Shadows on the Nile (42 page)

‘I cannot trust you. You lie to me.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. You already know the leader of these robbers.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes, it is true. You have been seen with him.’

‘No! It’s a lie!’

She saw no signal but two of
the black
galabayas
advanced on her, and her heart leapt to her throat as she scrambled to her feet. ‘Who?’ she demanded. ‘Who is he?’

Fareed could scarcely bear to look at her. ‘You know.’

‘Tell me his name.’

As hands twisted her wrists behind her back she heard Fareed’s reply.

‘The fat man,’ he said. ‘Their leader is the fat man.’

Georgie

Egypt 1932

The heat.

The sand.

The shouting.

The worst of these is the shouting. It hurts my ears
and makes me vomit up my fried eggs. I hate that. The taste in my mouth. I stink. I can smell sweat on me and feel sand like mouse-dirts in my hair. I mention it to you and you laugh. You are different here. You are busy, not just your hands but your mind as well, and I am squeezed into a small corner of it. I no longer write down my thoughts, but they are still here in my head, growing bigger and heavier, until they fall out of my mouth at the wrong time.

‘Please, Georgie,’ you say. ‘Please! Try to behave.’

I am trying.

For you.

I am trying for you. And because I am frightened of the Fat Man.

I am in my tent. It is hot. But the light is not so fierce
inside and I am unseen by the others. More important to me, I do not see the desert. It sucks out my eyeballs and makes me blind. I have to crush my hands over my eye sockets to protect them and you have given me a white muslin scarf that I can wind around my face but I still see through it just enough. I do not know why you love the empty wasteland so much that you go walking in it each evening. ‘It will swallow you,’ I warn but you pat my shoulder and laugh.

The desert’s face changes. Sometimes it is pink, smiling and soft, but at others it scowls its rocky frown, all browns and greys, and I understand that it is hungry. In my tent I hear it growl. I hate the desert. I hate the dead hills. I hate the sky. There is too much of it to fit in my head. I need my old room. My ceiling with its crack. The dark corners of my wardrobe. My beautiful uncomfortable chairs.

I tell you these things.

‘I don’t want to hear this, Georgie.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re here now. Try to make the best of it.’

I try. I try. But I am sick and I sweat. I tie the scarf over my mouth and my ears to stop the noises coming out or going in and you pin a black
galabaya
over the canvas of my tent to make it darker inside.

I hate so many things. I shake all the time.

Except …

Except …

My mind cannot say the word. Instead I cradle a
shabti
carved out of alabaster in my hand and the shaking stops. When I hold these objects that were held in the hands of tomb-makers three thousand years ago, I feel that I am a member of the human race, part of a continuous process of birth and death, not some dirty aberration to be swept under the carpet and forgotten. I am one of the droplets in the Nile, as significant as every other droplet. This thought calms me. No shaking. No sweating.

I tell you this and you say, ‘Georgie, your mind is growing.’

I touch my head. ‘No, it is the same size.’

You smile, but then the Fat Man shouts and you vanish.
I am on my knees on the sand in my tent with thirty-one
shabtis
in a neat row in front of me. Am I watching over them or are they watching over me?

A
shabti
is a human figure. Most are about as tall as my hand but some are as small as my thumb. Others can be much bigger.
Shabtis
are usually carved out of wood or stone, alabaster or quartzite, or made out of faience, which is glazed earthenware. They are workers, male or female, that were placed in the tombs of the Ancient Egypt ians to carry out the manual tasks that the dead person will be required to do in the afterlife. It strikes me that Egyptians must have been extremely lazy, if they need such figures to do the work for them.

I study the one in my hand and I feel the same tightening in my chest as I do whenever I look at the chairs you gave me. You say it is a normal response to beauty, but I think you are wrong. It is more than that. It is an awareness of myself. A knowledge that I will never be able to create such beauty. The feeling is one of deep sadness, mixed with admiration. I don’t tell you that and I don’t know why. Maybe because I want to be like you. Not a substitute person like the six-inch man in my hand.

This one is made of blue-green faience, a beautiful colour that I imagine underwater-sea to be like. His legs are mummified and down the front of them is inscribed in hieroglyphs the Spell 472 of the
Coffin Texts
found in Chapter Six of the
Book of the Dead
. You see, they believed in magic. The spell would animate the
shabti
to work throughout eternity as a substitute labourer in the fields of Osiris.

I want to believe in magic.

I hate so many things. I shake all the time.

Except …

I want to believe there is a spell here in Egypt that will cure me.

*

‘Where is the imbecile?’

‘Georgie is not an imbecile. He is my brother and
he is highly intelligent, so I expect some respect for him.’

‘He’s a buffoon, Timothy. Don’t fool yourself into thinking he is worth a moment’s thought just because he can recite the Encyclopaedia Britannica.’

‘He’s good at cataloguing what we’re bringing out. Extremely thorough. Doing a useful job that is—’

‘Give it a rest, Timothy. He’s a pain in the bloody neck and we both know it. He’s only here because you insisted on bringing him with you. If I had my way I would …’

‘I know perfectly well what you’d do.’

‘He’s a damn fool.’

‘He knows far more about dating Ancient Egyptian artefacts than you do.’

‘For God’s sake, Timothy, look what he did yesterday.’

‘I admit that it was unfortunate. But he didn’t mean to. It wasn’t his fault.’

‘He didn’t mean to kill a donkey? By slamming a rock down on its head? If you think that, you must be as crazy as he is.’

‘It was the noise it was making. He was trying to shut it up.’

‘Remind me to do the same to the imbecile next time he starts shouting.’

‘Don’t you dare even joke about—’

‘What makes you think I’m joking.’

The voices move away from my tent. But the Fat Man’s laugh stays and rolls around the tent pegs, as though it wants to loosen them, so that the canvas will collapse on top of me.

Imbecile
.

I put down my notepad in which I am recording each
shabti
with detailed measurements and description of its decoration and hieroglyphs. I roll into a ball, feeling flies gathering on my skin the way they do on the dead, and bury my face in the sand.

Imbecile
.

*

The Fat Man comes to me with his needles. They bite
my arms, my buttocks, my thigh. Like Dr Churchward, he wants to eradicate the person I am and put a new person inside me instead. He only comes when you are busy in the tomb. I was melting wax today to hold the faience on a wooden canopic chest in place when he came into my work-tent and told me to stop laughing like a bloody hyena.

‘Was I laughing?’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but you’re too stupid to know.’

‘I was enjoying my work,’ I explain. ‘I have never had work to do before.’

He takes off his spectacles and wipes them. When he puts them back on, his eyes have changed as if he has wiped them too. I have a photograph in a book in my room in the clinic of an eagle landing on the back of a lamb, its eyes savage with hunger for blood. That’s what the Fat Man’s eyes look like. I stare at my sandals.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I didn’t mean to offend you,’ I say quickly, grasping at one of my phrases.

He slaps me. ‘I only tolerate you,’ he says, ‘because I need Timothy.’

I continue to stare at my feet. ‘I only tolerate you,’ I say, ‘because I need Tim.’

He slaps me again. The touch of his hand is vile but I stand quietly, just my arms are shaking.

‘I could get rid of Tim,’ he growls at me.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘He loves his work in the tomb.’

‘Then you must behave.’

‘I know.’

Meekly I hold out my arm and the needle bites. When you return at nightfall you are so excited about the discovery of a calcite perfume vase inlaid with gold that you do not even notice that there is nothing in my head except the buzzing of sand flies.

The truck didn’t stop. It slowed, spitting up sand
as the big wheels struggled for grip and jolted over ridges. The rear door hung open. Only a fool would try to escape in this lifeless landscape and they knew Jessie was no fool.

No fool? So what was she doing tied up in the back of a truck, driven by men who clearly had orders to get rid of her? A bullet in the head, a body buried in the sand far from habitation. Fareed had finished with her. In his cave hideout he would fight on to protect his country’s heritage from theft and to lift the yoke of British rule from Egypt’s neck, and she didn’t blame him. He had squeezed what he could from her and when she was no further use to him, fit only to be thrown on the refuse heap along with the city’s trash, he had given the order.

She didn’t blame him but that didn’t mean she had to agree with him. Even more urgently now, she had to find Tim. To warn him.

Dawn had painted the desert floor a vivid blood-red and the sun’s warmth was tempting the snakes and scorpions from their holes for another scorching day. There was no wind, nothing but the tracks of the truck biting into the sand and shale.

Jessie edged closer to the rear opening. Dust kicked up in her face. She wished she had the use of her hands but wishing was a pointless waste of effort. She took a deep breath, relaxed
her shoulders, chose her spot and jumped.

Alone in a desert was nothing like she imagined.

The emptiness, she expected. The raw barren rocks and the utter loneliness, they were all part of the desert images in her head, the ones she had gleaned from photographs and pictures of camel trains and Lawrence of Arabia stirring up the sands.

What she was not prepared for was the silence. It crushed her. The overwhelming grinding silence that reduced her mind to dust and numbed any attempt at thought. It shocked her that she was so easily stripped of what made her who she was – her rational mind and her ability to think. The silence crept inside her head and spread its tentacles until even the act of blinking became an effort.

And with the silence came fear.

Cold. Irrational. Unrelenting.

Fear of no one and nothing; fear of everyone and everything. It stalked her footsteps, climbed up the bare skin of her legs, stuck spikes in her heart and raked her tongue with its claws. Fear held her hand and wouldn’t let go.

She had not expected that.

As the sun slipped loose from the horizon and rose higher, the shadows shortened and the colours of the desert changed. The reds became browns, yellows merged into a bleached soulless beige that nudged the purple and grey into dark crevices under rocks.

She saw the zigzag trail of a snake.

Concentrate, just concentrate on getting out of here
. She forced her mind to work out that the tomb valleys were situated west of the Nile, so probably the cave system of Fareed lay even further west than that. Therefore she must walk east. If she kept heading east, she would have to hit the Nile eventually and she knew which direction was east because that’s where the sun still hovered.

What she didn’t know was how far. Or how long.

She put one foot in front of the other and walked.

*

Sand chafed her feet. It was impossible to keep it out of
her shoes, or out of her mind. Her sunhat had vanished in the caves but she still had her handbag strapped across her body from her shoulder to her hip like a bandolier and she took time to winkle out the small penknife it contained and open its blade to saw through the rope at her wrists. It was painstakingly slow and she took a chunk out of the base of her thumb but when finally the rope fell away, it felt like an achievement.

She was in control.

She shook out her sore arms and narrowed her eyes against the glare as she stared ahead of her. Endless ridges of arid rock. Stretching on and on to eternity.

No. Don’t even think that
.

She shook her head and regretted it immediately. A pounding headache leapt into life and she knew the sun would fry her brain if she didn’t do something about it. Her fingers touched the hair on the top of her head and she was startled by the heat of it. She felt her cheeks. They were burning. She removed the chiffon scarf from her bag and tied its flimsy material around her head.

The blazing sun was sucking moisture from her body at an alarming rate, desiccating and dehydrating her vital organs, but her feet kept moving. One step. Another step. Up a gravel ridge. Down a scree slope. Into a dried-up wadi where large rocks had been carried down from up-river and here she crouched for two minutes in a patch of shade from a boulder. She tore off her petticoat and wrapped it around her head as well, across her forehead, looping just above her eyes to cut down the glare.

Her throat was parched.

Her tongue was growing too large for her mouth, as unwieldy as a pillow, and she picked up a small round pebble. She placed it in her mouth and retched for a moment at the sour taste of it, as though a camel had pissed on it, but it was just the taste of the desert, bleak and bitter on her tongue. But sucking the pebble brought a trickle of moisture into her mouth.

Monty
.

His name murmured like a wind through her mind. What
was he thinking? What was he doing? He would be searching Luxor, ransacking its homes, trying to find her.
Don’t wander off,
he’d said.