The Quest of Julian Day (45 page)

Only those who have tried sitting for even a short time in a completely darkened room can appreciate how swiftly thoughts come and go, so that in the space of a few minutes one can visualise a dozen scenes; and all too soon the brain gets tired of creating imaginary situations. Between half-past nine and eleven I must have followed out literally hundreds of such episodes in my mind and found that it was beginning to lose its power of concentration; yet I knew that if I were to stand any chance of securing another long sleep I must not settle down too early, so I hit on the idea of turning somersaults in the dark. Unfortunately it wasn't a very good one as I very soon grew dizzy and had to give it up.

I fished out another cigarette but just as I was about to light it the thought struck me that it might help to sustain me better if I chewed the tobacco instead. I had never chewed tobacco before and I did not like the sharp, bitter flavour at all. After I had masticated the first mouthful for some moments it dawned on me that I would have to spit it out, which would mean a considerable loss of saliva, and saliva was more precious to me than gold or rubies. That thought put the lid on chewing any more tobacco and to get rid of the unpleasant flavour I sucked another sweet.

My next idea was to try to count as far as possible all the people I had ever met, ticking them off on my fingers; but when I reached seventy I got hopelessly confused and could not remember if I had already put in certain people who kept on recurring to me; so I started off on a new game, which was to select belated Christmas presents, regardless of cost, for all the people that I could think of.

That set me wondering if I should live to see in the New Year; reckoning the odds up anew they seemed very long
indeed. It was, after all, only a theory of my own that Oonas and Sayed would return to collect my body before it was likely to be discovered by anyone else. Even if that were their programme, seeing that the tomb was so rarely visited, they might well consider it perfectly safe to leave me there for a week; while, if my best hopes were realised and they got the jitters to the extent of returning for me while I was still alive, my chances of outwitting them still remained pretty slender. I tried to force myself to think that they would be certain to come, and come soon, but it was a horribly difficult business.

I glanced at my watch again, dreading to see how slowly the minutes had crawled by, but to my joy it was after midnight so I felt that I might now reasonably hope to get a sleep. For ages, as it seemed to me, I debated with myself whether I should take the last six aspirins in one go or reserve some of them for the following night, but I had a grim foreboding that by that time I should be in such a ghastly state that two or three aspirin would be much too mild a dose to bring me any appreciable relief; so I swallowed the lot and settled myself as comfortably as I could.

Blessed sleep came quickly and owing, perhaps, to my now weakened state and empty tummy, the aspirin had a more than usually strong effect. I slept right though the night until half-past eight.

Waking to a new day in the eternal night of that silent grave was one of the most terrible things I have ever experienced. With utter despair I thought of the endless hours of torture that lay before me and I am not ashamed to say that so overwhelming was my distress that I broke down and wept. Yet, even as I did so, I greedily licked in the salt tears that ran down my face for my mouth was now dry, furry and horribly parched. Cursing myself for a spineless fool I managed to pull myself together again and tried to breakfast off a cigarette; but the invisible smoke now burnt my lips and tongue and, as I inhaled, I choked which sent me into a violent fit of coughing; so I had to stub out the cigarette before it was one-third consumed.

Three fruit-drops bettered my condition for a little and I sought to plan my day. An hour's exercise first, then a bit of a sing-song if I could manage it, after that a recital of all the
poetry I could remember, a little mental arithmetic involving such problems as I could conjure up in my head. That might bring me to midday if I were lucky, but even as I named the hour to myself I knew that such a programme would barely carry me to ten o'clock. I groaned with self-pity and was near giving way to tears again.

To get away from my thoughts I began to pace rapidly up and down the chamber, but after a couple of dozen turns I had to give up. Hunger had got me now and a beastly pain stabbed in my stomach each time I moved. I drew in the tab at the back of my trousers to its fullest extent but that didn't seem to ease things very much so I lay down and, undoing my clothes, began to massage my stomach. On and on I went, rhythmically smoothing it up and down until my wrists ached so much that I simply had to stop; but the pain was better and I was able to do two thousand paces which killed a fraction of my day.

The sing-song did not prove at all successful as my throat was now so dry and parched that it was a strain to get out every note, and my efforts were pathetic compared with those of the day before. Eventually I stopped trying and just repeated the words over to myself while humming the refrains in my brain. When I could not think of any more choruses that I knew I tried mathematics, but the only problem I could think of was: ‘if a herring and a half cost three-halfpence …?' the answer to which I already knew.

As I sat there with my back against the Pharaoh's bath-shaped coffin I realised that my tongue was constantly licking over my dry lips just as one sees a snake flicker its forked tongue while it considers some object which may prove a suitable prey. By eleven o'clock I was muttering to myself half-crazily but soon after, quite unaccountably, I fell asleep.

It was half-past three when I woke again. I had been entombed for over two days or, to be more exact, some fifty-one-and-a-half hours. I sucked at my mouth spasmodically and, when I popped a fruit-drop into it, only a conscious effort enabled me to move it round my tongue.

The afternoon seemed never-ending. I did my best to prevent myself from looking at my watch too frequently but in spite of all my efforts I never managed a longer interval than eight minutes between half-past three and six o'clock. Sometimes I
walked up and down, sometimes I endeavoured to sleep, sometimes I just sat there staring wide-eyed into the surrounding blackness, swallowing and swallowing and swallowing my ever-decreasing saliva and striving to ease the tension of my gradually-closing throat. For much of the time I must have been light-headed through the pains that constantly stabbed at my belly and my never-ceasing craving for some form of drink.

It was some time early in the evening when I forced myself to take stock of the situation and the result was only an appalling fit of despair. I was convinced now that Oonas would never come back. There were a score of other schemes which she might have adopted. Her subtle brain was quite equal to devising any number of explanations as to how my body came to be in the tomb when it was discovered there weeks later. It was quite a possibility that they had not locked the entrance-gates on going out and would say that I had gone back to get something which I had dropped, sending them on over the river when I had made my farewells, as it had been arranged that I should set off into the desert that afternoon. In any case the expedition would have to cross the Nile before it started and I might quite well have planned to have my things packed for me and join it only when it reached the western bank.

Such theories did not account for the withdrawal of the bridge over the pit, but by then my brain was too bemused for me to think clearly. I remember scrambling to my feet and staggering up and down in a semi-hysterical state, cursing Oonas long and bitterly in hoarse, gasping whispers for this thing she had done to me.

During my hysterics I had lucid intervals but while they lasted the pain in my stomach prevented my thinking clearly. It seemed to gnaw at my very vitals so that at times I rolled in agony upon the floor; my attempts to stop it by further massage now proved futile and I lay there semi-conscious for hour after hour moaning and muttering to myself through my cracked and swollen lips.

How the time passed I do not know but I came to my senses soon after ten o'clock and I did my very best to get a hold on myself because I knew that if I failed I should certainly go mad. I thought again of taking out my penknife and slashing the
veins in my wrist to let the blood flow so that I might sink away into a final unconsciousness, which would have been an overwhelming relief. But it was night again and, if they came at all, I felt convinced that it was by night they would come. With a gargantuan effort I forced the temptation away from me and resolved to support another ten hours in the tomb if I possibly could.

My mind weakened again and became a prey to strange fancies. I had O'Kieff pinioned under me and was battering in his head; time had gone backwards and Oonas as Cleopatra occupied the throne of Egypt, while I was Caesar, the lover of her youth; I was back in England and a few years had dropped away so that I was throwing a party once more at the Quaglino's to a few of those many friends I had had before I became an outcast; I was in the Diplomatic Service again, rising by extraordinary feats of skill to the post of British Ambassador in Berlin and, by a brilliant
coup
, preventing the out-break of another world-war while still under forty.

The visions faded and I slept. I was awoken by a piercing scream.

Apart from my periods of sleep I had been clinging to my sanity for over sixty seemingly endless hours by the single thread of hope that I might hear that cry at last.

Now that it had come it cut across my stupor like a clarion call rousing me to instant and automatic action. In one movement I was on my feet, thrusting blindly at the great slab of granite, shoulder-high beside me, which formed part of the coffin-lid; it tilted and went over, crashing to the floor with a thud that seemed to shake the vault. The echoes reverberated round the oval room shattering the momentary stillness which had succeeded that harsh cry of fear.

Next second there was another scream from the corridor but unlike the first, which had been deep and guttural, this was high and shrill. It was followed by further cries of terror and the noise of stampeding feet as those who had come to get me fled in utter panic.

My head was light and buzzing while my tongue, now thick and swollen, clung to the roof of my dry mouth. For an instant I lost my sense of direction and, missing the candle stump in the darkness, fumbled wildly for it; yet I knew I must force myself to act calmly. Life and death alternated on the balance. Only by keeping my head and drawing unsparingly on any reserve of strength that I might have left could I hope to reap any advantage from this one chance of escape that had been given me.

I found the candle, lit it and went out into the passage. Propped up against the wall there I saw the thing that I had made over two days before when I still had my full wits and strength about me. Seen in the dim light cast by a candle I did not wonder that the sight of it had filled Sayed and Oonas with stark terror. By balancing the smaller fragments of the great
coffin-lid one upon another against the wall, I had managed to construct a rough pillar of broken stone. On this I had draped my white shirt and drawers, crowning the pile with my panama stuck up on end so that on its crown, with spittle and dust, I had been able to draw the bold outlines of a face.

Coming upon it suddenly round the corner from the pit-shaft and finding it barring their path only six feet distant in the uncertain light, first Sayed and then Oonas had, as I intended, taken the effigy for my ghost. The loud thump of the coffin-lid which I had engineered immediately afterwards must have completed the impression that my angry spirit was active there and about to exact vengeance on my murderers.

Such an experience might well have shattered the nerves of two tough European criminals and, knowing the superstition-ridden mentality of all Egyptians, I could well imagine the devastating effect it had on Oonas and her thug. I could still hear their flying footsteps in the distance as small portions of rock and rubble clattered down the steep slopes above.

Although I knew that in their panic they would never have paused to withdraw the bridge over the pit again, I was unutterably relieved to find it in place, and I hurried across it.

Everything depended now on whether they would have recovered themselves sufficiently, by the time they had reached the entrance of the tomb, to lock the iron gates behind them. In an attempt to spur them on through an access of fresh terror so that they would not pause to do so, I tried to shout; but only a husky whisper would come from between my cracked lips, and every time I took a breath a frightful pain seared like a hot iron down my burning throat.

Whether they heard me coming after them or not I do not know but since I could not use my voice I made all the noise I could by stamping my way along the corridors and banging at the walls with my free hand. Even if I had been capable of running I should not have dared to do so as my candle would have gone out, and it would have been almost impossible to negotiate the half-fallen stairway without it. Swaying from side to side, groaning and gasping, I staggered up the steep ramps and broken stairs with all the speed I could muster.

At last a faint lightening of the darkness ahead told me that I was nearing the entrance of the tomb, and almost before I
knew it I was there. The gate was open and I was through it, staring up from the bottom of the twenty-foot hole where the entrance lay, past the dark cliffs on either side, to the blessed stars above.

I would have given the world to have sunk down there on the jagged rocks and just sucked in the fresh night air which was so gloriously refreshing after the close stuffiness of the tomb; but I was not yet out of danger. If they returned to find me lying in the tomb entrance they would slit my throat, as in my hopelessly weakened condition I could not possibly put up a fight against them.