Where the Light Falls(126)
As the sun descended beyond the dunes on the third evening of July, André rode out of the city of Alexandria among a force of some fifteen thousand soldiers. They rode or marched through the night, with the sounds of howling winds and far-off cries echoing as unseen reminders that they were foreigners in this wild desert realm. As the gray light of dawn turned to day and the sun rose in the sky, the heat hovered over and around them like an unwelcome and unmoving presence, extinguishing their high morale and sapping the energy they needed to cover the miles of desert.
“Conserve your water, lads!” André ordered as they halted and made camp for their afternoon rest. He noted, with dismay, that few took heed of this command; in temperatures soaring well above anything they had ever known, this order ran counter to their every human instinct.
On the third day of their march, the first animals began to die, and this cruel omen of the desert’s lethality caused some of the men to grumble and ask questions. “How much farther until the water source?” became a common query, posed nearly every hour.
André didn’t know the answer. He did not know, any more than his men did, what lay ahead; all he knew was that turning back was not an option. Their only hope was to keep going forward—eventually, they had to reach the Nile. With the tricolor standard leading the way like a distant, shimmering apparition, André and his men covered mile after mile across open sand that burned under centuries of unforgiving sunlight. The men felt their cheeks scorch and blister, their lips grow puffy from sun poisoning. More animals dropped, their carcasses left in the sand to feed the intrepid buzzards that would fly this far from any oasis. And still, no sign of the lifesaving Nile.
As horrible as the days were, the nights were no better. Their evening serenades were the high-pitched trills of the nearby Bedouin warriors, encamped just out of sight, a constant companion to the French march. The presence of this heard but unseen foe was made all the more eerie by the distant glow of their camps, the scent of their fires drifting over the horizons of moonlit sand.
“War cries,” Ashar explained. He had ridden up silently and now unfurled his sleeping pad beside André’s.
“Do they wish to fight us?” André asked, mesmerized by the never-ending glow of the distant fires.
“Perhaps,” was all the cryptic reply that Ashar offered.
André shivered involuntarily in the dark, bitter desert night.
But of all the trials André faced on that march, his dreams were the worst, for they assailed his mind and his very soul. He could not say whether it was the exhaustion. Or the thirst. Or the strange sounds that seemed to float across the endless expanse of desert. But his dreams were so vivid that he woke each morning feeling as if his grasp of reality, even of his mind, was slowly slipping away from him, grains of sand sliding through his blistered fingertips.
He dreamed of many things, but without fail his dreams would end with visions of Sophie. In one of the more vivid ones, she invited him to attend her wedding—a wedding between herself and another man, aged and ghostly pale. But the worst was when she came to him, crying, telling him that Remy was dead and that she had been listed for the scaffold the following day. André would wake with a lurch, his neck clammy and his body sweating under a makeshift cover made from his saddle and saddle blanket.
On the tenth day, it seemed as if the men could go no farther. André, exhausted and defeated, did not know whether he had it in him to force them on. It was on this morning that a small group of scouts appeared, riding back from the front of the train with a fervor that none of them had felt since leaving Alexandria. “Water! Water up ahead! We’ve reached the Nile!”
André watched the track of the riders as they galloped past him and disappeared along the horizon in a cloud of dust. He fixed his eyes forward and shielded them, hoping to see a shimmer up ahead that promised to be their salvation.
Turning to the nearest noncommissioned officer, André said, “I want to know how far the river is. Stay here, I’m coming straight back. Keep formation, no matter what any of the other companies do. For God’s sake, keep formation.”
André spurred his horse forward and galloped past the miserable infantry companies. After cresting a small dune, André squinted and gazed ahead, and then he saw it: a vast field spotted with intermittent groves of fertile vegetation. At the far end of the expanse, a brilliant track of shiny blue-green. It was a glistening surface, lined by a wall of shade-giving palm trees. Glorious sight! Perhaps a half league ahead of him, the first companies were reaching it, splashing into it with the joy and reckless abandon of a prisoner unexpectedly set free. It was no mirage; they had in fact reached the Nile.