The Quest of Julian Day (32 page)

When I asked Oonas if she ever thought of marriage, she told me that she had been married at the age of sixteen; had
been a widow at nineteen and was now twenty-one. Having inherited a fortune which made her independent she had stoutly resisted all her family's efforts to marry her off again; not, as she said with enchanting frankness, because she had found the connubial state unattractive, but because she had definitely made up her mind that for the next ten years, at least, she was not going to tie herself to any one man. In response I made it clear that while I too was all for the bliss which some aspects of marriage implied, I certainly had no intention of tying myself up to one woman yet awhile.

Having put our cards on the table we fell a little silent, but it was a pleasant silence warmed by the fact that each of us was unquestionably attracted to the other and, knowing it, dwelt happily upon the possibilities of the situation. For my part the knowledge that Oonas was mixed up in O'Kieff's organisation, and probably in some respects an extremely unscrupulous young woman, interfered in no way with my feelings. If I could get anything out of her which would help me against O'Kieff, so much the better; if not, I meant to regard the trip as a holiday and I saw no reason in the world why I should not make the most of her obvious liking for me.

When at last we stood up to go to bed I suddenly took her in my arms, lifted her right off her feet and kissed her. For a delicious moment her soft, warm little body clung against mine as she freely gave me her mouth but, after that moment, without the slightest warning she suddenly bit me viciously in the lower lip. It was a sharp and most painful warning that she really was the little vixen I believed her to be. As I dropped her she sprang away from me, dodged behind the seat where we had been sitting and ran off to her cabin laughing hilariously.

I had half a mind to follow her and administer the spanking she undoubtedly deserved but, on second thoughts, I realised that she was a sufficiently old hand at the game to know that anticipation is half the pleasure in a love-affair. She was, I felt certain, perfectly willing to be taken but only in her own time and tonight she had let me go just as far as she meant me to.

The following morning I bagged the two best places in the observation-lounge again but there was no opportunity to use them as we had set off from Minia, where we had anchored for the night, shortly after dawn and soon after breakfast pulled
into the river bank at Beni Hassan, where we were to go ashore.

Oonas appeared on deck just as the little crowd of tourists, loaded down with cameras, binoculars, fly-whisks and parasols, were filing down the gangway. I saw her quickly suppress a wicked little smile as she noticed my slightly swollen lower lip when she wished me good-morning, but I made no mention of our encounter that night before and immediately dropped into my rôle of escort.

Beni Hassan is not a particularly exciting spot as there is little there to see except a long terrace high in the cliff above the village where there are about thirty or forty XIth and XIIth Dynasty rock tombs; in consequence there are no cars to be had in the place and the excursion has to be made on donkeys; which are brought in from their work in the fields by the peasants as a Nile steamer makes a call. Oonas evidently knew the drill as her lower limbs were encased this morning in a pair of workman-like jodhpures and she carried a little riding-switch.

The donkeys are, of course, hired
en masse
by the companies that run the ships but their owners seem to live from visit to visit on the anticipation of a tip and each donkey appears to have at least three owners. It was as though Babel had broken loose on the bank of the river, as dozens of Arabs urged each passenger to take
their
donkeys, and the confusion was added to by scores of others endeavouring to sell neacklaces of beads, fake antiques, hand-made rugs and all sorts of other junk.

I managed to secure two of the less flea-bitten-looking animals for Oonas and myself and without waiting for the others we set off up the track to the rock tombs which looked like so many windows in a vast façade. Conversation was almost impossible as we had six or eight Arabs of varying ages jabbering about us, urging on the donkeys when we wanted them to walk or grabbing their reins and pulling them back when we had settled into a comfortable trot; without ceasing they sang their own praises in our ears—old gentlemen that they were ‘best fellow donkeyboy,' and urchins screaming for
baksheesh
or cigarettes.

This wretched pestering is one of the things which the traveller to Egypt has to set off against the glory of the sunsets
and the interest of the ancient monuments. Wherever one goes one is beset by these hordes of beggars who destroy half one's pleasure in visiting the sights and, for the ordinary traveller, there is no way of getting rid of them, since a present of money only incites them to yelp for more.

It is, however, possible to silence them and drive them off if one is sufficiently acquainted with their native tongue. I was just about to launch into a stream of Arabic when I suddenly remembered that Oonas was not aware I could speak it and it occurred to me that an occasion might arise later where that might stand me in good stead if I continued to conceal my knowledge of the language from her. As it happened, my reticence that morning was to save my life only a few hours later and the beggars were dispersed without any effort on my part. Oonas, who obviously regarded them only as human cattle, began to lay about her with her riding-switch while she hissed out just what she thought of them, their fathers, mothers and remotest ancestors; not forgetting the kind of offspring they were likely to produce in time to come.

We visited only three of the tombs; they were just a series of large, square chambers hewn out of the living rock and their wall-paintings had little of the beauty of those at Sakkara which had been made many centuries earlier. In the old days Egypt was divided into thirty
names
or provinces and Beni Hassan was the capital of the Gazelle Nome. The best-preserved tomb there is that of one, Kheti, who lived during the Middle Kingdom, about 2100 B.C, and was the
monarch
or governor of the nome. The next most interesting is the somewhat larger one of a Prince Khnem-hotep which has among its paintings a representation of the migration of Asiatic tribes into Egypt. Mahmoud told us that it was supposed to be Joseph and his brethren, but this idea has been exploded long ago; although it is the first known painting of beared Semites being received into the Land of the Pharaohs.

We lunched on board while sailing up the river and, at three o'clock in the afternoon, halted at Tel-el-Amarna where we were to go ashore again.

Here, on the east bank, the desert runs right up to the Nile and it is that which has saved the ancient city from complete destruction. All the other cities of the old civilisation were built
in fertile regions so when they fell into decay the land was ploughed over or planted with palms, wiping out all trace of them entirely; but here there was no object in ploughing up a waterless, sandy waste and so after 3,000 years the lower walls of row upon row of the brick houses which formed the streets can still be seen.

There are the ruins of the palace, too, quite near the river bank, but apart from these relics of the long-dead city there is very little of interest to the casual traveller. Tel-el-Amarna does have, however, a very special interest for anybody who has read even a little about Egyptian history.

When the New Empire was at the height of its magnificence under the mighty XVIIIth Dynasty which ruled from the Sudan right across to Mesopotamia, a nobleman called Iuaa and his wife Thuau were responsible for altering Egypt's destiny. They were not pure Egyptians but foreigners who had been ennobled and their daughter Ti became the queen of Amenophis III. When that Pharaoh died this foreign Queen and her parents brought up the new Pharaoh, her young son Amenophis IV, in strange doctrines.

She taught him that the Egyptians were wrong to worship many gods and that there was only one God who was the father not only of the Egyptians but of all peoples; and that he was represented in the solar disc which gave warmth and light to all. The young Pharaoh became a fanatical convert to his mother's belief, changed his name to Akhen-aton, meaning ‘Beloved of the Sun's Disc,' ordered his people to observe the new religion and defied the mighty priesthood of the old gods in his capital of Thebes.

The history of Egypt for the next decade is the story of the so-called ‘Heretic' Pharaoh's struggle against the priests of Amen. It was on finding that he could not subdue them in his capital that he decided to build a new city for himself further down the river at Tel-el-Amarna.

Akhen-aton was certainly one of the great reformers of the world and many people have compared the religion he preached with Christianity, since its main tenets were love, simplicity and naturalness; although it differed from Christianity in its intense devotion to every form of beauty in this present life. Akhen-aton's reign was not a long one but he left an indelible
mark upon his country because he revolutionised art and favoured the faithful portrayal of all things in a natural manner as opposed to the conventionality and symbolism which had been enforced upon all Egyptian artists by the priesthood for centuries.

Having built his new city at Tel-el-Amarna with extraordinary speed he went there to live the life of a dreamer and philosopher; but, in the meantime, his great empire was falling into decay. He would give his generals no instructions for the defence of his cities in Palestine but talked to them only of brotherly love or kept them waiting for days in his antechambers refusing even to see them.

On his death he was succeeded by his young son, who had been brought up in his doctrine, but by that time the remnants of the Egyptian armies had been driven back into Egypt and the whole country was falling into chaos. The boy soon fell under the power of the old priesthood who took him back to Thebes and rechristened him Tutankhamen; but his reign was short and while still in his teens he was buried in the now world-famous tomb. The ‘heretical' doctrines had meanwhile been suppressed; an able general called Horemheb became the next Pharaoh, founded the XIXth Dynasty and drove out the Semitic invaders; but Egypt never recovered the rich cities and great territories in Asia that had been lost to her by the dreamer Akhan-aton.

Oonas and I secured a couple of strong-looking donkeys, drove off the local beggars and rode through the palms fringing the top of the river-bank to the ruins of the ‘Heretic' Pharaoh's palace. From this point we could survey the whole site of the dead city, which occupies a wide, flat area broker only by rows and rows of low mounds where the buildings used to be, and is ringed in by a horse-shoe of hills the centre of which was about five miles distant.

Mahmoud was rallying his party to ride right across the plain to inspect some rock tombs in the hills, but we were sick both of his patter and the crowd so, having talked it over, we decided it would be much more fun to visit Akhen-aton's own tomb, which lies a mile or two further inland. In the light of later events I feel sure it must have been Oonas who first made this suggestion but she put it so skilfully that, at the time, I
was quite under the impression it was my own idea.

As the crowd trotted off after Mahmoud accompanied by ninety-eight per cent of the male population of the village we turned aside and, producing some piastres, I asked Oonas to bribe our donkey boys to leave us to our own devices. She spoke to them in Arabic and with broad grins on their faces they took the money, pointed out the way and stood aside while we cantered off together.

The track to Akhen-aton's tomb passes through a gap in the hills, then follows a shallow
wady
. Even in the strong sunlight it was a little eerie there, as once we had left the native village behind us there was no sign whatever of the hand of man and we might have been a hundred miles from any human habitation; but the rocks on either side were full of colour while here and there were patches of tiny desert daisies and dwarf shrubs which manage to exist in some waste places entirely without water except the little they can absorb from the nightly dew.

The way was longer than I had thought and although our animals were game little beasts we had to walk them most of the way, so it must have been a good hour-and-a-quarter from the time we left the river bank before we reached our destination.

A solitary mud-walled dwelling, which had round the edge of its roof a decorative row of things like inverted waterjars which are used for nesting pigeons, stood about a hundred yards from the iron gates of the tomb. A tousled-haired girl who was making bread outside it brushed the crawling flies from her eyes and went in to get her father. He was a villainous-looking fellow and emerged carrying an ancient fowling-piece, perhaps as a symbol of his tomb-guardianship, but having begged a cigarette he accompanied us to the tomb and unlocked it. We tethered the donkeys to a rock and went inside.

The tomb was hardly worth a visit except for the fact that it once contained the remains of a man who started a new religion and still makes his personality felt through the artistic revolution which he brought about, whereas countless other monarchs who reigned centuries after him have passed into complete oblivion.

The wall-paintings were not in very good repair and they did not consist of portraits of the Pharaoh making offerings to
a long line of gods and goddesses, as is usual in the tombs of the Egyptian Kings. Instead there were numerous representations of the sun's disc with rays in the form of straight lines radiating from it, each of which had a hand at its end, symbolising the light and life given by the sun to the Pharaoh, his family and all living things. When we got outside I tipped the tomb-guardian and he went off to his hovel. Then, as on looking at my watch I found that time was getting on, I said I thought we ought to start back right away.

Oonas did not share my view. She said that it was barely half-past four and that as the boat was only going up to Bern Mohammed to anchor for the night, after leaving Tel-el-Amarna, she saw no reason why we should hurry.