanny, and my Father (also very loved) is William Edward Nightingale. Everybody calls him WEN. She handed the copybook in weekly to the governess, who returned it with corrections in red ink: accents and apostrophes, spelling errors, failure to match case, gender, or number. There were never any comments on the facts or Flo’s effusive declarations of affection.
    When she wrote about her first serious illness, Lavie seemed to come to life, to take on the characteristics of an intimate. Flo had had the whooping cough and had to be isolated, Parthe banished downstairs to prevent contagion. Flo had enjoyed having the bed to herself, being alone. “J’aime être seule,” she’d written in her careful French, “complêtement seule.” On her first trip to London, where she had gone for a wedding, she described the soldiers’ band playing atthe Court