“You wish to go hunting, sir? Not far from here can be found lion, gazelle, oryx …”
“What I shall hunt I have not yet decided,” I told the man. “Is there a boatman here who took the philosopher Iphicrates of Chios on his monthly expeditions?”
The man looked puzzled, but he turned and addressed the bargemen in Egyptian. One man stood and stepped off his craft. He exchanged a few words with the foreman, who turned back to me.
“This man took Iphicrates out three times.”
“Tell him I want to go where Iphicrates went.” There was a bit more talk and we agreed upon a price. Hermes and the bargeman transferred our gear into the little vessel while I made myself comfortable in the prow. The man went to the stern and picked up his pole. Soon we were off, drifting silently by the awakening city.
The bargeman was a typical Egyptian of the riverine sort. He had short, bowed legs and had probably seldom ventured onto land in his life. His command of Greek was uncertain and he had not a word of Latin. He poled his craft along with quiet serenity, looking like a picture on a wall.
Soon we were in the tunnel that passed through the lake wall, its great double portcullis raised for the day. The bulk of the canal traffic was coming into the city at that hour. There was very little leaving it. We passed the entrance to the Nile canal and headed toward the lake. I turned and called out to the bargeman.
“Didn’t Iphicrates go to the Nile to measure its rise and fall, and to examine the shores?” I wasn’t sure he understood the whole question, but he understood enough.
“He went to the lake,” he said.
Soon we were on the quiet waters of Lake Mareotis. Its shores were low and marshy, lined with papyrus. The reeds were alive with waterfowl, wild ducks and geese and gulls, herons and the occasional wading ibis. We passed wallows where hippos disported themselves, their smiling mouths and comically wiggling ears belying their essentially hostile and ill-tempered nature. Hermes’s eyes grew round when he saw these huge, wild beasts so close.
“Will they attack us?” he asked.
“They never scared you before,” I said.
“We were on a bigger boat then. Those things could swallow us with one gulp.”
“If they were so inclined. But they eat grass. As long as we stay clear of them, they won’t bother us. Now that”—I pointed at something that looked like a floating log—“will definitely eat you, should you fall in.” As if hearing me, the thing turned and regarded us with a glistening eye. Hermes grew paler.
“Why don’t they exterminate those monsters?” he said.
“Crocodiles are sacred to the god Sobek. They mummify them and put them in temple crypts.”
“Egyptians! Is there anything they don’t worship and make into mummies?”
“Slaves,” I told him. “There is no god of slaves.”
“Or Romans either I’ll bet,” was his rejoinder.
We drifted eastward in the direction of the delta until the sun was nearly noon-high. Then we came around a low headland to a place where a stone dock protruded into the water. The bargeman turned the nose of his craft toward the wharf.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“This is where the man from the Museum went.”
In the distance I could see a large house amid tilled fields.
“Whose estate is this?”
He shrugged. “The king’s, or some great noble’s.” A safe guess, since everything belonged to the king or some great noble.
“Keep going,” I instructed him. “I’ll tell you where to put in to shore.”
He turned away from the wharf. I saw nobody manning the pier. As far as I could tell, we were unobserved. That was of little importance in any case, since we were far from the only watercraft on the lake that morning. Fowlers and fishers were at their work, and boats carried produce from the plantations fringing the lake. Barges like ours carried huge bundles of papyrus reeds for the paper factories of Alexandria. It was not exactly crowded, but one more boat should attract no attention.
About a mile east of the pier I saw a small inlet that cut through the reeds to the shore. “Put us in there.”
The barge nosed aground on a sandy bank surrounded by palm trees. We unloaded our gear and set it among the trees. The bargeman looked around with a dubious expression.
“Not much hunting here, I think.”
“We’ll chance it,” I told him. “Come back for us here at this time tomorrow and I’ll pay you double what you got today.”
It was all one to him, so he agreed. People everywhere assume that all foreigners are insane. Thus, when you are in a strange land, it is easy to get away with eccentric behavior. He poled his barge away from the shore and was soon out of sight. We carried our gear to a spot sheltered from view by high bushes and rested beneath the shade of the palms.