The Spoils of Egypt Page 6

  ‘You spoke of an attack,’ said Paul quietly.

  ‘Did I? Well, an attack of nerves, perhaps. Or maybe it was the bats. It was all very confusing. But an attack? Oh dear no. A mishap, which I may well have brought upon myself.’

  ‘It was a damned stupid thing to do,’ said Parker harshly. He was the tall, heavy-set American who was directing excavations on the site.

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ said Miss Skinner, looking at him coolly. ‘Perhaps it was.’

  ‘Certainly there was no need to bring anybody down from Cairo,’ said Parker. ‘Complete waste of time. And money.’

  ‘Mr Trevelyan is usually a pretty good judge of the public interest,’ said Owen.

  ‘It’s not the public’s time and money that I’m talking about. It’s mine.’

  Parker stood up abruptly, walked out from under the awning and shouted to some workmen who were sitting quietly in the shadow cast by the wall of the temple. Two of them stood up and hurried away.

  ‘Isn’t it time to stop for the day?’ asked Mahmoud.

  They had arrived at Der el Bahari in the late afternoon. The shadows were already creeping out from the cliff. This far south, though, the sun retained its heat till late.

  ‘I’m the judge of that,’ said Parker.

  ‘I was thinking of the legal limits,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘What damned business is it of yours?’ asked Parker.

  ‘The hours of work will be one of the things I’ll be looking at,’ said Mahmoud.

  Parker turned and faced him.

  ‘Oh, you will, will you?’ he said furiously. ‘Well, who the hell are you?’

  ‘Mahmoud el Zaki. Department of Prosecutions, Ministry of Justice.’

  ‘Really, Mr Trevelyan,’ began Miss Skinner, ‘you shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble—’

  ‘Two of them!’ said Parker disgustedly. ‘Two! They send two people down from Cairo just because of a crazy woman! Haven’t you got anything to do? You haven’t, I suppose.’

  ‘I am afraid you’re under a misapprehension, Mr Parker,’ said Mahmoud quietly. ‘I am not investigating, at present, the circumstances in which Miss Skinner was attacked. I am investigating, for the Department of Prosecutions, the circumstances in which two workmen have died.’

  ‘Oh, oh!’ said Miss Skinner, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Two!’

  Parker now was giving Mahmoud his full attention.

  ‘Those were accidents,’ he said. ‘It happens sometimes when you’re digging. Sites are dangerous places.’

  ‘I shall be looking at the circumstances in which the accidents took place,’ said Mahmoud, ‘in order to determine whether there are any questions of criminal liability.’

  ‘I’m an American,’ said Parker. ‘You can’t get me with Egyptian law.’

  Owen saw Mahmoud’s face harden.

  ‘It is true,’ the Egyptian admitted softly, ‘that any prosecution would have to be within the terms of the Capitulations procedure.’

  ‘Well, then—’

  ‘However, that is true only of formal prosecution. There are other things I could recommend. Such as withdrawing your license to excavate.’

  Parker turned purple.

  ‘You’d better not!’ he said. ‘There are big people behind this. We’re putting real money into this goddamned country and we’re not going to be messed around by clerks from Cairo. As you will damned soon find!’

  Mahmoud rose to his feet.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he said quietly, ‘I shall carry on with my investigations.’

  He walked over to the circle of workmen, crouched down and began to talk to them.

  Parker watched him in fury for a few moments, then turned on his heel and strode away.

  ‘My!’ said Miss Skinner. ‘My!’

  She sat for a while turning things over in her mind. Then she looked up.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think I’m glad on the whole that you did send for Captain Owen. Two workmen? Two? Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, looking at Paul. ‘Yes, you were quite right.’

  ***

  Owen woke early, as he did every morning, stood up at once and walked out from under the awning. Over to the east, across the Plain of Thebes, the sun was rising in a great ball of red and orange. The plain, though, was still covered in shadows and it was cold enough, without a jacket, to make him shiver.

  There was a pump not far away with a few workmen clustered round it, washing their faces. They used the water sparingly, letting it trickle into their hands and then spreading it over face, arms and upper body. He went across and joined them, then half filled a mug and began to shave.

  One of the men took the mug silently, walked over to the fire, picked up the kettle and topped up the mug with hot water. Owen thanked him, they fell into conversation and it was natural to follow him afterwards and join the ring drinking black tea around the fire.

  The sun was just beginning now to touch the tops of the cliffs above the camp. They rose in a steep wall to cut off the plain from the Sahara and at their foot, cut into the rock, was the incredible temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with its three great terraces, one behind the other, its marvellous double colonnades, open to the light, open to the eyes of men from miles around, but sloping back into the darkness of the cliffs and the holiest of holies.

  ‘C’est magnifique,’ said Paul, suddenly appearing beside him, ‘mais ce n’est pas the particular one they’re working on.’

  ‘Oh? What one are they working on?’

  ‘That one,’ said Paul, pointing along the cliffs to where a second temple nestled into the rock. It was smaller than the Hatshepsut temple and sadly ruined.

  ‘And therefore,’ said Paul, ‘neglected until about five years ago, when Naville began his excavations. You’ve met Naville? No? Well, you should. An interesting man and found some interesting things: the Cow of Hathor, for instance. You remember the Cow of Hathor? There was a lot about it in the papers—’

  ‘Saw it last week,’ said Owen. ‘They were moving it.’

  ‘Not part of the general exodus, I hope?’

  ‘No, no. Just from one part of the Museum to the other.’

  ‘I would hate to lose that,’ said Paul. ‘It might almost induce me to join forces with Miss Skinner.’

  ‘And it was over there, was it,’ asked Owen, looking across at the second temple, ‘that it happened?’

  ‘It’ according to Miss Skinner last night had been a simple fall. She had gone back alone one evening after excavation had finished for the day—‘oh, in the quiet, you know. I just wanted to take a quiet look, when there were no workmen fidgeting around’—and had fallen into a subterranean chamber.

  ‘My own fault,’ Miss Skinner had said.

  ‘Yes,’ Parker had said heavily, ‘it was. You ought to know better. Damned unprofessional.’

  ‘There was a thing I wished to check on.’

  ‘Well, just check on it in the daytime in future,’ Parker had said.

  ‘How did you come to fall, Miss Skinner?’ Owen had asked.

  ‘Oh. I don’t know. The hole was there for me to see, wasn’t it? And I had a torch. I must have been looking at something else, I suppose.’

  She had lain there for the rest of the night. It was not until the morning that her absence had been discovered. And it was not until late the following day that her cries had been heard. They might not have been heard then had not Parker, angry at yet more time being lost, ordered some of his men back to work.

  ‘However,’ said Miss Skinner briskly, ‘no bones broken. And there was no other damage apart from that to my self-esteem. Except, of course, that poor Mr Trevelyan was most frightfully worried.’

  She laughed and patted Paul playfully on the knee. ‘My faithful Achates,’ she said.

  Paul had smiled dutifull
y but said nothing.

  This morning he was still saying nothing.

  ‘Take a look at it first,’ he said. ‘We can talk later.’

  They were going over, as soon as it became light, to take a look at the scene of the incident. Already the workmen were beginning to make their way out of the camp.

  ‘Breakfast!’ called Miss Skinner. ‘Breakfast is served!’

  They joined her under the awning, where a bare wooden trestle table had been set up. The camp cook, rising nobly and convinced that no European ate anything other than eggs for breakfast, produced some well fried ones, together, however, with coffee, which Parker apparently insisted on.

  Parker himself was nowhere to be seen. He was already closeted with Mahmoud.

  ‘Where’s Naville?’ asked Owen. ‘Didn’t you say he was conducting the excavation?’

  ‘No, no. He finished two years ago. There was a gap and then Parker applied for the license.’

  ‘Thinking that where the pickings had been so good, there might be more,’ said Miss Skinner.

  ‘Another Cow?’

  ‘A calf at least.’

  Already the heat was rising up from the ground and bouncing back from the cliffs. This far south it was several degrees hotter than in Cairo and in the vast amphitheatre of rock it was hotter still. As they walked across to the second temple Owen could now see why the workmen had been glad to leave so early.

  In the open court of the temple they stopped at the entrance to a sloping passage extending down below the pavement. A modern door had been fitted—‘to keep out jaywalkers,’ said Miss Skinner—but was standing open.

  Inside was a rocky tunnel the height and width of a man, except that the men were smaller in those days and Owen had to stoop. It ran steeply downwards for over a hundred metres and then came out into a large room made of blocks of granite, extremely well joined, as they saw in the light of the torches. Two other tunnels ran out of the room.

  ‘That one,’ said Miss Skinner, pointing, ‘goes down to the sanctuary. That’s where they’re working at the moment. This one, here, is the one I went down.’

  ‘Not where they were working?’

  ‘I had been there. On my way back I thought I’d try this one.’

  The second tunnel was just as well made as the one they had walked down previously, except that it was, perhaps, a trifle smaller. The roof was vaulted and the floor, though bare rock, carefully smoothed.

  Paul, in front, stopped.

  ‘The scene of the crime,’ said Miss Skinner.

  ‘Crime?’ said Owen.

  ‘Accident,’ said Miss Skinner.

  The hole was not in front, as Owen had supposed, but at the side, in the wall. A cold, dusty smell came out of the opening.

  Paul shone his torch inside.

  ‘It’s a drop, as you can see.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Five feet,’ said Miss Skinner. ‘I could see over it, standing on tiptoe. But I couldn’t get up. There was nothing to stand on. Except mummies, of course, and they kept collapsing.’

  ‘Mummies?’

  Paul shone his torch.

  ‘There are dozens down there.’

  ‘They are mainly cats and dogs,’ said Miss Skinner. ‘Although there are some crocodiles.’

  ‘You tried standing on them?’

  ‘It was all I could find. The torch had, of course, gone out.’

  ‘How did you know—?’

  ‘I could feel them. The different animals are quite distinctive, even in the dark. I was down there, of course, for some time.’

  In the torchlight Owen could see the mummies, lots of them, and below him, a certain amount of debris.

  ‘They crumbled,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘when I stood on them.’

  ‘What’s it like down there?’ asked Owen.

  ‘Like—?’

  ‘The ground. Is it OK to stand on?’

  ‘Apart from the mummies, yes. It’s like this.’

  Owen gave Paul his torch and swung himself down. As his feet touched the ground he felt something give way and a cloud of acrid dust rose up and made him cough.

  ‘Of course,’ said Miss Skinner above him, ‘when I fell, I landed on top of them. I suppose, in fact, they cushioned my fall. But the dust! I couldn’t breathe! I thought I would choke.’

  Owen reached his hand up for the torch. The chamber was long, about thirty feet, and, as far as he could see, filled with mummies.

  ‘Why go to these lengths,’ asked Paul, ‘for animals?’

  ‘They were sacred. I think, however,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘they must have had a fondness for them, too.’

  The walls of the chamber were of granite blocks, exactly as the walls of the other room had been, fitting so well together that there wasn’t even a slight toe-hold that Miss Skinner could have used.

  The ground was deep in debris.

  ‘I used a lot of mummies,’ said Miss Skinner.

  Owen gave Paul the torch and heaved himself up.

  ‘Satisfied?’ asked Miss Skinner. ‘Have I told the truth?’

  ‘I’m just trying to get a picture.’

  Back in the corridor, he shone the torch around him.

  ‘I still don’t see how you came to fall.’

  ‘I think I may have tripped,’ said Miss Skinner, ‘put my hand out, as one does, found nothing there, overbalanced and fallen through.’

  Owen dropped on one knee and began to run his hands over the floor.

  ‘But what could you have tripped on?’

  ‘Is there nothing there? I thought I caught an edge. Of course, in the dark—’

  Owen straightened up and began to feel round the walls.

  ‘Perhaps it was my own flat feet,’ said Miss Skinner. She gave a little laugh. ‘I seem to be making rather a habit of it, don’t I?’

  ***

  ‘What didn’t you like about it?’ asked Owen.

  ‘It was what she said when we got her out,’ said Paul. ‘She said she’d been pushed.’

  ‘She said it as definitely as that?’

  ‘Yes. It was as we were helping her back along the passage. I said to her, you know, the way one does: “My God, Miss Skinner, what’s happened to you?” And she said: “I was pushed and fell into that dreadful place.” Something like that. But definitely pushed.’

  ‘She’s not saying that now.’

  ‘No, and a bit later, when we’d cleaned her up, and given her a drink, and she’d rested and I asked her again—I wanted to get the detail—she wasn’t saying it then, either. She just said she must have fallen. And when I probed, she shut up like a clam.’

  ‘Wouldn’t say any more?’

  ‘Stuck to a “Silly me—a foolish accident” kind of routine. But that’s not what she said when we got her out.’

  ‘Changed her mind when she’d had time to think about it.’

  ‘Yes. I must say,’ said Paul, ‘that I find the “Silly me” routine more than a little implausible in the case of Miss Skinner. A more self-possessed lady I have seldom encountered.’

  ‘Yes. Piling up the mummies—or even feeling them in the dark to find out what kind of mummies they were—does not seem to me the act of someone who’s lost her head.’

  ‘She was shaken, all right,’ said Paul. ‘She’d had a fall and she’d been down there all right. But confused? I wouldn’t have said she was at all confused.’

  ‘So you thought it was all a bit fishy?’

  ‘There were other things, too. I went back down the passage and had a look and I couldn’t see how she could have come to have fallen. And then,’ said Paul, ‘I remembered how she’d been pushed, and I decided that I was asking myself too many questions, and that they were not aide-de-camp sort of questions but Mamur Zapt sort of questions.’
>
  ***

  Last of all, Parker took them to a small chapel, only about ten feet long and five feet wide. The walls were covered with sculptures carved in relief and painted, and the roof was painted too, blue with yellow stars.

  ‘It is, of course, the sky,’ said Miss Skinner. ‘I like that, don’t you? The cow grazing in the field, with the blue sky above.’

  For this was the famous chapel in which Naville had discovered the Cow of Hathor.

  ‘What a piece of luck!’ said Parker enviously.

  ‘Not luck,’ corrected Miss Skinner. ‘Sound archæological practice. He’d worked out the chapel was going to be there.’

  ‘He didn’t know there was going to be anything like the Cow of Hathor in it, though, did he?’

  Parker turned to Owen.

  ‘The trouble with these places,’ he said, ‘is that even when you get into a chamber, you don’t know there’s going to be anything there. And that’s for two reasons: first, because if there was anything there, it’s probably been stolen; second, because the people who put it there in the first place anticipated that it might be stolen and hid it somewhere else. You need luck as well as archæology. And shall I tell you something else?’

  He faced Miss Skinner belligerently.

  ‘You also need to be a bit of a thief yourself, to figure out how their minds worked!’ He laughed loudly.

  ‘And are you?’ asked Miss Skinner.

  He broke off and looked at her, amused.

  ‘I’m just a simple archæologist,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m not likely to find anything!’

  He ushered them out. They stood for a moment blinking in the bright sunlight. Parker looked around.

  ‘You ask yourself if there could be another one nearby. If that one was intact, maybe they didn’t touch this part of the site. There might be another one. Still,’ he said, ‘that’s a question I’m not allowed to ask myself.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It’s the licence,’ he said. ‘I’m only allowed to work in two places: the sanctuary and the North-East Court.’

  He led them back into the shade of the colonnade and then turned to Owen.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that it? Seen all you want? Can I go now, sir? Some of us have work to do.’