The Levant Trilogy (3 page)

Miss Brownall
squeaked her alarm, 'Not the one with the bats?'

Clifford, with
his air of authority, in his uniform that was not a uniform, asked sternly,
'And why not the one with the bats?'

'Oh dear!'

The car turned
left on to a track in the sand and shapes could be seen through the limitless
fog of the distance. Approached, they were revealed as heaps of unbaked bricks
that had once
been
pyramids. Now they stood like patient, waiting animals as Clifford made a
dashing swerve in front of them and braked to a stop. The following car, trying
to imitate the swerve, skidded and nearly rammed Clifford's car. His
expression fierce, he threw open his door but finding all well, he contented
himself with the voice of leadership, 'All out. All out.' His followers,
struggling from beneath the heat of each other's elbows, emerged to a more
spacious area of heat.

Fly-whisk in one
hand, torch in the other, Clifford pointed both objects at the largest and best
preserved of the pyramids, 'We're going in this one,' then realized that Mr
Liversage was still in the car. Going smartly to it, he looked at the old man,
saw he was asleep and let him remain. The rest he led to a hole in the
pyramid's flank.

Harriet Pringle,
loitering, last in the queue, seemed reluctant to enter. Simon paused so she
could precede him into the dark, ragged opening in the bricks, but she shook
her head, 'I don't like the look of it.' The pyramid's outer casing of stone
had been looted away and the inner structure had sunk on itself like a ruined
plum-pudding. 'I don't think it's safe and I'm afraid of bats.'

Simon laughed,
'I’ll go ahead and scare them.'

For a few yards
they were able to walk upright, then the roof sagged and they had to bend to
get under it. Ahead of them Miss Brownall was giggling and from the scuffling,
scraping and grunting, it was clear that the others had been forced down on to
hands and knees. Harriet stopped, then something caught in her hair and she
turned and ran back to the daylight.

Simon went on
until he could feel space about him and heard people breathing. The air was
cold. Clifford had switched off his torch to heighten the drama of arrival in
the central chamber and the party stood in darkness until the stragglers
arrived. As Simon joined them, Clifford relit the torch and shone it upon him:
'All here?' Then he saw that Harriet was not there and said with displeasure,
'Where's
she
gone?'

'Mrs Pringle
turned back.'

'Oh, did she!'

Wisely, too,
Simon thought as he looked about him. The
chamber was
empty except for a stone sarcophagus of immense size. Everything else had been
looted, even the sarcophagus lid. Not only was there nothing to see but Simon
realized that to enter the place was foolhardy. The apex of the pyramid was
breaking through the roof plaster and poised over their heads were several tons
of bricks that could be brought down by the slightest earth tremor. Clifford,
moving imperturbably beneath this peril, flashed his torch on to the decayed
walls, saying, 'Wonderfully fresh, these colours. Book of the Dead, y'know!'

The others stood
as though not daring to move and their murmurs sounded to Simon more
apprehensive than admiring. Miss Brownall was slapping her bare arms and one of
the men from the second car, feeling the chill, had wrapped a scarf under his
chin and up over his trilby hat.

'Well, Miss
Brownall,' Clifford humorously asked, "who do you think was buried here?'

Miss Brownall
said she could not say but the man with the scarf answered for her, 'I would
presume, yes ... yes, I would presume it was Ozymandias, King of Kings.' His
precise enunciation did not suggest a joke but Clifford looked suspiciously at
him.

'Didn't know
there was an Ozymandias.' To prevent further discussion Clifford made a quick
move to an entrance in the further wall. 'Now, this is interesting. Another
passage. Let's see where this leads.'

As the others
filed after him, Simon made his escape and came thankfully out to where Harriet
was sitting on the ground, her back to the pyramid, sifting sand through her
fingers. She had collected a small pile of blue beads and scraps of mummy
cloth. 'Look what I've found.'

Simon sat down
beside her and took the opportunity to ask, 'Who is Mr Clifford? Is he very
important?'

'In a way, I
suppose he is. He's an agent for an oil company, but he's not as grand as he'd
like to be. He doesn't belong to the set that plays polo and gives gambling
parties so, to show his superiority, he's taken to Ancient Egypt in a big way.'

'I suppose he
is
English? Which part does he come from?'

‘You mean his
accent? It's a Clifford accent. He's English but doesn't come from England. The
Cliffords have lived here for generations. The men go home to find English
wives so the family maintains its Englishness. Their traditions are English,
but their money is not. I wonder, if the gyppos turned on us, which side he'd
be on?'

Turned on us? You
don't really think they'd turn on us after all we've done for them?'

Harriet laughed
at him, 'What have we done for them?'

'We've brought
them justice and prosperity, haven't we? We've shown them how people ought to
live.'

With his face
close to her, seeing his clear skin, the clear whites of his eyes, the denned
dark blue of the iris, she thought, 'How young he is!' Until now she had taken
it for granted that her generation was the youngest of the adults but she
realized that in the two years of her marriage, a yet younger generation had
come into the war. They arrived in Egypt, fresh and innocent, imbued with the
creed in which they had been brought up. They believed that the British Empire
was the greatest force for good the world had ever known. They expected
gratitude from the Egyptians and were pained to find themselves barely tolerated.

'What have we
done here, except make money? I suppose a few rich Egyptians have got richer by
supporting us, but the real people of the country, the peasants and the
backstreet poor, are just as diseased, underfed and wretched as they ever
were.'

Aware of his own
ignorance, Simon did not argue but changed course. 'Surely they're glad to have
us here to protect them?'

'They don't think
we're protecting them. They think we're making a use of them. And so we are.
We're protecting the Suez Canal and the route to India and Clifford's oil
company.' Disturbed by Simon's troubled eyes, Harriet stood up asking, 'And
where is Clifford? What are they doing in there?'

'Exploring
another passage. I must say, he's pretty brave. The roof's so shaky, it could
come down any minute.'

'He's showing
off. He's challenged by you.'

'Me? Why me?'

'Because you're a
fighting man and he ought to be, but isn't.'

'Oh, he needn't
worry about me. If he wants to keep out of it, all I can say is good luck to
him.'

They could hear
Clifford's voice as the party returned. Harriet opened her hand, full of tiny
blue beads, and scattered the beads over the sand: 'They've been here for two
thousand years. Now they can stay for another two thousand.'

Clifford, coming
out frowning and blinking in the brilliant light, looked sardonically at her.
'So, young lady, you were afraid to come with us?'

'Yes.'

Nonplussed by
this admission, Clifford turned on the others. 'Right. Back to the cars. I'll
show you a very remarkable tomb.'

'The funny one?'
asked Miss Brownall.

'Yes, the funny
one.'

Clifford spoke
sternly and he looked stern as he swung the car away from the dark mounds that
had once been pyramids and headed them into the dazzling, swimming nothingness
of the desert horizon. Silver mirage now hid the sand and, from it, oddly
elongated rocks and stones stood up like wading birds. Everyone except Clifford
was silent, stupefied by the atmosphere inside the car. Simon imagined them
cooking, their flesh softening and melting into fat, while Clifford talked
away. Apparently unaffected by the heat, he described the tomb he said he had
discovered. It was - and here Miss Brownall gave eager agreement - unlike any
other tomb anyone had discovered before. Absorbed by his own discovery, he ran
the car off the track and Harriet, clutching at a metal handhold, cried out
that her fingers were burnt.

'Is it always as
hot as this?' Simon asked.

'This is only the
beginning. Next month will be worse. They used to think Englishwomen and
children could not endure such heat but now we have to stay here, we find we
endure it quite well.'

An outcrop of
rock was appearing in the distance and Clifford said 'This is it.
Now
you'll
see something.'

The cars stopped
and the passengers struggled out again. They were immediately assailed by flies
that settled with sticky
feet on to sticky hands and
faces. Clifford, flapping his whisk about, said, 'Don't know what God was
thinking about when he created flies.'

Miss Brownall, modest
in her knowledge, asked, 'Weren't they created to plague the Egyptians?'

Harriet agreed. 'The
plagues came and never went away again.'

Simon began to
describe the millions of flies he had seen, a black blanket of flies, all
heaving together on the banks of the Red Sea, but Clifford, having no interest
in this talk, ordered the party to follow him into the rock tomb.

Simon remained a
moment to observe a fly motionless on the back of his hand, its molded grey and
black body covered by transparent wings that gave it a greasy look. It seemed
too large, like a fly seen through a magnifying glass. He tried to shake it off
but it remained, heat-struck, and having no heart to kill it, he brushed it
away.

'Don't lag
behind, chaps,' Clifford shouted. 'Come on. Stick together-'

They passed
through an opening into the semi-darkness of a large cave. The masons had
squared it up and plastered the walls, then the artists had marked in the areas
to be decorated but they had done no more. Some of the spaces had been roughly
brushed in with red or white. Clifford, pointing to them, said, 'Have you ever
seen anything like this? Isn't it extraordinary?'

There was a
questioning silence then Harriet said, 'Not really. It's merely unfinished.
They started to decorate it then, for some reason, the work came to a stop.'

Miss Brownall
drew in her breath as though she feared for Harriet's safety and Clifford did
indeed look angry. 'Why should they stop?'

'The usual
reasons. Demand falling off. New religions taking over. New ideas. Or prices
going up and the tomb-makers going out of business. It's interesting to see
that in ancient Egypt things ended just as they have always done.'

'Perhaps. Perhaps
not' Clifford was discouraging but one of the men from the second car said, 'I
think Mrs Pringle is right. It's just an unfinished tomb.'

Clifford grunted,
'That's merely supposition. Anyway, there's more to see.' He led the way down
some rough steps into a small, lower cave where shelves had been cut in the
rock. Here the walls were unplastered and there were no painted guidelines or
panels. Looking about the empty tomb where no soul had sought instruction and
no instructions were given, Harriet felt sorry for the builders who had been
forced to abandon their work. While Clifford flashed his torch about, trying to
whip up interest in a place that had ceased to be interesting, Harriet looked
up and saw they were all crowded together beneath a gigantic stone that was
poised, ready to be lowered on to the hole when all the shelves had been
filled. She murmured in horror and sped up the steps and into the safety of the
open air.

Simon, hurrying
after her, asked, 'What's the matter? Are you all right?'

'Yes. It was that
stone. If it had suddenly slipped, we would have been buried alive down there.'
At the thought of their death in the darkness and heat of that underground hole,
she was convulsed with fear. 'No one would ever have known what had happened to
us.'

Clifford, his
followers behind him, approached Harriet with a satisfied smile. 'You're very
jittery, aren't you? That stone's been propped up there for over a thousand
years. Did you think it was waiting to come down on you?'

She knew she was
jittery. She had come jittery out of Rumania and then out of Greece, and now
she lived in expectation of being driven out of Egypt. She said, 'I'm sorry. I
was silly. I'm inclined to be claustrophobic.'

Appeased by her
admission of weakness, Clifford smiled benignly and said they would go to the
Fayoum and have their picnic under the trees. The promise of picnic and trees
pleased everyone and the oasis, when they came to it, gave them an illusion of
relief. There was shade from the massed foliage of palms, sycamores, banyans
and mangoes, but it was heavy rather than cool. The sunlight, falling in shafts
through the branches, lit dust motes in the air. Dust veiled everything, the
dust of the road silenced their feet. Women, walking bare footed with pots on
their heads, moved with a dream-like quiet, their black draperies grey with
dust. Small houses stood by the road, simple cubes of whitewashed clay, with
unglazed windows from which came the smoke of burning cow-cake. The warm, dry
smell of the cow-cake smoke hung everywhere on the air.