The Grave Robbers of Genghis Khan (16 page)

“Thank you, young sir, thank you.” Mr. Bilharzia put the mint into his mouth and sucked it with considerable relief, like it was the choicest ambrosia. “But what more can I tell you, sir?”

“Is the story true, do you think?” asked Nimrod. “As described in Sidi Mubarak Bombay’s book?”

“Oh, yes sir. Very substantially true, I am thinking. It was very remiss of my ancestor to tell Sidi Mubarak Bombay these things. But he was a most persuasive fellow.”

“I’m still not sure how any of this helps us to find the tomb,” said Axel.

“The tomb of Genghis Khan?” Mr. Bilharzia shook his head. “It is lost forever. Only the Darkhats know where it is.”

Nimrod was wandering among the leather-bound ledgers in the adjoining cellar.

“What are these? Scrapbooks?”

“No, great djinn. They are my sales-and-purchase ledgers, invoices, profit-and-loss accounts, audit reports, camel-breeding records.”

“Going back how far?”

“All the way back, sir. To Ali Bilharzia and beyond.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you have records going back almost eight hundred years?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you could actually trace the descendants of Dunbelchin?”

“Oh, yes sir.”

He opened one of the older ledgers and turned the vellum pages.

“This is the purchase ledger for the year 1227. And here is a record of Dunbelchin’s purchase from Kamran Hotak Mahomet. This record is cross-referenced with …”

He opened another ledger.

“Here. Yes. You see? Bull camels and mare camels, their calves and their calves, when they were born, when they died. Everything. Dunbelchin had another calf after the one that was buried alive in the tomb of Genghis Khan. A male calf called Bigbelchin.”

He turned some more pages of the breeding-record book.

“Bigbelchin had three calves himself. Two died. But Loudbelchin survived and sired three calves: Stinkibelchin, Burpbelchin, and Silentbelchin.”

“Would it be possible to trace Dunbelchin’s line to the present day?” asked Nimrod.

“Oh, yes sir. But it would take several hours.”

“Please do it,” said Nimrod. “Yes, please do it now.”

T
he fierce men of Şābh al-Mjnwn drove northeast from Yemen across the great desert of Ar-Rub’ al Khali into the United Arab Emirates and Oman, where they boarded a ferry that carried them across the Strait of Hormuz, into Iran.

From time to time, one of the three gang members listened through the backseat armrest of the Toyota to check that Groanin was all right and hearing the sound of loud snoring they concluded, rightly, that he was still alive and coping well with the discomfort of traveling in the trunk of the car.

Driving all through the day, the Crazy Gang reached the Afghan border, about four hundred miles from the coast of Iran, just before dusk.

For much of the journey the leader of Şābh al-Mjnwn, Sheikh Raat el Enrool, busied himself on his laptop trying to write the speech that he intended to make on Groanin’s ransom video.

This was difficult, however, not because the poor condition of the road made it hard to type on the laptop’s Arabic keyboard, but because the noise of Groanin’s snoring grew louder and louder until it filled the interior of the car like the growl of an extremely large tiger. But it was the whistle that topped and tailed the sound of the butler’s snoring that annoyed the sheikh most of all because, according to the sheikh’s strict way of thinking, whistling was a kind of music and therefore immoral and forbidden.

“How are we going to stop this English dog from whistling?” he asked the driver.

“We could wake him up, perhaps,” suggested the driver, whose name was Assylam. “Only he might escape. Or we might have to endure his unbelieving conversation that would surely be worse.”

“Nothing could be worse than this infuriating sound,” said the sheikh angrily. “The snoring is bad enough. It sounds like the rumble of thunder. Or an earthquake. But the Englishman’s whistle is infinitely worse. It is making a nervous wreck out of me. I keep thinking that it is an artillery shell flying through the air toward us.”

“In which case perhaps it is not music at all and therefore not forbidden,” said a third member of the Crazy Gang, who was in the backseat of the car. His name was Ben Yussef.

“That might be true,” said the sheikh, “if the whistle was always the same. But from time to time the pitch of his whistle doesn’t descend like an artillery shell at all and
actually holds a perfect C. If a note of music could ever be described as perfect. But you know what I mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a dilemma,” said Assylam.

At this point, Groanin stopped whistling in and out of his snore for almost an hour.

“That’s a relief,” said the sheikh, and returned to his typing.

But when Groanin’s whistle started again, it seemed that his whistling had acquired a much more musical character. Assylam tried to think of the tune he had heard that the Englishman’s whistling snore was trying to pipe into his mind, and finally it came to him. With horror, he realized that the whistle sounded exactly like two notes from the whistling in the Monty Python tune “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” He debated whether or not to inform the sheikh of this; finally, when the temptation to actually finish the rest of the tune grew almost too great for him, he decided that the right thing to do was to tell the sheikh even though he knew that this would make him very angry indeed.

As soon as Assylam had imparted this information, the sheikh realized he was quite right about the tune, and was properly horrified.

“Now we’ll have to wake him up,” said the sheikh. “We can’t drive all the way to Kabul with this maddening tune in our heads.”

“Agreed.”

“The question is how to wake him up without opening the trunk and risking his escape.”

“Tell you what, sir,” said Assylam, “I’ll aim the car at a few of these potholes and maybe their impact will wake him up.”

“Good idea,” agreed the sheikh. “And honk the horn while you’re at it, for good measure.”

“Wait,” said Ben Yussef. “Isn’t honking the horn making a kind of music, too?”

“Good point,” said the sheikh. “Is it?”

Everyone thought for a moment.

“I think the horn would only sound musical if it was done in a rhythmical way,” said Assylam. “Like the evil noise that is made at a football match when people clap together and then shout
Eng-land
or
Eee-gypt.
If I avoid any hint of rhythm when honking the horn, then no one is offended.”

The sheikh nodded. “Agreed.”

Assylam honked the horn loudly, and hit several potholes in succession, which made the car shudder like an aircraft enduring air pockets of turbulence. But none of this was enough to rouse the sleeping butler and, if anything, the noise emanating from Groanin’s nose and throat actually seemed to get worse.

“It’s not working,” said the sheikh.

“No,” agreed Assylam, “and if the car hits another pothole, I’ll break the axle.” He winced as, accidentally, the car hit another enormous pothole that almost loosened the fillings in his teeth. “This is a new car. And I don’t want it damaged.”

“How is it possible that any man can sleep so soundly?” said an exasperated Ben Yussef.

“Only a fool could sleep so much when he has been kidnapped to be held for ransom,” said the sheikh. “It’s wrong to have no fear, I think. And immoral to sleep so much.”

“Most certainly,” agreed Ben Yussef.

“You’d better stop in Kandahar,” said the sheikh. “We’ll get out and beat him there. It may not stop him from snoring again, but it will certainly make us feel better. And it will teach him to have better manners.”

“Good idea,” said Ben Yussef.

When they reached the southwest of Kandahar, Assylam slowed the Toyota and drew up next to a brightly lit, modern-looking house with a camel-shaped swimming pool.

“Wow, look at that pool,” he said. “I have always wanted a camel-shaped swimming pool.”

“It is immoral to swim if one does it for pleasure. And especially immoral if one does it without clothes.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. Don’t even look at it.”

The sheikh and the others got out of the car and stood next to the trunk, ready to throw it open and give the Englishman a beating. Now that the car had stopped, Groanin’s snoring sounded very much like a large polar bear and it was hard for the three Crazy Gang members to believe that there was only a human being inside the trunk.

But of course there wasn’t only a human being in the trunk of the Toyota.

“I will punch him in the face,” said the sheikh. “You, Assylam, will punch him in the stomach, and Ben Yussef
will strike his thighs. We will teach him to sleep when he should be praying for his life.”

The other two nodded. Then the sheikh nodded at Assylam who unlocked the trunk and then pressed the catch to release the lid.

Groanin opened his eyes. “Are we there yet?” he asked, and sat up. “I said, are we there yet, Mustapha?”

The three Crazy Gang members regarded Groanin with even more horror and distaste than might have been expected for, attached to the Englishman’s chest and ample stomach like an enormous pink breastplate was the largest camel spider any of them had ever seen. All three screamed at once and ran in opposite directions as if Groanin had been carrying a deadly plague.

“What the heck’s wrong with them, I wonder?” mused the butler. He yawned loudly and sleepily. Oblivious to the hideous creature that was clinging to his front, he stretched his arms and got out of the trunk. “Not that I’m sad to see the back of them, mind. I said, not that I’m sad to see the back of them. Treating a person like that. Making me ride in the trunk like I was so much baggage. I’ve a good mind to report them to the police. In fact, I think I will. Let’s see now. I wonder if I have paper and pencil to make a note of this car number.”

Groanin glanced down to find his trouser pocket and, in the red rear lights of the car, dimly saw something shift on his torso as the camel spider, sensing that the butler was no longer immobile, tightened its ten-legged grip on his portly person.

“What the dickens is that?”

At first, Groanin thought that the members of the Crazy Gang must have attached a bomb to him — not least because the bony pink legs of the camel spider resembled several sticks of gelignite, and the creature’s thin and spindly antennae made him think of electrical wires. Naturally, he was very scared at the idea of exploding.

“And to think I used to complain about being in old Nimrod’s service. What kind of lunatic, psycho, nutcase, weirdo-fanatic attaches an Englishman to a bomb?”

He took several nervous breaths and tried to contain his panic.

“No, wait a minute, lad. Wait a minute. If they’ve run away and the thing still hasn’t gone off, then probably it’s not going to go off. Aye, that’s right. So, think, lad. Think. Think of Her Majesty the Queen, lad. What would she do in a similar situation? Yes, of course. She’d keep her cool. That’s what she’d do. She’d stay calm. The way she always does in situations of adversity. Like when she has to shake hands with some spotty little Herbert with dirty hands. Or when she is obliged to eat the filthy food at a dinner in some nasty little pimple of a foreign country. Or when she has to knight some creep of a pop star. Or when she does her Christmas radio and television broadcast to the nation. That’s it, lad. Keep calm, like Her Majesty does. What would she do? Yes. Yes, that’s it. I can detach the wires and defuse the thing before the nutters who did this to me come back. Only I need a bit more light here.”

Seeing that the headlights of the car remained on,
Groanin walked around to the front and then surveyed the problem before him. Then he gave one of the spider’s legs an exploratory tug.

“What the dickens?”

At which point, the spider felt obliged to warn the creature pulling its leg not to mess with it, and clacked together its chelicerae — the substantial and venomous mouthparts or mandibles for which the camel spider is renowned.

Still dazed with sleep, it was another second or two before Groanin realized the true nature of the peril in front of him.

“Flipping heck,” gasped Groanin. “It’s a … it’s a … it’s a …”

Not a bomb at all. But something alive and rather horribly animated. Something creepy and very crawly. Something very large and quite repulsively disgusting.

And strange to say, something much more horrible and terrifying than an explosive vest.

M
r. Bilharzia moved the big leather ledger toward Nimrod, John, and Axel.

“All of these books are bound with the finest camel skin.” He smoothed the cover of the ledger with his hand and nodded at John. “Feel.”

John rubbed his hand along the smooth surface and nodded his appreciation back as Mr. Bilharzia opened the ledger.

“So, here we are.” He pointed to an entry on the old vellum page. “You see? Dated winter 1859. We have the last of the direct descendants of Dunbelchin: Morebelchin, Sourbelchin, Rudebelchin, and Vilebelchin, owned by the Bilharzia family. After that, the line, if you can call it that, disappears from our family’s breeding records. Which means these camels must have been sold.”

“And would you have kept a record of the purchaser?” asked Nimrod.

Mr. Bilharzia looked surprised even to have been asked such a question. “Of course. This is a respectable business. With everything aboveboard. But we shall have to look in the purchase ledger for the winter of 1859 to find the buyer’s name.”

They waited while Mr. Bilharzia fetched another ledger from the shelves and when he had blown the dust from the cover, he opened it and started to turn the pages.

“Yes. Here we are. Winter 1859. Morebelchin, Sourbelchin, Rudebelchin, and Vilebelchin were sold to … well now, this
is
most unusual.”

“What is?” asked Nimrod.

“These four camels were sold not to an Afghan, or an Indian, or even the British Army.” Mr. Bilharzia pulled a face. “These were four of two dozen camels sold to an Australian gentleman. A Mr. George Landells of the Victorian Exploration Expedition, Melbourne, Australia. The camels were delivered by my ancestor to Karachi, in what was then India, for loading onto the cargo ship, SS
Chinsurah
.”

“What would an Australian want with two dozen camels?” said Axel.

“You’d think they had enough weird animals of their own,” said John. “What with kangaroos and the duck-billed platypus.”

“What do you mean, weird?” Mr. Bilharzia looked and sounded as if he had been insulted. “There is nothing weird about camels. Nothing at all.”

He closed the ledger, with a loud bang that made John jump.

“The camel is the most beautiful animal ever made,” insisted Mr. Bilharzia. “Not just beautiful but remarkable, do you hear? Tell me, American. Can you drink forty gallons of water at once? Does your skin reflect sunlight and insulate you from heat? Can your nostrils trap and recycle the water in your body when you breathe out? Can you carry a rider for one hundred and twenty miles in a single day? Can you see where you are going in a sandstorm? Don’t talk to me about weird, sonny. There are one hundred and sixty different words for camel in the Arabic language. But only one word for a fool of an American who thinks that camels are weird and that word is —”

“Mr. Bilharzia, my nephew meant no offense,” Nimrod said smoothly. “And in truth he has more acquaintance with camels than ever you might suppose. The boy has ridden camels. Raced camels. You might even say he knows camels inside out. He spoke as many young Americans speak, which is sometimes as he thinks. You don’t really think camels are weird, do you, John?”

“Not in a bad way,” said John. “Only in a good way. And if I said
weird
, I really meant that they’re remarkable. I just thought that with the remarkable animals that Australians already have, that it was strange they should want any more. I mean, you don’t think of camels when you think of the Sydney Opera House, do you?”

“As a matter of fact,” said Nimrod, “you don’t think of opera, either. But that’s another story. The fact is, John, that
deserts occupy almost a fifth of the Australian continent. About half a million square miles. And there are ten of them. Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. Even drier than Antarctica. And that makes it perfect country for camels.”

John shrugged. “I guess it does.” He smiled at Mr. Bilharzia. “Sorry, Mr. Bilharzia. No offense intended.”

“Apology accepted,” said Mr. Bilharzia.

“Here,” said John. “Have another mint.”

“Thank you.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Nimrod, “there are more than a million wild camels living in Australia. And many of them will be descended from the twenty-four bought by this Mr. George Landells of Melbourne, Australia.”

“A million?” Mr. Bilharzia was astonished. “Wild, you say?”

Nimrod nodded.

“Perhaps I should set up my business in Australia,” said Mr. Bilharzia.

“Indeed, they are considered to be agricultural pests,” said Nimrod. “A bit like rabbits. And in some parts of the country they have even tried to eradicate them.”

“Eradicate?” Mr. Bilharzia looked aghast. “You mean —”

“Yes,” said Nimrod. “They shoot them.”

Mr. Bilharzia opened his mouth and his eyes with horror and pressed his hands hard against the sides of his skull as if he thought it might explode.

For a moment John was convinced that Mr. Bilharzia, who was clearly very fond of camels, had screamed. And it
was a moment or two before he realized that the scream had come and was still coming from outside.

It was a man’s scream and to Nimrod’s keen ears there was something about it that sounded almost familiar.

“Curious,” he said.

Upstairs in Mr. Bilharzia’s house, Philippa heard the scream, too, and went to look out of the window.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Mrs. Bilharzia. “We get all sorts in this neighborhood. It might be terrorists. It might be soldiers on R & R. Or an animal in pain. A dog. We get a lot of strays in this part of Kandahar and people are sometimes very cruel to them.”

The scream continued like something infinite in the air.

“You know what? It’s probably someone making a protest about the electricity cuts. ’Round here the power is always going off and people are really fed up with it.”

“The lights seem to be working,” said Philippa.

“We have a generator,” explained Mrs. Bilharzia proudly.

Philippa moved the curtain aside and stared down into the street. It was almost dark outside, although the ash from the eruption of Mount Taftan, in Iran, had left the sky bloodred. An empty car was parked with its headlights on beside the glowing blue camel-shaped swimming pool at the back of Mr. Bilharzia’s house. In the headlights she could see a bald, middle-aged, rather stout-looking man just standing in front of the car and, it seemed to her, screaming for no good reason. His hands were pressed to each side of his face and his eyes were wide open with fear and loathing.

The professor joined her at the window. But it was hard
for him to see anything through his mask and the eye grille in his
chadri.

“What is it?” he said.

“It doesn’t look like someone protesting against anything,” said Philippa. “And it certainly doesn’t sound like someone protesting.”

Was he the driver, perhaps, and had just received some rather bad news? Or the victim of some crime — an attempted robbery, or even a hit-and-run? Or had he escaped from a lunatic asylum and was shrieking because he was suffering from some sort of mental disorder? Or perhaps was he shrieking at the top of his voice just for the fun of it? She couldn’t imagine why anyone, let alone a grown man, would scream like that, and for so long, too. It seemed quite unmanly to her. And yet there was something about the man and indeed his screaming that was strangely familiar.

Something about the pin-striped trousers, and the vest, and the white shirt and the black tie and the pink bald head she seemed to recognize.

“It can’t be,” she said.

She removed her glasses, cleaned them on the back of Professor Sturloson’s electric-blue
chadri
, and, putting them back on her nose, opened the window and leaned out to get a better look.

“It is,” she said, and hurried toward the door.

Outside, she sprinted around to the back of the house, narrowly avoided falling into the camel-shaped swimming pool, and almost collided with the still-shrieking Groanin and the horrible thing that was attached to his torso. Indeed,
so close did she come to colliding with her old friend and the Solifuga clinging to his belly that it hissed loudly at her with its stridulatory organ and then snipped its rattling and hideous mouthparts defensively in the air.

Philippa, who hated creepy crawlies of any size, let alone one as big as a dinner plate, screamed loudly. Hers was a loud, high-pitched, piercing scream, whereas Mr. Groanin’s scream was now running out of energy and air; Philippa’s loud and piercing scream was also over relatively soon, although to be fair to Groanin, it might have been a very different story if the camel spider had been attached to her.

Wringing her hands nervously, she took several steps back from the butler and, momentarily containing her horror and disgust, tried to stay looking at him long enough to figure out what to do.

“What is it?” she said.

Groanin, who was almost out of air because he had been screaming for so long now, just shook his head.

“Is it poisonous?”

Groanin shook his head and then whispered, “I don’t know, miss. I don’t even know what
it
is.”

“It’s a camel spider,” said Axel, who was next on the scene. “A smaller one than that put me in hospital for six weeks.”

“Thank you,” whimpered Groanin, “for sharing that with me, whoever you are.”

Next on the scene was John who stared openmouthed at the horrid thing stuck to his old friend and said, “That is an awesome-looking horror, Mr. Groanin.” He shook his head. “
Alien
One, Two, Three, and Four. Hey, let’s hope
it hasn’t laid an egg inside you, or you’ll be eating breakfast on your own for a while.”

“Please,” whimpered Groanin. “Someone. Help me.”

Nimrod appeared and next to him was the person wearing the
chadri
, whom everyone in Mr. Bilharzia’s house assumed was Nimrod’s wife, but was in fact Professor Sturloson.

“Oh, I say, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “That is a magnificent specimen. You know, I think that’s the largest female Solifuga or Pseudoscorpionida I think I’ve ever seen. Just look at the size of the creature’s prosoma, to say nothing of those enormous biting parts — the
chelicerae
.”

He leaned toward his butler to take a closer look. And so did Professor Sturloson.

“This one appears to have chewed through your vest and your shirt,” said Nimrod. “But lucky for you, it hasn’t yet tried to chew through your not insubstantial stomach.”

Groanin whimpered again and shut his eyes.

“I was hoping to see one of these,” said the professor. “I’ve heard so many stories about these little creatures.”

“Little?” John guffawed. “It’s huge.”

“How clever of you to find it, Groanin,” said Nimrod. “Normally, they’re very shy and shun the light. That’s what the name
Solifuga
means. It’s Latin for ‘the thing that flees from the sun.’ ”

“I didn’t find it,” whispered Groanin. “It found me. If I’d found it before it found me, I’d have dropped a rock on it. Or stamped on it. Or hit it with a hammer.”

“Nonsense,” said Nimrod. “Is it?”

“Marvelous bugger, isn’t he? When I was a boy we used to call them jerrymuglums. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know. But I used to have a South African friend as a boy who called them haarskeerders. And he was terrified of them. Used to claim they could cut your hair in your sleep and line their nests with it.”

“Get it off,” whispered Groanin.

“All in good time,” said Nimrod. “All in good time. They’re not venomous as such. But the bite is supposed to be extraordinarily painful and can easily get infected.” “I can testify to that,” agreed Axel.

“Unfortunately, they don’t much like being handled at the best of times,” said Nimrod. “Even by someone like me.” He took hold of the creature’s abdomen and tugged gently. “Who knows what it’s doing.”

“If you don’t get that thing off me soon,” squeaked Groanin. “I’m going to die of heart failure. Do you hear? Either that, or I shall simply suffocate from lack of oxygen.”

Nimrod bent closer and blew gently on the camel spider’s back.

“Be careful,” squealed Philippa.

“Why don’t you just zap it with djinn power?” asked John. “Blast it into the next world.”

“Because, my young zap-headed friend, I might also zap Groanin in the stomach, which would be a great pity. No, this has to be handled with care and precision.” He blew on the spider again.

“Try not to breathe for a moment,” said Nimrod. “I think
it’s attracted to the sound of your lungs. Not having any lungs of its own.”

“Really?” said the professor. “How does it breathe?”

“With great difficulty, I hope,” said Philippa, who was feeling thoroughly revolted by the spider.

“Through some slits on its trachea,” said Nimrod. “Here we go. Nice and easy does it.”

“I think it’s shifting now, Groanin,” observed John. “Get ready to be very happy.”

Now there are lots of urban myths about camel spiders, but the one story about them that is actually true is that they can run incredibly fast; so that one moment Nimrod was lifting the spider clear of Groanin’s bare belly, the next he was laying it down on the ground, and the moment after that it was running at ten or fifteen miles an hour but in no particular direction, and thus scattering a screaming Groanin, a yelling Axel, a howling John, and a shrieking Philippa, north, south, east, and west. Much to the amusement of Nimrod and the professor.

Gradually, everyone came back and Groanin got to explain what had happened to him after the others had left him at the hotel in Sorrento.

“I shall never ever leave your service again, sir,” the butler told Nimrod finally. “It has been the worst experience of my life. Nothing that happens to us now could ever be worse than what I’ve been through these last few days.”

Hearing this, Philippa exchanged a look with John. “Let’s hope you’re right,” she said.

“Of course he’s right,” insisted Nimrod.

“What now?” asked the professor.

“Back to the carpet, I think,” said Nimrod. “And then on with our journey.”