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beautiful woman accompanying General Desaix’s expeditionary force to Upper Egypt, but if so, she too vanished. Of the wounded Mameluke Ashraf that you mentioned, we heard no word. No one remembers Astiza’s presence in either Cairo or Alexandria. There is soldier talk of an attractive woman, yes, but no one claims to have seen her, or known her. It is almost as if she never existed.”
    “But she fell into the Nile too! An entire platoon saw it!”
    “If so, my friend, she must never have emerged. Her memory is like a mirage.”
    I was stunned. Her death, the burial of her drowned body, I had braced for. Her survival, even if she was imprisoned, I had hoped for. But her complete disappearance? Had the river carried her away, never to be seen again or decently buried? What kind of answer was that? Silano gone too? That was even more suspicious. Had she somehow survived and gone with him? That was even greater agony!
    “You must know something more than that! My God, the entire army knew her! Napoleon remarked on her! Key savants took her on their boat! Now there’s no word at all?”
    He looked at me with sympathy. “I am sorry, effendi. Sometimes God leaves more questions than answers, does he not?”
    Humans can adapt to anything but uncertainty. The worst monsters are the ones we haven’t yet encountered. Yet here I was, hearing her last words that rang in my head, “Find it!” and then her cutting the rope, falling away with Silano, the screams, the blinding sun as the balloon soared away… was it all just a nightmare? No! It had been as real as this table.
    Jericho was looking at me gloomily. Sympathy, yes, but also the knowledge that the Egyptian woman had kept me at a distance from his sister. Miriam’s gaze was more direct than it ever had been before, and in her eyes I read sorrowful understanding. In that instant I realized she’d lost someone too. This was why no suitors were encouraged, and why her brother remained her closest companion. We were all bonded by grief.
    “I just wanted a clear answer,” I whispered.
    “Your answer is, what is past is past.” Our visitor stood. “I am sorry that I could not bring better news, but I am only the messenger. Jericho’s friends will keep their ears open, of course. But do not hope. She is gone.”
    And with that, he, too, left.
     
CHAPTER 6
     
    M y first reaction was to depart Jerusalem, and the cursed East, immediately and forever. The bizarre odyssey with Bonaparte — escaping Paris, sailing from Toulon, the assault on Alexandria, meeting Astiza, and on and on through horrific battles, the loss of my friend Antoine Talma, and the bitter secret of the Great Pyramid — was like a mouthful of ashes. Nothing had come of it — no riches, no pardon for a crime in Paris I’d never committed, no permanent membership with the esteemed savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s expedition, and no lasting love with the woman who’d entranced and bewitched me. I’d even lost my rifle! My only real reason for coming to Palestine was to learn Astiza’s fate, and now that word was that there was no word (could any message be crueler?) my mission seemed futile. I didn’t care about the coming invasion of Syria, the fate of Djezzar the Butcher, the career of Sir Sidney Smith, or the political calculations of Druze, Matuwelli, Jew, and all the rest trapped in their endless cycles of revenge and envy. How had I found myself in such a crazy necropolis of hatred? It was time to go home to America and start a normal life.
    And yet… my resolution to get out and be done was paralyzed by the very fact of not knowing. If Astiza seemed not alive, neither was she definitely dead. There was no body. If I sailed away I’d be haunted the rest of my life. I had too many memories of her — of her showing me the star Sirius as we sailed up the Nile, her help in wrestling down Ashraf during the fury of the Battle of the Pyramids, her beauty when seated in Enoch’s courtyard,