The Illusion of Murder (12 page)

Male servants enter carrying silver platters laden with vegetables grown on the Nile Delta—carrots, onions, tomatoes, radishes, and turnips—wooded bowls filled with couscous, and crystal bowls overflowing with shredded coconut, honey, dates, figs, olives, grapes, and pomegranates.

It’s all so lavish, but also wasteful because it’s impossible for us to eat all this food. I’m sure that in Port Said there are families that would survive a month on just a few platters of the food served here.

Two men carry in a platter that holds a lamb and place it in front of the sheikh who plucks the eyes out of the lamb and pops them in his mouth.

I force myself to keep a poker face. He
really
looks like he’s enjoying them. But as my grandmother always said, “To each his own, said the old lady when she kissed the cow.” I’m just glad I’m not eating the eyes.

He proceeds to cut off a leg and then takes a stuffing of dates and figs from inside the belly with his right hand. When he’s done the lamb is passed to another table where a man cuts out the tongue.

I’m quickly losing my appetite, but my real focus is not on food as I keep a surreptitious eye on the men at our host’s table.

No coincidence,
is my reaction. I can’t tell what they are talking about, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is about me, the key, and John Cleveland. And maybe the snake man is telling them he could put a cobra in my bed.

“Have you eaten something that disagrees with you?” Lady Warton asks. “You have the oddest look on your face.”

“No, I’m fine. I was just thinking about what a small world it is.”

She raises her eyebrows. “In what way?”

“Oh, all these people from so many places. Look—even the snake magician from the marketplace is here.” Unable to resist the temptation, I add, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Cleveland paid us a visit.”

She gives me a crocodile smile. “Let’s hope he does so you will be able to dismiss those silly notions about him being dead.”

Touché! Wonderland’s queen has chopped off my head again.

Dishes are cleared away and once again the gong booms. Dozens of men wearing the traditional long loose garments of cotton or rough wool, with full sleeves and hood, appear outside the tent.

The men lie down on the sand, arranging themselves in a row like sardines, side to side, each one pressed so close to the next there is not the slightest space between their bodies, as if they’re forming a floor. A man casually walks down the line of bodies.

Lord Warton and Von Reich join us after the sheikh leaves his table where Mr. Selous and the magician remain huddled together in what appears to be a deep conversation.

“Why is that man walking over them?” I ask Von Reich.

“To make sure that this human plank will hold.”

“Hold what?”

“They’re preparing for a ceremony called
Doseh
, which means treading.

“Treading?” I ask.

“Yes, but it’s best not to tell you what’s going to happen. After it’s over, if you like, I’ll explain why it’s done.”

Trumpets blare and the sheikh appears astride a white Arabian stallion led by two grooms. Its thick mane flows down his side, his tail high in the air.

The sheikh makes a clicking noise with his tongue and the grooms let go of the stallion.

The horse advances with long, exaggerated steps, stepping up onto the human plank.

The big Arabian stallion with the sheikh aboard must weigh close to fourteen hundred pounds.

And it’s walking on the men!

13

“The treading,” Von Reich tells us, enjoying his role as scholar, “is a ritual done in memory of a miracle performed by a Muslim saint. The saint rode his horse into Cairo over earthenware jars without breaking them. It’s believed that the sheikh who reenacts this ceremony cannot hurt the prostrate men, just as the saint didn’t break the jars. If any of the men die, it’s due to their sins.”

Another couple had joined us to hear the man from Vienna’s explanation.

“That’s horrible.” I see it as an act of arrogant oppression by the mighty against the helpless. I had gaped at the brutal spectacle, unable to move an inch, as the horse’s powerful hooves had come down like sledgehammers, on one man and then the next. “Why doesn’t the sheikh just use jars as the saint did?”

“And take the chance of cutting the hoofs of his prize stallion? His horses are much more valuable,” Lord Warton says.

Everyone—except me—gets a good chuckle over the sheikh prizing his horses over his subjects, egging the peer on. “The noblest of men and desert nomads love, admire, and cherish their horses—”

“Sometimes more than their wives,” Lady Warton interjects.

“I’m speaking of Arab men, my dear.” Lord Warton grins at the other men. “Wouldn’t you agree that if one has several wives, as many of these Arabs do,” he pronounces it A-rabs, “sometimes they’ll find sweeter dispositions in the stables than in the main house?”

The men enjoy another chuckle.

“There’s a line from Sir Walter Scott’s
The Talisman
,” Lord Warton says, “which describes the impression of the Crusader knights of King Richard the Lion-Hearted when they first encounter the magnificent Arabian horses in the Holy Land: ‘They spurned the sand from behind them; they seemed to devour the desert before them; miles flew away with minutes—and yet their strength seemed unabated…’”

“The prophet Muhammad said every man shall love his horse,” Von Reich adds. “Bedouins will go without food before they would let their horses starve.”

“But what about the men who have to endure the sheikh’s horse?” I ask in vain, knowing these people have no compassion for the underdog.

“The peasants consider it a privilege to be treaded upon,” Lord Warton says.

“Really? I wonder how any of us would feel if we had to lay on the ground back home and let royalty walk their horses across our backs.”

Von Reich gives me a small grin, but I get stony silence from the others. When they start comparing Arabian horses to quarter horses, I wander off, heading for the back of the tent in the direction I had seen Mr. Selous and the magician exit.

Strange bedfellows, the magician who was performing where a man was killed and the Brit who talked to the dead man. The two are huddled together, walking slowly, talking too low for me to hear. Very discourteous of them, not speaking loud enough for me to eavesdrop.

The two disappear into the ruins and rather than running to find them and making a perfect fool of myself by getting caught, I veer off to see the ruins by light of flaming torches that have been set up to permit guests to enjoy the antiquities.

It’s a bit eerie seeing the ancient monuments under the ghostly glow of the full moon and the flickering torchlight, but a few other people are wandering about, too.

I come around a pillar and find myself abruptly face to the face with the magician. He is not blocking my way, but not moving, either; just standing still, staring at me with the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen. I give a quick look about, but his British companion is not in sight.

Forcing a smile and a “Good evening,” I start to go around him when I spot a scarab hanging from a gold chain around his neck. Not a brother to the one slipped into my pocket, the magician’s amulet is a blood ruby, almost heart shaped and encrusted with precious stones.

Worth a fortune,
I think, as I raise my eyes to meet his. Not at all what one would expect a marketplace magician to be wearing. Neither were his clothes, which were not the simple cotton he’d worn yesterday, but were black silk trimmed with pearls.

“Do you know the magic of the Heart Scarab?” he asks in heavily accented English.

“No, but I would certainly like to hear it.”

“A bearer of the Heart Scarab is assured of rebirth after death.”

“I see … and how does it do that?”

“When people die, the gods weigh their hearts. Hearts that are full of sin are heavy and are eaten by the destroyer of hearts. But if the dead person’s heart is replaced with a scarab before it is weighed, the sins are not discovered and the person is reborn.”

“Is that how Mr. Cleveland managed to get from the marketplace to the beach where he spoke to Mr. Selous? And stare at me through a porthole? His heart was replaced with a scarab?”

He gives me a glare that would cow a two-ton Tanis sphinx.

“You are on sacred ground where gods still walk. Their wrath falls upon those who mock them.”

His staff comes out from where it’s concealed beneath his robe and I flinch back but the rod taps the ground with a solid sound as he sweeps by me, leaving me cold at the bone despite the hot night.

I shake off the willies and keep an eye out behind me for snakes as I head deeper into the site. What a creepy character. Put him on the front porch and I wouldn’t have to worry about trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

That he wasn’t surprised when I mentioned a dead man talking to Frederick Selous didn’t astonish me; he probably got an earful of that subject at the sheikh’s dinner table. But he could have at least raised a curious eyebrow about a porthole Peeping Tom.

More regrets about having come on the excursion start stacking up in my head and I shake those out, too, determined not to let an Egyptian bogeyman keep me from my chance to soak in some more of the land of pharaohs. I’m happy to visit the ruins without Von Reich’s pedantic chatter and Lady Warton’s caustic view of everything, including me.

Night is falling, the sky taking an ashen glow as an early full moon rises behind a thin blanket of dark clouds. Torches have been placed in a number of places to light significant monuments for guests who wander out for a look, but I see only a man and woman, and I take a path different from theirs to have some solitude.

Tanis is a ghost city, its greatest monuments shattered, the dusty souls of its ancient dead scattered by the desert wind, but the faint moonlight takes just enough edge off of the darkness for a little imagination to bring its past glories alive. It’s not hard for me to imagine a pharaoh on a golden chariot, his soldiers using their spears to push back crowds staring with awe at the living god.

My feet take me far enough from the tent for the music and party sounds to fade, taking me past the Great Temple of Amun and beyond to where a short fence has been put up at an excavation site near the Temple of Horus.

A large cavity has been opened and fenced with stalks of river reeds, but the desert sand that coats everything makes it appear that the whole project had been abandoned years ago. The opening reveals a crudely excavated stone stairway, steep and broken with missing steps patched by wood supports. The broken stairwell disappears into a pool of darkness that the moonlight doesn’t penetrate.

The crudeness of the opening makes me wonder if it wasn’t done by thieves rather than professional archaeologists, and what priceless treasures the tomb held before tomb raiders vandalized it.

A smaller fence is about thirty paces away next to the end of a tall wall where a torch is mounted. I mosey over to see what it’s guarding and find another cavity, a hole about six feet wide. As with the fence at the stairwell, the reed fence is flimsy, not meant to hold a person back but just to mark the opening.

I edge closer, bracing myself with my left hand against the granite wall, careful not to put any weight against the fencing which appears ready to blow away with a strong wind. The flickering light from the burning torch at the end of the wall is at my back and casts little light into the hole but there’s enough moonlight for me to see a mound of rubble ten or twelve feet down. From the debris and irregular shape of the hole, I assume that I’m standing on the roof of a tomb or whatever the chamber below is, and that the opening was created by accident, perhaps from a cave-in when the area was excavated by workers inside the cavern who had entered through the stairway I’d seen.

The rest of the room is lost in a dark void but it doesn’t take much for my mind’s eye to envision markings on the walls, perhaps the tale of a war won by a pharaoh, a royal marriage, or the god-king getting sage advice from a god.

I’m leaning over the opening, trying to see more, when a shadow is created in the light of the torch behind me and I hear the crunch of a footstep.

“Is someone—?”

A black blur comes at me and impacts with the side of my head, the blow slamming me against the wall. My legs collapse and I go down to my knees, head spinning, putting my hands out in front to keep from going down on my face. Something drops next to me—a rock—and I see a swirl of a cloth being manipulated. My senses are half knocked out of me but I realize I’d been hit by a rock wrapped in cloth material. The cloth goes over my head and around my throat, a knee goes into the small of my back, and the cloth is jerked back to strangle me. I pull on it and try to twist out of it, my head spinning from the blow, with blind panic giving me some strength. Suddenly the pressure releases against my throat and I take in one gasp of air before something slams against my head again and I see stars.

I feel hands all over my body, exploring, searching, pressing, and grabbing, the strength of them telling me they are a man’s hands. Fingers squeeze my breast and I get a flash of my drunken lout of a stepfather who touched me offensively, and I raise up, pushing back against the man pawing me, banging my head back against his chin.