The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (36 page)

“Yes, I guess that’s true. Viscount Summerfield, actually …”

“What
is
a Viscount?” she asked.

Such lovely eyes, and the way she laughed as she looked at him. Suddenly he was no longer angry with Henry for being holed up with that dancer, Malenka. Better that Henry should be altogether out of sight with his drinking and gambling, rather than hanging about the public rooms of the hotel.

Oh, what would Julie think of Miss Barrington? Well, he knew what he thought!

High noon. The dining room. Ramses sat back laughing.

“Now, I insist you do it. Pick up the fork and the knife,” Julie said. “Just try.”

“Julie, it’s not that I can’t do it! It’s that it seems absolutely barbaric to thrust food in one’s mouth with pieces of silver!”

“Your trouble is, you know how perfectly handsome you are, and how you charm everyone.”

“I learned a little tact over the centuries.” He picked up the fork, deliberately gripping the handle in his fist.

“Stop that,” she said under her breath.

He laughed. He laid down the fork, and took a morsel of chicken with his fingers again. She grabbed his hand.

“Ramses, eat properly.”

“Darling dear,” he said, “I’m eating in the manner of Adam and Eve, Osiris and Isis, Moses, Aristotle and Alexander.”

She dissolved with laughter. He stole a kiss from her quickly. Then his face darkened.

“What about your cousin?” he whispered.

It caught her completely off guard. “Must we speak of him?”

“Are we to leave him here in Cairo? Are we to leave the murder of your father unavenged?”

Tears sprang to her eyes. Angrily, she searched in her bag for
her handkerchief. She had not seen Henry since their return, and she didn’t want to see him. In her letter to Randolph she had not mentioned him. And it was the thought of her uncle as much as anything else that made her cry now.

“Pass the burden to me,” Ramses whispered. “I shall bear it easily. Let justice be done.”

She put her hand up suddenly to his lips.

“No more,” she said. “Not now.”

He looked up, over her shoulder. He gave a little sigh, and squeezed her hand. “The museum party is here, it seems,” he said. “And we mustn’t keep Elliott standing about.”

Alex swooped down suddenly to give her a little peck on the cheek. How chaste. She wiped at her nose quickly, and turned so that he wouldn’t see the colour in her face.

“Well, are we all set?” Alex said. “We have our private guide meeting us at the museum in fifteen minutes. Oh, and before I forget, the opera has been completely arranged. Box seats and of course tickets to the ball afterwards. And Ramsey, old man, if you’ll allow me to say so, I shan’t compete with you that night for Julie’s attentions.”

Julie nodded. “Fallen in love already,” she said with a mock whisper. She allowed Alex to help her to her feet. “A Miss Barrington.”

“Please, darling, do give me your opinion. She’s coming to the museum with us.”

“Let’s hurry,” Ramses said. “Your father is not well. I’m surprised he doesn’t remain behind.”

“Good Lord, do you know what the Cairo Museum means to people?” said Alex. “And it’s the dirtiest, dustiest place I’ve ever—”

“Alex, please, we are about to see the greatest collection of Egyptian treasures in existence.”

“The last ordeal,” Ramses said, taking Julie’s arm. “And all the Kings are in one room? This is what you have been telling me?”

“My word, I should think you’d been there before,” Alex said. “You are such a puzzle, old man.…”

“Give up on it,” Ramses whispered.

But Alex scarcely heard. He was whispering to Julie that she must give him a candid opinion of Miss Barrington. And Miss Barrington was the rosy-cheeked blond woman standing in the lobby with Elliott and Samir. A pretty thing, obviously.

“To think,” said Julie, “you need my approval!”

“Shhhh, there she is. With Father. They’re getting along famously.”

“Alex, she’s perfectly lovely.”

Through the broad dusty rooms of the first floor they trekked, listening to the guide, who spoke rapidly despite his thick Egyptian accent. Ah, treasures galore, there was no doubt of it. All the loot of the tombs; things he had never even dreamed of in his time. And here it was for all the world to see, under soiled glass and weak lights, yet nevertheless preserved from time and ruin.

He stared at the statue of the happy scribe—the little cross-legged figure with his papyrus on his lap, looking up eagerly. It should have moved him to tears. But all he felt was a vague joy that he had come, he had visited it all as he should, and now he would be leaving.

At last they proceeded up the grand stairway. The room of the Kings, the ordeal he was dreading. He felt Samir at his side.

“Why not forgo this gruesome pleasure, sire? For they are all horrors.”

“No, Samir, let me see it through to the finish.”

He almost laughed when he understood what it was—a great chamber of glass cases like the cases in the department stores where goods were displayed safe from prying fingers.

Nevertheless the blackened grinning bodies gave him a dull shock. It seemed he could scarcely hear the guide, and yet the words were coming clear:

“The Ramses the Damned mummy in England is still a controversial discovery. Very controversial. This is the true Ramses the Second, right before you, known as Ramses the Great.”

Edging closer, he stared down at the gaunt horrid thing that bore his name.

“… Ramses the Second, greatest of all Egypt’s Pharaohs.”

He almost smiled as he studied the dried limbs, and then the obvious truth hit him, like something physical pressing on his chest, that if he had not gone into that cave with the wicked old priestess, he would indeed be lying in this case. Or what was left of him. And all the world since faded; it was no more suddenly than those years. And to think he would have died without knowing so much; without ever realizing.…

Noise. Julie had said something, but he couldn’t hear her.
There was a dull roaring in his head. Suddenly he saw them all, these ghastly corpses, like burnt things out of the oven. He saw the filthy glass; he saw the tourists pushing this way and that.

He heard Cleopatra’s voice.
When you let him die, you let me die! I want to be with him now. Take it away. I won’t drink it
.

Were they moving again? Had Samir said it was time to go? He looked up slowly from the awful sunken face and saw Elliott gazing at him, with the strangest expression. What was it? Understanding.

Oh, but how can you understand? I myself can scarcely understand.

“Let’s go, sire.”

He let Samir take his arm and lead him towards the doorway. It seemed Miss Barrington laughed at something Alex had whispered in her ear. And the din of the French tourists nearby was positively frightful. Such a harsh tongue.

He turned, staring back at the glass cases. Yes, leave this place. Why are we going down the corridor to the very back of the building? Surely we have seen it all; the dreams and fervor of a nation come to this; a great and dusty mausoleum where young girls laugh and rightly so.

The guide had stopped at the end of the hall. What was it now? Another body in a case, and how could anyone see it in the shadows? Only weak shafts of dusty light cut through the dirty window above.

“This unknown woman … a curious example of natural preservation.”

“We cannot smoke, can we?” he whispered to Samir.

“No, sire, but we can slip away, surely. We can wait for the others outside, if you wish.…”

“…  combined to naturally mummify the body of this anonymous woman.”

“Let’s go,” he said. He placed his hand on Samir’s shoulder. But then he must tell Julie lest she be alarmed. He stepped forward and gave her sleeve a little tug, and glanced down at the body in the case as he did so.

His heart stopped.

“…  though most of the wrappings were long ago torn away—in the search for valuables, no doubt—the woman’s body
was perfectly preserved by the delta mud, much as bodies found in northern bogs.…”

The rippling hair, the long slender neck, the gently sloping shoulders! And the face, the very face! For a moment he did not believe his eyes!

The voice pounded in his head: “…  unknown woman … Ptolemaic period … Graeco-Roman. But see the Egyptian profile. The well-molded lips …”

Miss Barrington’s high-pitched laugh went through his temples.

He blundered forward. He had brushed Miss Barrington’s arm. Alex was saying something to him, calling him sharply by name. The guide was staring up.

He looked down through the glass.
Her face!
It was
she
—the soft cerements molded into her flesh, her naked hands gently curved, her feet bare, the wrappings loose around her ankles. All black, black as the delta mud which had surrounded her, preserved her, hardened her!

“Ramses, what is it!”

“Sir, are you ill!”

They were speaking to him from all sides; they were surrounding him. Suddenly someone pulled him away, and he turned back furiously. “No, let me go.”

He heard the glass shatter beside him. An alarm had gone off, shrieking like a woman in terror.

Look at her closed eyes. It’s she! It’s she. He needed no rings, no ornaments, no names to tell him. It’s she.

The armed men had come. Julie pleaded. Miss Barrington was afraid. Alex was trying to make him listen.

“I cannot hear you now. I can hear nothing. It is she. Anonymous woman.” She, the last Queen of Egypt.

Again, he jerked free of the hand on his arm. He hovered over the filthy glass. He wanted to shatter it. Her legs no more than bones; the fingers of her right hand dried almost to a skeleton. But that face, that beautiful face. My Cleopatra.

Finally he had allowed himself to be led away. Julie had questioned him. He had not answered. She had paid for the damage to the case, a small display of jewelry upset. He wanted to say that he was sorry.

He could not remember anything else. Except her face, and the whole picture she made—a thing created from the black
earth and lifted up and placed on the bare polished wood of the case, linen wrappings still wrinkled as if by lapping water. And her hair, her thick rippling hair; why, the whole form had almost glistened in the dim light.

Julie spoke words. The lights were soft in the room at Shepheard’s Hotel. He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t. And then there was that other memory; that strange moment when he had turned in the confusion and the blur, and seen Elliott with those sad grey eyes watching him.

Oscar hurried after Mr. Hancock and the two chaps from Scotland Yard as they marched right through the drawing rooms and into the Egyptian room. Oh, he never should have let them into the house. They had no right to come into this house. And now they were marching right up to the mummy case.

“But Miss Julie will be so angry, sir. This is her house, sir. And you mustn’t touch that, sir, why, it’s Mr. Lawrence’s discovery.”

Hancock stared at the five gold Cleopatra coins in their case.

“But the coins could have been stolen in Cairo, sir. Before the collection was cataloged.”

“Yes, of course, you’re absolutely right,” Hancock said. He turned and glared at the mummy case.

Julie poured the wine in his glass. He merely looked at it.

“Won’t you try to explain?” she whispered. “You recognized it. You knew it. That has to be it.”

For hours he’d sat there in silence. The late afternoon sun burned through the sheer curtains. The overhead fan churned slowly, monotonously, giving off a dull groan.

She didn’t want to cry again.

“But it couldn’t be …” No. She couldn’t bring herself even to suggest it. Yet she thought of the woman again; of the gold tiara in her hair, now black and glossy as all the rest of her. “It’s not possible that it’s she.…”

Slowly Ramses turned and looked at her. Hard and brilliant his blue eyes were.

“Not possible!” His voice was low, hoarse, no more than an agonized whisper. “Not possible! You’ve dug up thousands of the Egyptian dead. You’ve raided their pyramids, their desert tombs, their catacombs. What is not possible!”

“Oh, my God.” The tears flowed down her cheeks.

“Mummies stolen, traded, sold,” he said. “Was there any man, woman or child ever buried in this land whose body has not been defiled, if not displayed, or dismembered? What is not possible!”

For a moment it seemed he’d lose control altogether; but then he was quiet, merely staring at her again. And then his eyes went dim as if he had not seen her. He sat back in the little chair.

“We don’t have to stay in Cairo any longer if you don’t want.…”

Again he turned slowly and looked at her. It was as if he were waking from a daze, that he had not just spoken to her.

“No!” he said. “We cannot leave. Not now. I don’t want to leave.…”

And then his voice trailed off as if he’d just realized what he was saying. He rose and walked slowly out of the room, not even glancing back at her.

She saw the door close; she heard his tread in the hall; and then her tears flowed again.

What was she to do? What would comfort him? If she used all her influence, could she possibly have the body in the museum removed from public view and given proper burial? Not likely. The request would seem whimsical and foolish. Why, countless royal mummies were on display!

But even if she could accomplish such a thing, she feared it would not help now. It was the mere sight of the thing, not its desecration, which had crushed him.

The two officers from Scotland Yard watched the man from the British Museum uneasily.

“We should go now, sir. We don’t have a court order to be disturbing the mummy’s coffin. We came to check the coins, and we’ve done it.”

“Nonsense,” Hancock said. “We should check everything now while we have the court order. We came to see that the collection is intact. I want to see that the mummy’s unharmed before I leave here.”

“But, sir,” Oscar intervened.

“Don’t say another word, my good man. Your mistress ran off to Cairo and left a priceless treasure here. She did not have our permission.” He turned to the two officers of the law. “Open the thing,” he said sharply.