Ramose and the Tomb Robbers (2 page)

“It’s the feast day of Bastet, the cat goddess,” said the cook, who used to be a sculptor until he’d lost two fingers when part of a tomb had collapsed. “No one celebrates it down here in the south, but in the Delta where I come from there’s a big festival. I like to make something special for the goddess on her day.”

Ramose helped himself to the food that was spread out for the workers’ midday meal. He heaped freshly cooked lamb, bean stew and boiled eggs into his bowl.

“Pity it’s not Bastet’s feast day every day,” he said. He felt something soft and warm brushing around his legs. A sleek, sandy-coloured creature with eyes the colour of greenstone was wrapping itself around Ramose’s legs. It was the cook’s cat. It had a gold earring in one delicately pointed ear. On a leather string around its neck was a small ceramic square with a Horus eye painted on it. This was to protect the animal from danger. The cat was miaowing loudly.

“Mery likes lamb,” said the cook, smiling at his pampered pet. “She wouldn’t mind if you shared a bit with her.”

“I like lamb too,” said Ramose, thinking that the cook’s cat looked well-fed enough.

Hapu was piling a second helping into his own bowl. He couldn’t help staring at the way the cook managed to do things with his three-fingered hand.

“What are these?” Ramose asked pointing to a pile of sticky balls on a platter, hoping the man hadn’t seen Hapu staring.

“They’re fig and nut cakes,” the cook replied. “Rolled in honey. And there won’t be enough for all the workers if your friend takes so many.”

Hapu put two of the sticky balls back on the platter and licked his fingers. He and Ramose walked back to their hut and sat down to eat. The hut was nothing more than a pile of rocks roofed over with a few palm fronds, but it was the boys’ home while they were in the Great Place. Ramose picked up one of the large eggs.

“I haven’t eaten an ibis egg since I was at—”

Hapu dug him in the ribs. “Samut’s over there,” he whispered. “Watch what you’re saying.”

Ramose glanced over his shoulder. The foreman of the tomb was talking to another tomb worker. Ramose was normally more careful. He peeled his egg and bit into it.

“Save one of your cakes for Karoya,” Ramose said. “I’d like to take some home for her.”

Hapu looked at his friend. “Why should I give my food to her?”

“She probably hasn’t tasted anything like them,” said Ramose.

The cat came and sat next to Ramose watching very closely as he ate his food. It miaowed again. It wasn’t a polite request, it was a demand. Ramose gave it a piece of meat to keep it quiet. The cat ate it delicately.

“Karoya would like a cat like this,” he said.

“I’ve never met anyone so concerned about a slave,” grumbled Hapu pushing one of the sweet cakes to the side of his bowl.

“I feel responsible for her. If my father’s army hadn’t captured her, she’d still be living in freedom with her family in Kush.”

“Pharaoh’s army has captured thousands of slaves. What difference does it make if one of them is a little happier than the rest?”

“It makes a difference to me,” replied Ramose, then he lowered his voice. “When I become pharaoh, the first thing I will do is free her.”

“What about the other thousands of slaves?” asked Hapu eating his last fig cake.

Ramose thought for a moment. It would be hard being pharaoh, there would be so many difficult decisions to make.

“I’ll free them all,” he replied.

“And who will grind the grain?” asked Hapu.

“I’ll let the vizier worry about that.”

Hapu finished his food and put his bowl down in the sand. He sighed contentedly and leaned back against the wall of the hut with his hands behind his head. His smile faded slightly.

“The sky’s a strange colour.”

Ramose looked up at the large oval of sky above the valley. It was darkening. Light grey clouds were drifting over the valley. A breeze suddenly picked up. It was more than a breeze. It was a wind strong enough to blow over one of the water jars. It wasn’t the hot wind that occasionally blew from the desert. It was cool. Ramose shivered.

“What’s happening?” asked Hapu.

There was a low rumble in the distance. The clouds grew darker as they moved across the valley and covered the sun. As they stared at the sky the boys saw a flash of bright light zigzag from the clouds to the pyramid-shaped peak of the mountain known as the Gate of Heaven. The rumbling noise came again and grew until it exploded in a loud crack.

“The gods must be angry,” said Hapu. He was plainly terrified. “They’re attacking us.”

The sky above the valley was completely covered with black clouds. It was like evening instead of midday. More lightning flashed around the mountain followed immediately by a louder crack of thunder. A large drop of water fell on Ramose’s upturned face. Then another. Within a few seconds water was pouring from the sky.

“It’s raining,” Ramose said, hardly able to believe his eyes.

Hapu stared in amazement as the large drops of water falling from the sky were replaced by even larger lumps of ice. Round ice stones the size of walnuts started pelting down on them.

“Quick,” yelled Ramose. “The tomb. We can shelter in the tomb.”

The boys ran towards the tomb entrance. Other tomb workers were doing the same. The cook, abandoning his cooking pots, picked up the cat and ran with the boys. They reached the tomb and watched in disbelief as the ice stones continued to fall. The tomb workers shook their heads. The cook’s cat was yowling loudly, adding to the eerie feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

“This is a bad omen,” said one of the sculptors. “I’ve heard of rain falling in the desert before, but I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

Ramose remembered when he was younger seeing a heavy shower of rain on a royal visit to the northern city of Memphis. Hapu, who had lived all his life in the south, had never seen rain before. In Egypt people were used to their water coming from the Nile, not from the sky. If the gods were throwing ice stones at them, it was indeed a bad sign.

The ice stones stopped as suddenly as they started and were replaced by rain again, even heavier than before.

“The earth will be covered with water. We’ll drown,” said Hapu who was almost in tears.

“It’ll stop soon,” said Ramose, trying to reassure his friend, but he was scared himself.

As if to contradict Ramose’s words, there was another rumbling noise. This time it didn’t come from the sky but from the ground. It didn’t fade or end in a crack, it grew. It was coming from the direction of the Gate of Heaven, the cobra goddess’s mountain home.

Ramose watched the familiar slopes of the mountain turn to liquid mud as water foamed down them. Then a wave of water appeared over the edge of the high desert on the western side of the mountain and rushed down its slopes in a foamy surge. The ground beneath their feet began to shake. The noise of the advancing water turned from a rumble to a roar as water continued to pour from the high desert down the mountain slopes. As the size of the wave grew, so did the noise.

It was like nothing Ramose had ever heard before, deafening and frightening. A wall of water crashed down the lower slopes and began to surge across the valley floor. The water was brown with mud. Stones and rocks were carried along in the flow, gouging a deep rut in the sand. Boulders the size of houses were washed down from the slopes of the mountain as if they were pebbles. The wall of water was rushing across the valley at such a speed that Ramose and the other tomb workers stood and stared at it in disbelief.

As it got closer the wave grew bigger. Ramose calculated that it must be at least ten cubits high. The cook’s cat yowled again and struggled out of her master’s arms and darted out of the tomb. Ramose suddenly realised that the terrible wave was heading straight for them.

“We have to get to higher ground,” Ramose yelled, “or we’ll be washed away.”

The tomb makers suddenly leapt to life and ran out of the tomb entrance. They didn’t have time to get across the valley to the path that led to the village. Instead they followed the cat which was clambering up the cliffs around the tomb entrance. Hapu didn’t move, he was mesmerised by the awful brown wave.

“Hapu, come on!” shouted Ramose, but the roar of the approaching water drowned his feeble voice.

Ramose grabbed his friend’s arm and pulled him along. Hapu finally tore his eyes away from the water and started scrambling up the cliff. The rain battered down on them. Rivulets of water pouring down the cliff loosened stones, making it hard for them to climb. Every time they grabbed a stone for a handhold it would slip out of its muddy hole and fall to the valley floor.

Ramose turned to look for Hapu who was struggling below him. The wall of brown water was coursing across the valley. The storehouse and the workers’ makeshift huts were smashed by the crest of the wave. The place where minutes before they had sat in the sun eating their meal disappeared beneath the surging water.

The wave would be on them in a few seconds. Ramose looked for a way up the sheer cliff face. Water was sluicing down it like a waterfall. Other men were trying to climb up the cliff, but it was too steep and slippery with rain. He saw someone slip and fall. He knew that if he didn’t think of something quickly he and his friend would face the same fate.

The familiar dirty-yellow colour of the cliff had turned brown in the rain. Ramose saw a darker brown stripe in the rock face to his left. It was a crevice, a vertical split in the cliff. Hapu’s hands were groping wildly around Ramose’s feet. Ramose reached down, grabbed his friend’s arm and yanked him up. He shouted at him, telling him to shelter in the crevice. His words were completely swallowed by the roar of the water. Hapu was blinking the rain out of his eyes, too frightened and stunned to comprehend what Ramose was trying to do.

Ramose pushed Hapu into the crevice, but didn’t have time to squeeze in himself. The wave of water hit the cliff with a crushing force. Ramose glimpsed other workers washed from the cliff as the side of his head crashed against the rock. Gritty water filled his mouth and nose. He couldn’t move. The weight of the water pushed him against the rock. I’m going to die, he thought, squashed like an insect under god’s thumb.

The wave split into two streams around the cliff face and Ramose felt himself being ripped off the cliff face by one of the streams and washed along in its furious course. The tumbling water tossed him like a reed. There was water all around him. He couldn’t tell which way the surface was. He tried to scream out in terror, but only got a mouthful of muddy water.

Ramose felt the grasping hands of drowning men grab at his arms and legs. Now he knew which way was down. I don’t want to die, he thought. He kicked out to stop them dragging him down with them. His lungs were ready to burst. He opened his eyes. He could see nothing but murky brown water. He kicked again and his head broke the surface.

He gulped in air, but still couldn’t see through the sand and silt that filled his eyes. He reached out blindly. His hand banged against stone as the stream dragged him along and his fingers struck a protruding rock. He grabbed at it with both hands and heaved himself up onto it. The rushing water pulled at him, but he clung to the rock gasping for air. He felt sharp points stick into his back and then something climbing up his back and onto his shoulder.

By the time Ramose had blinked the sand out of his eyes the rain had stopped. The water still rushed past, but it was losing its force. There was a forlorn yowling in his ear. He reached up to his shoulder. There was something clinging there, covered with wet fur. It was the cook’s cat, terrified but still alive. Ramose straddled the rock with the wet cat in his arms. A feeling of elation burst inside him, he wanted to shout out loud. He was alive, he’d cheated death. The gods had poured down their fury and he had survived.

The water was disappearing, oozing through cracks and ravines, soaking into the sand. The sky was a strange orange colour as the sun fought to break through the thinning clouds. It cast an unearthly light on the Great Place. The rocks shone. The valley was an unfamiliar place. The rushing waters had completely resculpted the valley floor with wet sand and huge boulders. The remains of the huts and the storehouse were buried under two cubits of brown mud. A deep ravine had been cut down the middle of the valley where the main force of the flood had bored along.

Ramose realised that he was naked. The flood waters had ripped his kilt from him. He could taste the metallic taste of blood in the water that dripped from his hair. Blood was seeping from cuts and grazes all over his body. He stood up shakily and looked around. Others emerged from the shelter of the rocks. Ramose clambered stiffly down the rock, dizzy with the joy of being alive. He waded through the knee-deep sludge that was now the new valley floor, still holding on to the cat.

The mud sucked at Ramose’s legs as he made his way towards the tomb entrance. He couldn’t find it. It wasn’t there any more. The cliff above it had collapsed and fallen into the mud.

The mud around him grew too deep to wade through. There was a soft moist noise like a contented belch after a good meal. The bog around him shifted slightly and a body floated to the surface. The face was bruised and battered beyond recognition, but one hand had two fingers missing. Ramose’s joy turned to horror and then to fear. He was alive, but others had died. What about Hapu? He prayed to Amun, king of the gods, that his friend was still alive.

The clouds moved away to the south and the sun appeared again. The surviving tomb makers slowly made their way to higher ground and gathered together in a dazed and bruised group. Ramose looked frantically at their faces. Hapu wasn’t among them. He clambered back down to where he had left his friend. That section of the cliff was still standing. Hapu was still wedged in the crevice where Ramose had pushed him. He gently pulled his friend out. His face was covered in deep gashes, his nose was pushed to one side, his lip was split and pouring blood. His eyelids flickered as Ramose pulled him out into the sunlight. He was still alive, but unconscious. Ramose’s face, which had just dried in the sun, was wet again. This time with tears of relief. With the cat clinging to his shoulder, Ramose carried Hapu back to where the stunned survivors were huddled together.