The Buried Pyramid (36 page)

Other stops were shorter, the highlight a single temple, cluster of tombs, or a native bazaar. Assiut, the Lykopolis of the ancient Greeks, was fascinating, as were Abydos and Denderah. Jenny began to recognize various clusters of hieroglyphs, just as Stephen had predicted, and felt almost indecently pleased with herself.

At Eddie Bryce’s suggestion, they kept to themselves their knowledge of all but the most routine aspects of archeology, and mingled with the tourists. For Stephen and Jenny this was a delight, but Jenny suspected that Sir Neville was growing impatient.

Although no jackal-masked assassins haunted their cabins, and the Sphinx seemed to have ceased correspondence entirely, their days were not without excitement. Stephen got into a fist fight with a fat English tourist—a minor lord or some such—who was determined to break off a section of relief sculpture as a souvenir.

For her part, Jenny garnered some startled and disapproving stares when she not only encouraged Stephen, but offered to help him. Eddie, who continued to blend in with the Arabs, intervened before more than a few blows were exchanged, and both sculpture and tourist escaped relatively unscathed.

When they were not touring monuments and temples, there was the Nile itself to enjoy. The coordinator of the Cook’s tour arranged entertainments similar to those on
Neptune’s Charger
, but in the interest of not attracting too much attention, Sir Neville requested that they keep their participation to a minimum. Watching for crocodiles was a favorite pastime, despite—or perhaps because—the reptiles seemed scarce on this heavily traveled stretch of the Nile.

At every halt in the steamer’s route robed and turbaned Arabs sold “anteekahs”—real and manufactured. The sight of women who had only moments before been exclaiming in squeamish horror over a lizard on the deck or a rat swimming through the water, now digging up to their elbows in cases containing fragments of bone and cloth presented by their sellers as “real mummy” brought the twist of a cynical smile to Jenny’s lips.

For Jenny’s part, she found herself remarkably free from the universal passion for relic-hunting. She didn’t resist when Uncle Neville bought her a few pretty strings of glass beads, nor did she chide Stephen for the growing collection of figurines, scarabs, and the like that cluttered his cabin. However, she felt no desire to grub in the dust and make a find herself.

Denderah’s archeological sites were nearer to the river than was usual along the Nile, where every bit of arable land was kept under cultivation. This made it a natural stop for the Cook’s tour, and the Hawthorne party mingled with them. Jenny trailed toward the rear of the group, but the late period temple of Hathor, magnificent as it was, failed to hold her attention.

The weather had grown progressively warmer as the steamer carried them south along the Nile, and while some of the women had been heard complaining that they should have remained in Cairo’s more temperate climes, Jenny—who had laced her stays as loosely as she dared—was quite content.

She wandered off through the newly planted fields, stepping over thin irrigation rills, and admiring the stark beauty of the temple without the annoying interference of tourist chatter. Distance made it easier to imagine the temple as it might have been. In her imagination Jenny replaced the broken stone that remained where Hathor’s face had been hacked from the columns with the goddess’ benign features.

A shrill, piercing cry broke into Jenny’s imaginings. For a moment, she thought it was the high-pitched voice of one of the women on the tour carrying from the echoing halls of the temple. Then she realized it had come from much closer.

One of the fellahin?
she thought.
The women do bring their babies with them into the fields.

With more urgency, she continued her search, imagining a child abandoned or forgotten. What she found seemed just as pathetic.

A litter of kittens not more than a few weeks old were nested in a grassy hollow near one of the irrigation streams. All were stiff, still, and cold, all but one who cried from the center of the huddle, its little pink mouth opening and shutting, its cries growing suddenly more intense, as if it sensed Jenny’s nearness. There was no sign of the kittens’ mother, and judging from the way their ribs were outlined beneath their fur, she must have been gone for several days.

“Oh, you poor darling,” Jenny said, scooping up the kitten.

It was a miserable scrap of an animal. Its ragged coat was a deep, golden brown, the hairs ticked at the tips with a darker brown—more like a rabbit’s coat than a cat’s. Its wide blue eyes could not have been open for more than a few days, but the kitten already viewed the world with suspicion. It didn’t even struggle when Jenny picked it up, just drooped limp and resigned.

“You,” Jenny said, stroking the kitten’s fur, “need something to eat. Can you handle goat’s milk, I wonder? You’d better, since I don’t think the steamer has a resident mother cat.”

She hadn’t noticed Stephen and Uncle Neville crossing the field, the curiosity writ large on their features making them look oddly alike.

“What did you find, Jenny?” Uncle Neville asked.

“A kitten,” she said. “The rest of its litter is here, dead. It’s nearly starved, poor darling.”

Stephen looked at it critically.

“You’re not taking a kitten with us,” he said.

“And why not?” Jenny replied stubbornly.

“They won’t want a kitten on the boat,” Stephen said reasonably. “Give it to one of the merchants. They’ll be glad for a cat. Or maybe the temple custodians would want it.”

“Lady Smitherington has her obnoxious pomeranian with her,” Jenny replied stubbornly. “No one will complain about my having a kitten. I want to keep it.”

Eddie Bryce came up to join them, having apparently grasped the situation by osmosis.

“It is cute,” he admitted, using one finger tip to pat the tiny head, “but we’re due to leave the Nile in a few days. We’ll be hard pressed to keep ourselves alive then. You’d be dooming the little thing.”

“It isn’t at all strong,” Uncle Neville added. “I don’t mind if you bring it with you now, but we’ll find a home for it in Luxor. Otherwise you’d save its life for nothing.”

Jenny felt unreasonably stubborn, and Stephen must have seen this, for he wheedled most unfairly, “The ancient Egyptians considered the cat a sacred animal. You said you were worried about the sacrilegious aspects of our expedition. If you leave the kitten behind in Luxor, you will have gained the merit of saving a life, but if you selfishly take the kitten with you and it dies, you will have slain a holy animal.”

Although she was fully aware that leaving the kitten behind was the most reasonable option, nevertheless, Jenny turned a deaf ear to the men’s words. She carried the kitten back to the
Lotus Blossom
, cleaned it up, and even went as far as to give it a restorative from her medical kit. With stubborn disregard for gender—for the kitten was female—she planned to name it Moses.

“I found it among the bulrushes,” she said, “and the name means ‘saved from the water,’ which is certainly appropriate enough.”

Stephen looked up from his book. “Why not Mozelle?” he asked. “That’s a feminine form of the same name.”

Jenny liked his suggestion, and so the kitten became Mozelle.

13

The Sphinx Again

Karnak and Kurneh, both of which had yielded so many monumental finds in the early and middle years of the century, were their last major stops before Luxor. The natives here were accustomed to tourists, and the local authorities expected “gifts.” Fortunately, the
Lotus Blossom
’s captain had standard arrangements in place, and made a great ceremony of handing out mirrors, fountain pens, and bags of good tobacco.

This ceremony occurred on the Hawthorne party’s last day aboard the vessel. Eddie had booked them passage only this far, and Neville had explained to any who inquired that he had business in the area, but hoped to rejoin the vessel when she returned from Aswan.

The city of Luxor was rich with history, even discounting the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Named Waset by the Egyptians, rather confusingly, the city had been called Thebes by the Greeks. The Greeks’ other name for the city, Diospolis Magna—the Great City of the Gods—made more sense, for Luxor was amply supplied with temples and shrines, as well as numerous structures dating to important periods in the New Kingdom and before.

The Arabs, arriving with very little sense of the previous inhabitants, had called the city Al Uqsur, the Castles, doubtless in reference to the ruins that remained—though some argued that what had impressed the Arabs had been the towering cliffs that framed the relatively flat area.

Neville noted with some amusement that Europeans tended to refer to the city as Thebes, as if they were visiting it in an incarnation of its older glory, while residents and Egyptian “old hands” referred to it as Luxor. It made for a certain amount of amiable confusion, a confusion not lessened by its proximity to Karnak, which tended to get conflated by the less knowledgeable into the much-renamed whole.

Reis Awad, captain of the dahabeeyah on which Eddie had made arrangements for them to travel onward, was not there to meet them, but a representative of his family brought word that the
Mallard
was expected any day now. She had gone upstream with a small group of hunters who hoped to find crocodiles.

Neville was inclined to be annoyed at this, and Eddie reproached him.

“It was the best thing Awad could have done,” he said. “A dahabeeyah sitting idle at this busy season would have attracted attention. Gossip is the very life of any port city, and I told Awad in my letter—without explaining precisely why—that we were very eager not to make ourselves conspicuous.”

Not knowing precisely when the
Mallard
would return, Stephen and Jenny urged Neville to help them plan an itinerary that would let them see as many of the sights as possible. Neville fell in with this, not wanting Eddie to be distracted from the last-minute preparations that he had not been able to attend to before they reached Luxor. Therefore, he was rather surprised when Eddie heard their intentions and nearly took their heads off.

“Don’t you people realize that this is the most dangerous portion of our trip since we left Cairo?”

Stephen blink owlishly, but found the courage to reply. “I admit, I
do
fail to understand. We have had no difficulties—not even a letter from the Sphinx—since we boarded the
Lotus Blossom
. Shall we not assume that we have shaken our adversaries from our trail?”

“Use your heads for something other than filling out your hats,” Eddie said. “Yes, we seem to have shaken them, but if those people have agents anywhere other than in Cairo, it’s going to be here. We’re not terribly far from where Chad Spice’s journal indicates he emerged from the desert. Right?”

Three heads nodded as one.

“It ought not take a genius to realize that any archeologists who show up here are going to be watched. They’ll be watched by the locals, and they’ll be watched by other archeologists—some of whom have been known to exchange shots when they’re worried that someone is going to try and poach their site. Now, look at that plan you have laid out—not a single trip to the bazaar, or to watch the dervishes dance, or anything else that isn’t strictly archeological.”

Three heads bent and inspected the schedule.

“You’re right, Eddie,” Stephen said, shamefaced, for he had suggested most of the points of interest. “We’ve been idiots of the worst order.”

“I did so want to see some of the more famous sites,” Jenny sighed. Mozelle curled asleep in her lap, the question of her eventual fate rather pointedly undiscussed. “I don’t suppose there is some way we can see more of Thebes than this hotel, is there?”

Eddie softened. “Oh, I think there might be. We just won’t go poking around the digs, and Stephen will have to keep his enthusiasm—and his fists—to himself. You folks will dress up properly English, and we’ll tour the sights. Jenny should look a little bored, and whine about wanting ices, and Stephen should talk about how he wants to go shooting. Neville should do a bit of business with the local merchants, enough so that anyone who heard why you left the
Lotus Blossom
won’t wonder.”