The Sycamore Song Page 16

  She managed to laugh. “Yes, I would.”

  There was a great deal of noise and the explosive sound of a camel protesting against the indignity of being put to work. A few minutes later Tariq appeared at the hole in the wall and came swinging down towards her, carrying one of the lamps in his hand.

  When his feet touched the bottom, he lifted the lamp high and studied her face, his expression showing his anxiety more than any words could have done.

  “You see,” she said. “I really am all right.”

  He lowered the lamp, saying nothing, but as he did so the glint of gold on her left wrist caught his eye and he lifted her arm, staring in silence at her inadequate watch. Victoria put her hand over his, her heart going out to him.

  “I’m afraid of heights, but I’ve never been afraid of the dark.” She thought he would crush the bones in her wrist he held it so tightly. “Besides,” she said, “I knew you were coming back.”

  “And that made it all right? I should never have allowed you to take such a risk. I might have known that something would happen to you!”

  She touched her right hand to his cheek in a gesture borrowed from him. “It wasn’t your fault, habipi.”

  He shook his head at her, but he let go her arm and managed a faint smile. “And that makes it all right? I wanted to protect you - to keep you safe, but you seem destined to jump out of the frying pan into the fire every time I let you out of my sight - and even when I don’t!”

  She buried her face in his shoulder, amused. “But think how much I like to have you rescue me!”

  He tugged gently on a lock of hair. “Do you?”

  She met his eyes. She did not trust herself to speak and turned away from him, afraid lest he should think she wanted more of him than he wanted to give.

  She pulled the lamp out of his hand and flashed it all round them. They were standing at the bottom of a shaft that led upwards, away from the mastaba her father had been excavating. It was roughly made, betraying that it had been cut out by robbers, either ancient or modern. It was a steep climb up to the top and, at the thought of working her way up there, Victoria was gripped by the familiar fear that turned her knees to cotton-wool and her will-power into blind panic.

  “You’ll manage it all right,” Tariq said behind her.

  “I hope so.” She swallowed, her mouth dry and painful. She clung to the fact that he would be there and some of the unreasoning fear left her limbs. “Anyway,” she told herself more than him, “I have to manage it if I want to see what’s up there, and I do!”

  She found it easier to crawl up the hollowed-out steps on her hands and knees, keeping her eyes firmly on a fixed spot in front of her. Behind her, she could hear Tariq’s heavy breathing as he kept pace with her, vying with the sound of the lamp as he pushed it up a step at a time ahead of him.

  Then, suddenly, they were almost at the top and she saw that the shaft opened up into a large chamber. Forgetting her fears and the discomfort of her position, Victoria reached back and grabbed the lamp, setting it down on the floor just above her. The room was crowded with objects of every kind, lying higgledy-piggledy where rough hands had thrown them while seeking for other things of greater value

  “It’s fantastic!” She pulled herself up the last few feet and into the chamber. It was large and solid, the walls covered with hieroglyphs from top to bottom. “Tariq, where can we be?”

  He joined her in the chamber, his face white and tense with excitement. If she was thrilled to bits by their discovery, she thought, how much more must it mean to him with his innate love for the past of Egypt and the years of study he had put into learning about it.

  “It could be important, couldn’t it?” she said.

  “Could be.”

  She recognised the true expert’s reluctance to commit himself until he had sifted through every particle of evidence. It was always the same, she thought. They would be as dogmatic as they liked on any other subject but, when it came to their own discipline, they would buttress themselves with ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ as if they feared a single wrong surmise would bring the whole edifice down about their ears.

  She wandered off by herself, leaving him to decipher some of the texts in an effort to discover something about the chamber in which they found themselves. She knew better than to touch any of the articles that were strewn across the floor, but they were more interesting to her than any number of hieroglyphs all the same. She found a small wooden statue, the paint still clinging to it, and bent down to look at it closer still. She thought it must have been a child’s toy, and wondered who could have played with it and what it was doing in someone’s tomb.

  On the far wall was pictured rows and rows of serving girls, each carrying some article of food. Victoria amused herself by looking at their different expressions, surprised, though she admitted she should have known better, by the detail in which the artist had recorded their expressions and actions. Even their hairstyles were varied, depending on whether they wore wigs or their own hair, and whether they had short curly locks, or long straight ones that fell right down to their waists.

  “Who are all these women?” she asked.

  Tariq came across to her. “The hope was that they would serve the great man in the next world. In very ancient times, his servants would have been buried in person alongside him, to serve him in death as they had served him in life. Look, here was his huntsman, and here a farmer who probably worked on his estate bringing the cows home to be milked. By the time this tomb was built, the custom of such wholesale slaughter had fallen into disfavour for obvious reasons, and so they substituted pictorial images for the real thing, which to their mind would have worked equally well. Even today, making a pictorial representation of a living thing is frowned upon by both devout Moslems and Jews.”

  “Much the same idea as making a statue of the dead man for his soul, or ka, to return to if anything happened to his body?” Victoria hazarded.

  “Right. It’s thought that’s why so much of Egyptian art is a bit peculiar from the point of view of perspective. They had to show the whole eye, even when the face was in profile, to make sure that the person would be able to see. And both shoulders so that he could carry as much in death as in life.”

  “I thought they didn’t know about perspective,” Victoria said.

  Tariq twisted his lips into a wry smile. “No, they knew the principles well enough. They are plenty of chalk drawings, done for fun, that have been found in all sorts of places, and they are as naturalistic as the most modern drawings.”

  She was intrigued by this and went on looking at the painted figures, amused by the distraught face of one of the cows whose calf was being carried by a man a few feet ahead of her. She didn’t notice Tariq move away from her, making his way to the most distant corner of the chamber, and she nearly jumped out of her skin when he made a sudden hissing noise between his teeth.

  “I fancy this is how Jim Kerr comes in and out,” he remarked, in such casual tones that it was a moment or so before she took in what he was saying.

  “Where? Let me see!” She rushed over to where he was standing. He pushed at a slab of granite with the palm of his hand and it swung upwards, allowing him to pass through to the other side before sliding back into its former position. “Tariq!” she screamed. “Come back!”

  He did so immediately, smiling at her. “It goes straight into the burial chamber of your father’s mastaba, cutting off the corner, just as you said it would.”

  “And you believe me now? About Jim Kerr?”

  “Yes, I think I do,” he said. He put a hand up to his head and brushed the dust out of his hair, still smiling. “No wonder he acquired such a dirty image. The tunnel on the other side is falling in places, most of it on the top of my head!”

  He pushed the stone into the open position again, changed his mind, and let it swing shut again. “I’m sorry, Victoria, but you realise that I’m going to have to call in the police to deal with this?”


  She nodded, blissfully unconcerned. “Has much been taken?”

  “It’s impossible to tell. Do you want to look into the sarcophagus and see if the mummy’s intact?”

  She wasn’t sure that she did. It seemed an impertinence to intrude into the privacy of the dead occupant, even if he had been dead for a very, very long time. “Won’t he crumble, or something, if we let the air in?” she objected, almost hopefully.

  “Somebody had already done that, by the look of things,” he observed. “Still, you don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

  But, in the end, she couldn’t resist it. She was shocked to see how little remained of the mortal remains of the mummified body inside. A few wisps of grizzled hair, flesh that looked more like strips of leather, and a great many dirty bandages that had been ripped apart by greedy fingers looking for jewels amongst their folds.

  “There’s not much left, is there?” she commented, tears in her eyes.

  “My dear girl,” said Tariq, “he’s been dead too long for you to mourn him now. Your crying over him isn’t going to help him.”

  “Perhaps he’s a she,” she said.

  “More likely a man, and an important nobleman at that. But we’ll find out as soon as we find the serdab—”

  “That what?”

  “A hidden, yet open, place, built to protect the statue that was to substitute for the body, allowing the ka to come and go and be sure of somewhere familiar to return to. Usually it was bricked up, with no more than a couple of holes cut in the wall, allowing the statue to see out, and the smell of the incense to greet the nostrils of the dead man. We’ll come back and look for it some other time. We ought to be getting back to Abdul.”

  He pushed open the granite slab again and held it open while she slid past him into the burial chamber of the mastaba beyond.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” she wondered. “The entrance is still blocked on the other side.”

  He held up the lamp by way of answer and she saw another crumbling passageway that went straight into one of the corridors that had already been cleared of sand. It was the easiest thing in the world to walk through it and, in a few seconds, they found themselves back in the original courtyard of her father’s mastaba.

  Abdul, leaning sleepily against his camel, gave a yell of horror at the sight of them. His relief when he saw who they were brought a flood of Arabic to his lips. “Bismillah el rahman el rahin! But you are both safe! I thought you were djinns come to frighten me away! Where have you been, ya sitt? The dust! I will run and put the water on to heat for your bath. You will want to wash yourself - your hair, clothes, everything!”

  Looking at her Tariq smiled. “Good idea!” he said. “It will give you something to do while I get in touch with the police. I’ll have a quick wash myself before I go in case they mistake me for Kerr!”

  Victoria took a deep breath. “Why don’t you go after lunch?” she suggested, refusing to meet the mockery in his eyes.

  He put out a hand and brushed some of the dust out of her hair. “What a good idea!” he said.

  For Victoria the afternoon passed slowly. She had enjoyed her lunch alone with Tariq. Abdul, sensing an occasion, had chosen not to make any of the European dishes he had learned with such care. He had rushed down to his village and had come back with his wife, carrying so much food in her spindly arms that Victoria had rushed to help her, but Abdul would have none of it. “Leave her alone, ya sitt. She will only drop something, or forget what she has brought, if you take her mind off her work.” He smiled shyly at her. “You will need the time to make yourself beautiful for your husband. Leave it to my wife to make the meal for you both.”

  Victoria had not needed his eyes sliding over her filthy appearance twice. She had made the most of the tin bath Abdul had brought to her tent, filling it with hot water already perfumed with bath essence, though where that little luxury had come from, Victoria preferred not to enquire. She wanted badly to take down the curtain Tariq had put up between their beds. She looked at it for a long, long time but, in the end, she hadn’t the courage, and she contented herself with giving it a vicious tweak as she went from one part of the tent to the other.

  After her bath, she had put on a dress and had brushed her newly-washed hair until it shone. She had left it flying free, ostensibly so that it would finish drying in the sun, but really because she thought it made her look more feminine and prettier than when she tied it back. She had been rewarded, too, by the look Tariq had given her when she had joined him at the table. She didn’t believe that he had ever looked at Juliette with quite that light in his eyes.

  Abdul had served them with his wife’s atayefs, a kind of cheese pancake which was rolled and fried in oil; followed by falafels, little vegetable balls made of chopped beans and onions spiced with salt, pepper and pimentoes; together with bamiyah, a kind of vegetable served with a tomato sauce. To go with the food, Abdul had opened a bottle of wine and, when they had finished eating, had served them with tiny cups of very strong coffee, enjoying their pleasure almost as much as his wife whose shy giggles had come from the kitchen every time Abdul had gone in there to tell her how much her cooking was being appreciated.

  But after lunch Tariq had gone off immediately, without even bothering to ask what she was going to do with herself all afternoon. Victoria had been strongly tempted to go back to the mastaba and to take another look round that sad, beautiful tomb that she and Tariq had discovered that morning, but the thought of Tariq’s reactions to her doing so deterred her. Instead, she had offered to accompany Abdul’s wife back to the village, planning to take a quick look at the ruined Monastery of St. Jeremias on the way.

  The Egyptian woman walked ahead of her, her hips swaying as she balanced her pots and pans on her head, leaving her hands free to carry the remains of the vegetables and the other things she had brought with her. From behind she looked a pretty woman. It was only when one saw the pockmarked skin of her face and the marked squint in her eyes that one realised that poverty could leave a physical mark on the sufferer that no later affluence could ever remove. They had no language in common, but the silence between them was far from being oppressive. Abdul’s wife pointed out a nesting heron and a flock of green-backed swallows that dipped over the irrigation channels in their constant search for food. When they came to a pathway that climbed up the hill away from the Causeway of Unas, she made gestures to Victoria that that was where she should go and, with a last fleeting smile, she quickened her footsteps and hurried away into the distance.

  The monastery itself was rather disappointing. It had been built in the second half of the fifth century, and had been destroyed by the conquering Arabs round about 960. At the beginning of this century it had been cleared of sand and the best carvings and paintings had been removed to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. Now the sand had returned, half burying the few columns and the remaining traces of what had once been an important church.

  Victoria retraced her steps back to the Causeway, up which the heavy stones had been dragged up from the edge of the Nile, along which they had been floated in barges from the quarries, to be heaved into place to form the Pyramid of Unas. Most of the work had been done at the time of the inundation, a season which had infallibly started on the Seventeenth Day of July, which the Ancient Egyptians had counted as the first day of their year. During the time that the waters from the river had covered the fertile soil of the valley, work on the land had been impossible, and it had been the best time to find the labourers to float the heavy stones down the river and haul them into their final resting place in the pyramid of the Pharaoh.

  Looking to the south-west of the Step Pyramid, to where their camp was situated, she could see that Tariq was back, and she began to run, wanting to be with him, and wanting to know what the police had said too and if they would be coming to visit the site themselves, perhaps even to arrest Jim Kerr that very day.

  She went straight to the communal tent, bursti
ng her way into it. “What’s happening?” she demanded.

  Tariq rose to his feet, frowning. “Gently,” he warned her. He turned her round and gave her a gentle push in the direction she had come. “We are talking just now. Come back later and serve our tea, will you? Your presence will be more acceptable then.”

  Shocked at first, she belatedly remembered that the visiting men would be embarrassed and inhibited if they were expected to talk freely in front of a woman. Because they treated Tariq as one of themselves, they would expect his wife to behave according to their customs too. If she insisted on staying and taking a part in their discussions, she would lose their respect and, more important to her, so would Tariq. She went without another word, holding her head high, but there was no way of telling if Tariq was appreciative or not. He sat down again and went straight on with what he had been saying, ignoring the interruption as if it had never been.

  Back in her own tent, she felt even more bored and restless. Finally, she took herself to task for her stupidity and settled down to write a long overdue letter to her mother. She refrained from mentioning the troubles at the dig, concentrating instead on the sights she had seen since coming to Egypt. The fact that Tariq’s name cropped up in every paragraph, and practically every other sentence, only occurred to her after she had finished the long account of her doings, and by then it was too late to change what she had written.

  She was licking down the envelope when Tariq came into the tent. He stood for a long moment looking down at her, the separating curtain in his hand.

  “I thought you were coming back to have tea with us,” he said.

  “I didn’t know when you would be finished talking,” she returned, determined not to let him see she had minded his dismissal of her from the communal tent.

  He let the curtain fall. “Do you want to know what they said?”

  “If you want to tell me.” She was dismayed to hear herself launching into an apology. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” she said. “I’d forgotten they wouldn’t want a woman there.”