about the future yet, but won't you be applying?"
"Of course," he nodded. "But that doesn't mean that no one else should.
Perhaps you will take the job out from in front of my nose." His smile
was complacent. She was a woman in an Arab world, and he was the nephew
of the minister. Nahoot knew just how heavily the odds favoured him.
"Friendly rivals?"he asked.
Royan smiled sadly. "Friends, at least. I will need all of those I can
find in the future."
"You know you have many friends. Everyone in the department likes you,
Royan." That at least was true, she supposed. He went on smoothly, "May
I offer you a lift back to Cairo? I am certain my uncle will not
object."
"Thank you, Nahoot, but I have my own car here, and I must stay over at
the oasis tonight to see to some of Duraid's affairs."This was not true.
Royan planned to travel back to the flat in Giza that evening but, for
reasons that she was not very sure of herself, she did not want Nahoot
to know of her plans.
"Then we shall see you at the museum on Monday." Royan left the oasis as
soon as she was able to escape from the relations and family friends and
peasants, so many of whom had worked for Duraid's family most of their
lives.
She felt numbed and isolated, so that all their condolences and
exhortations were meaningless and Without comfort.
Even at this late hour the tarmac road back through the desert was busy,
with files of vehicles moving steadily in both directions, for tomorrow
was Friday and the sabbath. She slipped her injured right arm out of the
sling, and it did not hamper her driving too much. She was able to make
reasonably good time. Nevertheless, it was after five in the afternoon
when she made out the green line against the tawny desolation of the
desert that marked the start of the narrow strip of irrigated and
cultivated land along the Nile which was the great artery of Egypt.
As always the traffic became denser the nearer she came to the capital,
and it was almost fully dark by the time she reached the apartment block
in Giza that overlooked both the river and those great monuments of
stone which stood so tall and massive against the evening sky, and which
for her epitomized the heart and history of her land.
She left Duraid's old green Renault in the underground garage of the
building and rode up in the elevator to the top floor.
She let herself into the flat and then froze in the doorway. The sitting
room had been ransacked - even the rugs had been pulled up and the
paintings ripped from the walls. In a daze she picked her way through
the litter of broken furniture and smashed ornaments. She glanced into
the bedroom as she went down the passage, and saw that it had not
escaped. Her clothes and those of Duraid were strewn over the floor, and
the doors of the cupboards stood ajar. One of these was smashed off its
hinges. The bed was overturned, and the sheets and bolsters had been
flung about.
She could smell the reek of broken cosmetic and perfume bottles from the
bathroom, but she could not yet bring herself to go in there. She knew
what she would find.
Instead she continued down the passage to the large room that they had
used as a study and workshop.
In the chaos the first thing that she noticed and mourried was the
antique chess set that Duraid had given her as a wedding present. The
board of jet and ivory squares was broken in half and the pieces had
been thrown about the room with vindictive and unnecessary violence. She
stooped and picked up the white queen. Her head had been snapped off.
Holding the queen in her good hand she moved like a sleepwalker to her
desk below the window. Her PC was wrecked. They had shattered the screen
and hacked the mainframe with what must have been an axe. She could tell
at a glance that there was no information left on the hard drive; it was
beyond repair.
She glanced down at the drawer in which she kept her floppy disks. That
and all the other drawers had been pulled out and thrown on the floor.
They were empty, of course; along with the disks, all her notebooks and
photographs were missing. Her last connections with the seventh scroll
were lost. After three years of work, gone was the proof that it had
ever existed.
She stumped down on the floor, feeling beaten and exhausted. Her arm
started to ache again, and she was alone and vulnerable as she had never
been in her life before. She had never thought that she would miss
Duraid so desperately. Her shoulders began to shake and she felt the
tears welling up from deep within her. She tried to hold them back, but
they scalded her eyelids and she let them flow. She sat amongst the
wreckage of her life and wept until there was nothing more left within
her, and then she curled up on the littered carpet and fell, into the
sleep of exhaustion and despair.
the Monday morning she had managed to restore some order into her life.
The police had come to the flat and taken her statement, and she had
tidied up most of the disarray. She had even glued the head back on her
white queen. When she left the flat and climbed into the green Renault
her arm was feeling easier, and, if not cheerful, she was at least a
great deal more optimistic, and sure of what she had to do.
When she reached the museum she went first to Duraid's office and was
annoyed to find that Nahoot was there before her. He was supervising two
of the security guards as they cleared out all Duraid's personal
effects.
"You might have had the consideration to let me do that," she told him
coldly, and he gave her his most winning smile.
"I am sorry, Royan. I thought I would help." He was smoking one of his
fat Turkish cigarettes. She loathed the heavy, musky odour.
She crossed to Duraid's desk, and opened the top right hand drawer. "My
husband's day book was in here. It's gone now. Have you seen it?"
"No, there was nothing in that drawer."Nahoot looked at the two guards
for confirmation, and they shuffled their feet and shook their heads. It
did not really matter, she thought. The book had not contained much of
vital interest. Duraid had always relied on her to record and store all
data of importance, and most of it had been on her PC.
"Thank you, Nahoot," she dismissed him. "I will do whatever remains to
be done. I don't want to keep you from your work."
"Any help you need, Royan, please let me know." He bowed slightly as he
left her.
It did not take her long to finish in Duraid's office. She had the
guards take the boxes of his possessions down the corridor to her own
office and pile them against the wall.
She worked through the lunch-hour tidying up all her own affairs, and
when she had finished there was still an hour until her appointment with
Atalan Abou Sin.
If she was to make good her promise to Duraid, then she was going to be
absent for some time. Wanting to take leave of all her favoUrite
treasures, she went down into the public section of the huge building.
Monday was a busy day, and the exhibition halls of the museum were
thronged with groups of tourists. They flocked behind their guides,
sheep following the shepherd.
They crowded around the most famous of the displays.
They listened to the guides reciting their well-rehearsed spiels in all
the tongues of Babel.
Those rooms on the second floor that contained the treasures of
Tutankhamen were so crowded that she spent little time there. She
managed to reach the display cabinet that contained the great golden
death'mask of the child pharaoh. As always, the splendour and the
romance of it quickened her breathing and made her heart beat faster.
Yet as she stood before it, jostled by a pair of big-busted and sweaty
middle-aged female tourists, she pondered, as she had so often before,
that if an insignificant weakling king could have gone to his tomb with
such a miraculous creation covering his mummified features, in what
state must the great Ramessids have lain in their funeral temples.
Ramesses II, the greatest of them all, had reigned sixty-seven years and
had spent those decades accumulating his funerary treasure from all the
vast territories that he had conquered.
Royan went next to pay her respects to the old king.
After thirty centuries Ramesses II slept on with a rapt and serene
expression on his gaunt features. His skin had a light, marble-like
sheen to it. The sparse strands of his hair were blond and dyed with
henna. His hands, dyed with the same stuff, were long and thin and
elegant. However, he was clad only in a rag of linen. The grave robbers
had even unwrapped his mummy to reach the amulets and scarabs beneath
the linen bandages, so that his body was almost naked. When these
remains had been discovered in 1881 in the cache of royal mummies in the
cliff cave at Deir El Bahari, only a scrap of papyrus parchment attached
to his breast had proclaimed his lineage.
There was a moral in that, she supposed, but as she stood before these
pathetic remains she wondered again, as she and Duraid had done so often
before, whether Taita the scribe had told the truth, whether somewhere
in the far-off, savage mountains of Africa another great pharaoh slept
on undisturbed with all his treasures intact about him.
The very thought of it made her shiver with excitement, and goose
pimples prickled her skin and raised the fine dark hair at the nape of
her neck.
"I have given you my promise, my husband," she whispered in Arabic.
"This will be for you and your memory, for it was you who led the way."
She glanced at her "Wrist-watch as she went down the main staircase. She
had fifteen minutes before she must leave for her appointment with the
minister, and she knew, exactly how she would spend that time. What she
was going to visit was in one of the less-frequented side halls.
The tour guides very seldom led their charges this way, except as a
short-cut to see the statue of Amenhotep.
Royan stopped in front of the glass-fronted display case that reached
from floor to ceiling of the narrow room. It was packed with small
artefacts, tools and weapons, amulets and vessels and utensils, the
latest of them dating from the twentieth dynasty of the New Kingdom,
1100 BC, whilst the oldest survived from the dim ages of the Old Kingdom
almost five thousand years ago. The cataloguing of this accumulation was
only rudimentary. Many of the items were not described.
At the furthest end, on the bottom shelf, was a display of jewellery and
finger rings and seals. Beside each of the seals was a wax impression
made from it.
Royan went down on her knees to examine one of these artefacts more
closely. The tiny blue seal of lapis lazuli in the centre of the display
was beautifully carved.
Lapis was a rare and precious material for the ancients, as it had not
occurred naturally in the Egyptian Empire. The wax imprint cut from it
depicted a hawk with a broken wing, and the simple legend beneath it was
clear for Royan to read: "TAITA, THE SCRIBE OF THE GREAT QUEEN'.
She knew it was the same man, for he had used the maimed hawk as his
autograph in the scrolls. She wondered who had found this trifle and
where. Perhaps some peasant had plundered it from the lost tomb of the
old slave and scribe, but she would never know.
"Are you teasing me, Taita? Is it all some elaborate hoax? Are you
laughing at me even now from your tomb, wherever it may be?" She leaned
even closer, until her forehead touched the cool glass. "Are you my
friend, Taita, or are you my implacable adversary?" She stood up and
dusted off the front of her skirt. "We shall see. I will-play the game
with you, and we shall see who outwits whom," she promised.
The minister kept her waiting only a few minutes before his male
secretary ushered her into his presence. Atalan Abou Sin wore a dark,
shiny silk suit and sat at his desk, although Royan knew that he
preferred a more comfortable robe and a cushion on the rugs of the
floor. He noticed her glance and smiled deprecatingly. "I have a meeting
with some Americans this afternoon." .. She liked him. He had always
been kind to her, and she owed him her job at the museum. Most other men
in his position would have refused. Duraid's request for a female
assistant, especially his own wife.
He asked after her health and she showed him her bandaged arm. "The
stitches will come out in ten days."
They chatted for a while in a polite manner. Only Westerners would have
the gaucherie to come -directly to the main business to be discussed.
However, to save him embarrassment Royan took the first opportunity he
gave her to tell him, "I feel that I need some time to myself. I need to
recover from my loss and to decide what I am to do with the rest of my
life, now that I am a widow. I would be grateful if you would consider
my request for at least six months' unpaid leave of absence. I want to
go to stay with my mother in England."
Atalan showed real concern and urged her, "Please do not leave us for
too long. The work you have done has been invaluable. We need you to
help carry on from where Duraid left off." But he could not entirely
conceal his relief She knew that he had expected her to put before him
her application for the directorship. He must have discussed it with his
nephew. However, he was too kind a man to relish having to tell her that
she would not be selected for the job. Things in Egypt were changing,
women were emerging from their traditional roles, but not that much or
that swiftly. They both knew that the directorship must go to Nahoot
Ouddabi.
Atalan walked with her to the door of his office and shook her hand in
parting, and as she rode down in the lift she felt a sense of release
and freedom.
She had left the Renault standing in the sun in the Ministry car park.
When she opened the door the interior was hot enough to bake bread. She
opened all the windows and fanned the driver's door to force out the
heated air, but still the surface of the driver's seat burned the backs
of her thighs when she slid in behind the wheel.
As soon as she drove through the gates she was engulfed in the swarm of
Cairo traffic. She crawled along behind an overloaded bus that belched a
steady blue cloud of diesel fumes over the Renault. The traffic problem
was one that seemed to have no solution. There was so little parking
available that vehicles lined the verge of the road three and four
deep," choking the flow in the centre to a trickle.
As the bus in front of her braked and forced her to a halt, Royan smiled
as she recalled the old joke that some drivers who had parked at the