The Sycamore Song Read online

  Victoria swallowed, unable to think of any adequate reply. Her heart took up an erratic beat within her and she stooped quickly to pick up her handbag.

  “A government barnacle,” she reminded herself as much as she was reminding him. “My being a girl or a man doesn’t come into it.”

  “You think not? You may be right. But whichever you are, come along and we’ll start your first lesson in your father’s trade.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Buck up, sweetheart!”

  It was an impertinence for him to call her sweetheart. She was in two minds as to whether she would rebuke him for taking such a liberty. It was worse, she knew, because if she decided against it, it would only be because she thought he would find some stinging retort that would discomfort her still further. She began to hope that she wouldn’t have to see much of him at Sakkara, not until she had a better idea of how to handle him.

  “Tariq, Juliette is quite right. I don’t even begin to know how to cope with the excavation. I can’t imagine why my father thought I could.”

  “You have me,” he reminded her.

  Yes, and much good that was going to do her when she didn’t even know if she could trust him or not. “Have I?” she said aloud. “I can’t know that. How can I? And what am I to do if Torquil Fletcher turns up? Will you cope with him too?”

  “I think I can safely promise that. You don’t have to worry about Fletcher, Victoria. It’s true he quarrelled with your father, but it was a personal matter, and it had nothing to do with their work.”

  Victoria sighed. “A woman?” she said.

  “A woman,” he agreed.

  She sighed again. “I suppose it was silly of me not to have realised. I never thought of my father—”

  “Why should you, if you barely knew him? How old are you, Victoria?”

  “Twenty-three.” Twenty-three was old enough not to be surprised and shocked by such matters, she thought gloomily. “How old are you?” she added, not to be outdone.

  “Thirty-four. But it isn’t only the years that count. I’m an old man compared to an innocent like you. I’ve lived my life to the full, while you, at a guess, have scarcely lived at all, keeping your mother company and she keeping the local swains at bay from her little ewe lamb!”

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” she said. “If you knew me better, you might be surprised!”

  “Would I?” He sounded amused.

  No, he wouldn’t be! “My mother would have been lonely if I had left her on her own,” she defended herself. “I’m all she’s got. She isn’t possessive exactly, but she does want me to marry a nice local boy and live round the corner so that we can call in on each other every day. You know the sort of thing.”

  “I’m surprised you could tear yourself away to come to Egypt,” he commented gravely.

  “But it was the most marvellous opportunity!” She made an expressive gesture. “I want to see something else before I settle down, but I don’t love her any the less.”

  “And you think you'll go back there more or less unchanged when you’ve finished here?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Things look different out here.”

  He looked her over, noting the eager interest she had in everything she saw.

  “Very different,” he agreed.

  She wondered what he meant by that, but as at that moment they gained the main gate of the hotel, her attention was claimed by the hustle and bustle outside at the foot of the hill that led up to the Giza complex of Pyramids. It was very steep and the urgency of the vendors made any progress upwards quite difficult.

  “Welcome to Egypt, madame! Welcome, welcome! Will you ride my camel? Just to have the photograph of you? Very comfortable camel! Please, madame, you come this way! Nice view of Sphinx! No camel, then I find a donkey for you, yes? But, madame, I have a lovely chariot—”

  Tariq looked as though he actually enjoyed the exchanges that beset them on every side. Occasionally he would say something to them in Arabic and they would laugh, bow gracefully, and go away, to Victoria’s great relief.

  “Why are they so persistent?” she asked him.

  He put his arm right round her, guiding her carefully round a group of animals and oblivious tourists. “They have no other way of making a living. There’s compulsory schooling in Egypt now, but most of these men are too old to have benefited from the new ideas and they scratch a living how they can. If you can’t read or write, there isn’t much you can do in the modern world.”

  She pulled away from him because the close contact with him disturbed her, but his hand shot out, anchoring her firmly back against his side. “You’ll get run down if you dart about like that,” he reproved her and, as if to prove his words, an enormous American car shot past them, just shaving the robe of one of the camel-drivers.

  At the top of the hill, Tariq bought their tickets at a little booth and stuffed them into his pocket, leading her away from the largest pyramid of them all, the Pyramid of Cheops, an edifice of such magnificent proportions that it towered above them, looking to all appearances, even in these days of high-rise buildings and engineering miracles, as though it did indeed reach right up into the sky. Close up, it was possible to see the huge slabs of granite that had gone into its making and that once had been clad in an outer coating of Tura limestone which had long since been carted away for other buildings. The height of the pyramid had been reduced for the same reason and it was possible to climb up the sides to the top, to look right across modern Cairo, and to Memphis, the first capital of the Two Kingdoms, and to Sakkara, the necropolis of that capital.

  “I never imagined it would be so big!” Victoria confided. “It’s huge!”

  Tariq smiled. “You’re not the first person to think that. All sorts of calculations have been made to give some idea of its size. It’s been said that you could house the Houses of Parliament and St. Paul’s Cathedral in its base and still have some room over. Or, alternatively, Florence and Milan Cathedrals, and St. Peter’s in Rome, and still be able to throw in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s for good measure.”

  “That’s big,” she agreed.

  “Something of a triumph for those days,” he said dryly. “Imagine what they must have been like when they were gilded to catch the rays of the morning sun! The ancient Egyptians may have been obsessed by death, but it was a magnificent obsession. There was nothing paltry about the grandeur with which they endowed the Kingdom of Osiris.”

  “The god Osiris was killed himself, wasn’t he?”

  “He was. He was killed by his brother Set. His sister-wife, Isis, combed the world looking for him and, when she found his body, she mummified it to keep it for ever. But Set’s hatred was such that he couldn’t bear to leave well alone and he chopped up the body, scattering it over the countryside. Poor Isis set out on a further search and collected up all the various parts of her husband’s body. Life was breathed back into it and Osiris became the King of the Dead.”

  Victoria herself commented, “She was some lady, was Isis, wasn’t she? I know she was considered to be very beautiful.”

  “So lovely that many of her statues in Rome were transformed into being called representations of Our Lady sooner than break them up, as was the fate of most pagan religious objects. Probably the picture we have of Mary, even today, owes a lot to the Ancient Egyptian’s vision of his goddess Isis.”

  Victoria caught at his arm, reluctant to leave the Great Pyramid without having seen inside. “Please, do let’s go in there,” she begged him.

  “We’ll come back,” he promised. “I want you to see Chephren’s pyramid first. It was built later and it hasn’t quite the same marvellous quality of Cheops’, but it makes a very good introduction, to how they were planned and built. I’m afraid you’re going to find it an exhausting afternoon. You must tell me if you get too tired.”

  His concern for her was rather nice, she thought. She wondered if he thought her particularly fragile, but dis
missed the idea as absurd. He probably always treated all females, young and old, in the same old-fashioned way, expecting them to respond in kind by allowing him to have the last say in everything. She thought there had probably been a good many who had chosen to bask in the warmth of his approval rather than strike out for themselves against his wishes for them. Had Juliette?

  She turned away from the thought. It was none of her business, she told herself, and she had no right to be hurt by anything to do with him. He was nothing to her, just as she was nothing to him.

  Somewhat reassured, she gazed up at Chephren’s pyramid, noting that part of the limestone casing had been left on this second monument to show what the whole had once been like. From ground level it seemed to reach almost as high as that of Cheops’ and, because the sides were less ragged, there were no climbers scaling its heights, looking as small as ants as they worked their way up and down the huge blocks of stone.

  The entrance to the pyramid seemed dark after the sunlight outside. A tunnel stretched downwards, lit by a few naked bulbs. On the floor had been placed some planks of wood on to which small strips had been nailed to give some purchase. The guide hurried forward to greet them, arranging their progress to his own satisfaction by taking a firm grasp of Victoria’s hand and hurrying her onwards, further and further down into the bowels of the earth. The roof was not high enough for her to stand upright, so she had to bend almost double to avoid hitting her head, which added considerably to the discomfort of the breathless rush down the makeshift catwalk. She arrived at the bottom sadly out of breath and made a play of looking determinedly about her until she had recovered herself.

  “This was the first burial chamber that was later abandoned for the one that’s almost in the centre of the pyramid,” Tariq told her. He, of course, had had no difficulty in keeping up with the impetuous guide, she noticed with disgust. He caught a glimpse of the expression on her face and chuckled. “Don’t think about the weight above your head,” he advised her maliciously. “We can’t have you suffering from claustrophobia as well as acrophobia.”

  “But we must be well below ground level,” she answered, unamused.

  “Yes. We climb up again now to just below ground level to where the actual tomb was situated. Do you want to go on?”

  It was easier going up than going down, she discovered. At one point they passed some frightening, unguarded steps, but the guide pressed onwards and her relief that she was not going to have to climb up them was such that she found she could hurry on almost as fast as he, as if she had done this sort of thing all her life.

  The reward when they reached the burial chamber was great. The tunnel opened into a large-sized room, nearly fifty feet in length, she judged, by perhaps twenty feet wide, with a high, gabled roof, the stone of which had been laid at the same angle as the outer sides of the pyramid. Except for the roof, it had been hewn wholly out of stone, and she wondered what their tools had been to embark on such a task.

  “Is the tomb my father discovered anything like this?” she demanded, with suppressed excitement.

  “Well, it’s smaller,” Tariq answered her, “but it has its own grandeur. You’ll see it for yourself tomorrow. It’s earlier than any pyramid. It’s thought that the pyramids grew out of the mastabas of the Pharaohs and noblemen who preceded them.”

  “A mastaba being what?” she asked.

  “A flat-topped tomb, like the one that’s being excavated at Sakkara. Mastaba means a kind of seat in Arabic, rather like a form, which the shape of the tomb is supposed to resemble. During the first two dynasties, in what is known as the Archaic Period, Pharaohs as well as noblemen were always buried in mastabas. Noblemen were never allowed to be buried in anything else.”

  The way back seemed shorter. The guide still hurried ahead, firmly grasping Victoria’s hand and pulling her along behind him. She tried at one point to make Tariq go ahead of her, but this met with a flat refusal on the part of the guide to let go of her.

  “He likes holding your hand,” Tariq told her with a laugh. “He thinks you very gamil.”

  “Thank you very much! I don’t like camels!”

  “Not a camel. Gamil. It means beautiful.”

  Diverted, Victoria looked over her shoulder at him. “You can’t possible know he’s thinking that. He probably only wants to make sure that we hurry up.”

  “All Arabs have an eye for a pretty girl,” he answered her. “And not only Arabs!”

  She laughed with him. She was glad that he thought her pretty at least, for he certainly thought her a fool. Indeed, she was so entertained by the compliment he had paid her that she scarcely noticed they had come back to the unguarded steps she had noticed going the other way until they drew level with them and the guide put a slippered foot on the lowest stair, urging her to follow him.

  But she could not. The mere thought of climbing those steps froze her into immobility. They reached up above her, white and ghostly in the dim light, with the well of the passageway disappearing into the darkness below her. Terrified, she jerked her hand out of his and turned blindly back the way they had come.

  “I’m not going up there!” she cried out.

  Tariq put an arm about her body. “It isn’t very high. Take it one step at a time.”

  “I can’t!”

  “My word, you do get yourself in a state over heights,” he said. He put a hand under each elbow. “Up you go!”

  She tried to turn round, to bury her face in his chest, beyond herself in her anxiety to get away from the wooden steps, but his hold on her arms increased and he would not let her go.

  “I’m not going up there!” she wailed.

  “Of course you are!” he said in her ear. He answered something the guide had said to him in Arabic and the Egyptian climbed the stairs, looking back at them with a gappy, toothless grin that Victoria was sure would haunt her as long as she lived. She shut her eyes with a gasp of sheer panic and the pressure on her elbows increased.

  “Go on, ya habibi, I’m right behind you. I shan’t let you go!”

  “Are you sure? I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be! It’s a very good excuse to hold you in my arms without you thinking the worst of me.” She could feel rather than hear the rumble of laughter in his chest, and she hated him. “I have an eye for a pretty girl too,” he claimed. “Especially one who has hair as black as night, eyes as dark as the evening sky, and a skin as fair as the light of the moon.” He laughed out loud. “You can open your eyes now, Victoria Lyle. You’ve made it!”

  She opened her eyes the better to berate him for talking such foolish nonsense to her at such a moment, and was surprised to discover that she was indeed at the top of the staircase. She rubbed her elbows where his hands had held her, confused by the memory of what he had said. “You hurt me!” she complained.

  “Little liar! At least I got you up here. Why don’t you thank me for that? You felt safe enough as soon as you knew I wouldn’t let you fall, didn’t you? You must trust me more than you think.”

  “You don’t understand,” she retorted. “One doesn’t reason logically at a time like that. Besides, I didn’t have any choice. You forced me up here!”

  “Oh no, I did not,” he said. “You walked up here by yourself because you knew you were safe with me behind you.” He touched her lips as she opened her mouth to contradict him with his forefinger, effectively silencing her. “Don’t you dare deny it, or next time I’ll leave you to the mercies of the guide!”

  That pulled her up with a jerk. “You wouldn’t!” she breathed.

  “No, of course I won’t. But I do wonder if you should attempt Cheops’. It’s a pretty stiff climb.”

  “I’ll be all right if you’re there. It can’t be much worse than that!”

  “The Grand Gallery goes right up into the centre of the pyramid, but you should be all right if you don’t look back—”

  “And if you’re right behind me!” He gave her a push along the short catwalk that l
ed to some stone steps at the other end of which she thought she could see daylight. She plunged upwards, barking her shin against an uneven stone in her hurry. She hardly felt the pain at all. “I’m sorry to have made such a fool of myself,” she apologised as they came out at the original entrance to die pyramid and started down the uneven steps to the ground below. “But you didn’t have to say pretty things to me to give me something to think about. I know I’m just a job to you.” She blinked in the sunlight. “You’ve probably said them all a hundred times before!”

  His eyes shone gold and spelt out the message that she was treading on dangerous ground.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she assured him hastily, “I didn’t believe a word of it!”

  He took a well-handled note out of his pocket and gave it to the guide, slapping the man companionably on the shoulder. After they had all shaken hands, he turned back to Victoria, his eyes very bright.

  “I’ve never seen anyone with yellow eyes before!” she exclaimed. “I’m sure you didn’t get them from your English father?”

  “From my mother,” he admitted. “She was a little French hen of a woman. I’ve always regretted that I never knew her, for the French often have a je ne sais quoi that other women lack.”

  “Like Juliette?” Victoria suggested, chancing her arm.

  “Uhuh. Sophisticated, chic—”

  And no better than she should be! Victoria finished for him in her own mind. At least Juliette was not, but perhaps he thought that that too added spice to a woman.

  “Don’t you think we ought to get on?” she said with admirable aplomb. “The afternoon is half gone already.” She ignored the twinkle in his eyes and pointed vaguely in the direction of the Great Pyramid. “I want to see everything while I’m here!”