‘It was impossible to say,’ I answered.
Walo had pleaded with me on the voyage from Italy to consult the bestiary and to make a list of the animals we could expect to encounter in Egypt and beyond. I had done so, though the book seldom made it clear which country each creature lived in. The crocodile was an exception. The bestiary stated that the crocodile was born in the Nile, and that its skin was so hard that it did not feel the blows of even the heaviest stones. It had fierce teeth and claws and laid its eggs on the land where male and female guarded them, taking turns. It was unique among all beasts in that it could move its upper jawbone.
‘Walo, crocodiles can’t weep,’ observed Osric. Like me, he was not convinced that the information in the bestiary was always accurate. The book claimed that a crocodile shed tears just before and after eating a man, and from then onwards could not cease crying.
‘You saw the creature for yourself,’ said Walo obstinately. ‘It was exactly like its picture.’
‘But the book also says that the crocodile takes to the water only by night. It remains on land by day. So something is not right,’ Osric pointed out.
‘We should ask the boatmen what they know,’ I suggested.
We squeezed our way around the aurochs’ cage, which occupied most of the midships of the boat, and went to where the boat master squatted near the helm. An old man, he was wizened and scrawny, his white hair close cropped to stubble, and dressed in a grubby white gown. I questioned him about the crocodile and its habits, but he found my Saracen difficult to understand, and even when we asked for Abram to help out with interpreting, he still looked puzzled.
‘Show him the picture in the book,’ suggested Walo.
I fetched the bestiary from my luggage. The crocodile was illustrated twice. The first picture showed the beast on a riverbank. From its jaws protruded the naked legs of a man it was swallowing entire. The boat master looked at it with rheumy eyes, and nodded vigorously.
‘You see,’ said Walo triumphantly. ‘The crocodile does eat men.’
My efforts at miming the beast crying tears were not understood so I showed the second illustration. Here the crocodile had an unpleasant-looking creature bursting out sideways from its stomach, through the skin. It was, according to the text, the crocodile’s main enemy, a hydris. It was a water snake that hated the crocodile. If a crocodile lay on the riverbank with its jaws open, the hydris disguised itself as a ball of mud, rolled up to the open mouth and leaped in. From inside the crocodile’s stomach the hydris then ate its way sideways, killing its enemy.
The old man frowned for several minutes at the picture of the hydris, and then shook his head.
‘Why don’t you show him that other Egyptian creature we doubted?’ suggested Osric.
I turned the pages until I found the hyena. Neither Osric nor I believed the animal really existed. The humped shoulders, sloping backbone and ghoulish face were too grotesque. It was shown straddling an open coffin, and gnawing on a human corpse. To my surprise the elderly captain recognized the hyena immediately. He nodded energetically and made a sound like an odd coughing grunt, then smiled at us before spitting a gob of phlegm over the side. He pointed to the writing beneath the picture.
‘He wants to know what’s written there,’ prompted Abram who had come aft to join us. ‘If you read it aloud, I’ll try again to translate what it says.’
With the dragoman interpreting my words, I read out: ‘The hyena’s jaws are so strong that they can break anything with their teeth, then they grind up the morsels in the belly. The hyena is male one year, female the next. It cannot bend its neck, so must turn the whole body to see behind.’
I glanced at the old man to see his reaction. He squatted in the sunshine, arms against his bony knees, expressionless.
‘The hyena can imitate the sound of a human voice,’ I read on, ‘it calls travellers by their names so that as they emerge from their tents, they leap upon them and tear them to pieces.’
‘How would a hyena know my name?’ asked Walo with his usual unanswerable directness.
I ignored the interruption. ‘If it wishes, the hyena’s cry resembles someone being sick. This attracts dogs who are then attacked.’
‘That’s what the old man was doing – imitating the hyena’s cough,’ said Osric. ‘Mind you, if I heard that noise outside my tent at night, I think I’d prefer to stay where I was.’
*
Our travel plans were thrown into utter disarray three days later. Our boats had progressed through the delta, sailing and rowing against the sluggish current by day, tying up at night. The larger animals in our menagerie were bearing up remarkably well despite the increasingly ferocious daytime heat. The crew rigged awnings over their cages to keep off the Egyptian sun, and threw buckets of water over the aurochs and the two bears whenever they seemed to be uncomfortable. The Nile water was tepid, but helped them cool off, and the ice bears had the good sense to spend most of the daylight hours fast asleep in the shade, waking up at night. Walo had clipped the heavy coats of the dogs, and flew the gyrfalcons regularly for their exercise, watched by our boatmen who regarded him with something approaching awe. They took to acting as his lookouts – scanning the banks of the river and drawing his attention to the creatures that he might otherwise have missed. Crocodiles were commonplace. Often half a dozen of the ugly beasts were drawn up, side by side, on the dried mud of the bank, sunning themselves, mouths open. Walo triumphantly pointed out to me that the beasts did indeed move their upper jaws, just as the bestiary had claimed. But we never saw the hydris, the crocodile’s deadly enemy, and it totally slipped my mind that Walo and I had also talked about the hypnalis, the asp that killed Cleopatra the Queen of Egypt.