The Golden One Read online

  “Yes,” said Daoud placidly. “There is no hurry. Look.” Another shift of the stone surface resulted in a further subsistence – no more than an inch, but now Ramses saw what Daoud’s calmer mind had grasped. Someone was digging the stone out from below, a little at a time.

  “They will be in the passage,” Daoud went on, climbing down into the shaft and taking the basket Selim handed him. “We will soon have them out.”

  There wasn’t anything they could do to help Daoud except empty the basket as soon as he handed it up. Ramses fought the urge to join him in the shaft, but only one person could work efficiently in the narrow space. It was not long, though it seemed an eternity to the anxious watchers, before a break in the solid wall of the shaft became visible – the squared-off lintel of the entrance to the side passage.

  It was filled to the top with broken stone.

  Ramses lost the last remnants of his calm. “Father!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Mother, for God’s sake -”

  Daoud stopped digging. In the silence Ramses heard sounds of activity behind that ominous blockage. An irregular gap, less than two inches deep, appeared, and an eerily distorted, very irritated voice was heard.

  “Ramses, is that you? I trust you did not allow him to escape. Is Daoud with you? He will have to empty the entire shaft, the cursed stones keep trickling down into the passage. Though ‘trickle’ is perhaps an inappropriate word.”

  After Ramses had drawn his first full breath in what felt like hours, he persuaded his garrulous mother to retreat farther down the passage. She continued to shout instructions and questions, and they shouted questions back at her – a fairly futile exercise, since Daoud had gone back to work with renewed energy and the crash and rattle of stone drowned out most of the words. Ramses shouted along with the rest of them. He had been utterly taken aback by the intensity of his relief when he heard his mother’s voice, and a distant bellow from Emerson. This wasn’t the first time they had been in trouble, not by a long shot, and he had always worried about them, but for some reason he had never fully realized how much he loved and needed them. The very qualities that sometimes irritated him were the qualities he would miss most: his mother’s infuriating self-confidence and awful aphorisms, his father’s belligerence and awful temper. After all the adventures they had survived with their usual aplomb, it would be horribly ironic if they met their final defeat (he couldn’t even think the other word) at the hands of the most contemptible opponent they had ever faced.

  I’m getting to be as superstitious as Mother, he thought. It hasn’t happened. It isn’t going to happen.

  His mother’s half-heard orders had provided enough information to save valuable time. Some of their followers ran off and came back with enough wood to make a litter as well as a splint for Emerson’s arm. The light of several torches brightened the increasing darkness and one overly enthusiastic helper got a basketful of rock square on the chin as he leaned over the shaft offering unnecessary advice.

  As soon as the space was clear enough, Ramses dropped down and crawled into the passage. It was half-filled with bits of stone, which sloped down toward the far end. His mother hadn’t sat waiting to be rescued; she had scooped the stuff out from below as Jamil dumped it in above. She hadn’t been able to keep up with him, but that was his mother for you – “every little bit helps,” she would have told herself, and, “Never give up hope.” Something caught in his throat. He hurried on toward the square opening at the far end, which glowed with faint light.

  He took in the scene in a single glance, by the light of the failing torch – the pile of rugs on which Emerson was lying, the jars, the stores of food – and his mother, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, dredging peas out of a tin with her fingers.

  “Ah, there you are, my dear,” she said. “And Nefret too? How nice.”

  Her face was filthy, her hair gray with stone dust. Arms and shoulders were bare and as dirty as her face; the garment that more or less covered the upper part of her body had narrow ruffled straps, yards of lace, and several little pink bows.

  Ramses was unable to speak or move. Nefret had gone at once to Emerson and was examining his arm. She let out a choked laugh. “She’s used the ribs and shaft of the parasol for a splint!”

  “Once again proving, if proof were needed, the all-round usefulness of a good stout parasol,” said his mother.

  Peas went flying as Ramses snatched her up and hugged her.

  “All’s well that ends well,” I remarked, sipping my whiskey and soda.

  The axiom was trite, I confess, but I do not believe it deserved the general grumble of disapproval it received. They were all there on the veranda, even Katherine. Dinner was going to be very late, since Fatima had been too agitated to instruct the cook when she learned that not only we, but Ramses and Nefret and Daoud and Selim, had vanished into thin air, somewhere between Sheikh Abd el Gurneh and the western cliffs. Cyrus and Bertie had waited less than an hour before going in pursuit; finding the horses still in Mohammed’s charge and with no idea of where to look next, they had returned to the house in the hope that some or all of us had returned.

  I cannot say that anyone behaved sensibly. Cyrus had sent for his wife, Sennia demanded that she be allowed to take the Great Cat of Re out to look for Ramses, and Gargery had to be forcibly restrained from dashing wildly out of the house waving a pistol. His grumbles, on the monotonous theme of “going off like that without me” were the loudest of all.

  “Do be still, Gargery,” I said sternly. “And the rest of you. We had no choice but to act at once.”

  “Quite,” said Emerson, who was having some difficulty smoking his pipe and drinking his whiskey with only one serviceable arm. Nefret had tended to him; he had a nice neat cast and a proper sling. Nefret had admitted, in confidence, that she had made the cast twice as heavy and thick as was usual, since she knew he would keep hitting it against things. I saw the logic of this, though I knew it would mean a few more shirts ruined. I had had to cut a long slit in the sleeve of the one he was wearing so he could get it over the cast.

  “Well, mebbe so,” Cyrus conceded. “But you four should have left word with someone. You knew we’d be worried.”

  Ramses began, “I’m very -”

  “Sorry be damned,” said his father gruffly. “For all you knew, there was not a moment to lose. Ramses, my boy – er – thank you. Again.”

  Ramses’s thin brown face broke into a smile. “It wasn’t me, Father, it was Daoud and Jumana. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have done better.”

  Daoud beamed. “Who is Sherlock Holmes?” he asked.

  “The greatest detective who ever lived,” Ramses replied. None of us laughed, for fear of hurting Daoud’s feelings, but Ramses directed another smile at me. “Except for Mother.”

  Then we could laugh. I joined in as heartily as the others, my heart swelling with affection.

  “Sennia, it is long past your bedtime,” I said. “Off you go.”

  She had to give everyone a good-night kiss and of course she had to have the last word. “The Great Cat of Re would have found you.”

  “Ha,” I said, but I said it under my breath. The kitten had grown very fat and lazy. Curled up on Ramses’s lap, it resembled a shapeless bundle of spotted gray fur.

  After Sennia had gone I took another cucumber sandwich. I was ravenous, for the peas and the foie gras that had preceded them had done very little to assuage the hunger resulting from long hours of strenuous manual labor.

  “Let us now,” I said, “discuss what we have learned. It has not been wasted effort, though we did let Jamil get away from us.”

  “I haven’t learned a blamed thing except that you two are incorrigible,” Cyrus grumbled.

  “Not at all, Cyrus. First, there is the interesting matter of Jamil’s costume. He was not wearing Jumana’s clothes. They would have been far too small for him. He cannot have purchased them because… Need I explain my reasoning?”


  “No,” Katherine said. “Aside from the question of how he could pay for them, I can’t see him going into one of the shops and trying on blouses and skirts.”

  “That is right. We will leave that matter for the moment. I think I know the answer, and it can easily be proved. The second clue… Ramses, at one time you were able to recall the entire contents of a crowded storeroom some hours after you had seen it. Do you remember what was in Jamil’s hideout?”

  “Rugs, several jars… I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Sorry, Mother.”

  “Quite understandable, my dear,” I said. His impulsive embrace had touched me deeply, even if it had hurt my back. To see my imperturbable son forget all else in the joy of finding his parents alive and well assured me that his affection was sincere and profound.

  “Fortunately I had ample time to inspect the place,” I went on. “It was well stocked, but the most interesting items were the tins of food. European food – peas and beans and cabbage, beef, even a tin of foie gras. Someone supplied him with those delicacies, or with the money to purchase them. No, Jumana, I know it wasn’t you.”

  I knew because I had been careful to keep all the cash in the house under lock and key. Trust is a beautiful thing, but when someone has done you an injury, you are a fool if you give him the chance to do you another.

  “It is beginning to look as if he has found another tomb,” Ramses said thoughtfully. “It’s the only way he could lay his hands on that much money, by selling some of the artifacts. Mother, what did you do with that cosmetic jar you bought in Cairo? I’d like to have a closer look at it.”

  “Wait until after dinner,” I said, rising with a suppressed groan. Those long hours on hands and knees in the passage, pulling the rubble out, had taken their toll on my back, and ruined a good pair of leather gloves.

  The Vandergelts stayed, of course. Wild horses could not have dragged Cyrus away, and nothing made Fatima happier than having more people to feed. Some of us were rather inclined to gobble, I am afraid; but I noticed that Bertie was not eating with his usual healthy appetite. Under cover of the animated speculations about another tomb, I said softly, “Are you feeling well, Bertie? How is your ankle?”

  “It’s fine. I could walk or climb with no trouble, if everyone would stop fussing over me.” Repenting his surly tone almost at once, he gave me an apologetic smile. “You told me last year you’d let me take a hand in your next adventure, remember? I haven’t done a bl – - blasted thing to help! It’s nobody’s fault but mine, I know that; I’m so confounded clumsy and stupid -”

  “Now don’t say that, Bertie. Anyone could suffer an accident like yours, and we are still a long way from a solution to this matter. Who knows, your opportunity may come at any moment.”

  The corners of his mouth drooped. “Yes, ma’am, I hope so. I’ve been sitting in that chair staring at the same scenery for so long, it’s driving me crazy. I swear, I know every crack in that cliff face and every brick in those house walls.”

  “We will have another look at your foot, Nefret and I,” I promised. “Perhaps with a little strapping you can begin to move about more.”

  As soon as we had finished dinner we retired to the drawing room, and I went to fetch the cosmetic jar and lid and the other odds and ends I had purchased from Aslimi. Emerson arranged the lamps to give the maximum amount of light and Ramses took the jar in his long fingers.

  “There was a cartouche,” he said, after a moment. “I think I can make out a few lines.” He turned the jar from side to side, so that the light came at it from different angles. “Paper and pencil, Nefret, please.”

  The sketch he produced was, I confess, something of a letdown. There was a great expanse of blank paper and a few random lines, some horizontal, some perpendicular, some curved. Ramses studied it for a few moments and then began filling in the missing spaces, connecting one section to another, as one does in a certain kind of child’s puzzle. Finally he put the pencil down. “That’s all I can be certain of. It’s enough, though.”

  Not to me, I thought, studying the hypothetical hieroglyphs in puzzlement. There were only a few: a long, thin, squared-off sign, the jagged line of the water hieroglyph, and a pair of curving horns.

  “Not to me,” said Emerson.

  “There is only one royal cartouche that contains those particular signs,” Ramses said. “To the best of my knowledge, that is. This is how the rest of it looks.” He completed the name and Emerson let out a gasp.

  “Shepenwepet. By the Almighty, the boy has found one of the Divine Wives of Amon!”

  8

  We sat up late that night, going over and over the astonishing revelation – for none of us doubted Ramses’s reconstruction of the cartouche. In the end we were forced to the conclusion that there was absolutely no way of knowing where in the immense Theban necropolis Jamil’s hypothetical tomb might be. The cosmetic pot in itself told us nothing, except that Jamil was not as stupid as we had believed.

  “It is a common error,” I admitted, in chagrin, “to assume that because someone is uneducated and illiterate he is necessarily ignorant. There are ways of acquiring knowledge other than by reading. Jamil had worked for a number of Egyptologists and he knew a great deal about tomb robbing – more than we know, I expect. He had sense enough to realize that such a cartouche would arouse speculation, so he removed it, even though he lost money thereby. Are you certain it was done recently, Ramses, not in ancient times, by someone who wanted to reuse the jar?”

  Ramses was certain. The little pot was not an essential part of the funerary equipment, like a canopic jar or a sarcophagus. Besides, the marks were fresh. The patina -

  Emerson had cut him off at that point, remarking that we would take his word for it.

  The other bits and pieces I had purchased from Aslimi were even less informative. As we all knew, the same techniques and motifs had been used throughout pharaonic history. They might not have come from the same place as the jar; there was no way of dating them.

  “So where are we gonna look next?” Cyrus asked hopefully. “The western wadis again?”

  “We certainly are not going off on a series of random searches,” Emerson replied, extracting his pipe and tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket. “Damnation,” he added, acknowledging the difficulty of proceeding with the process.

  “Let me do that for you, my dear.” I took them from him.

  Bertie coughed deprecatingly. “I may be on the wrong track altogether, but if I were trying to conceal something I wouldn’t hang about the place howling like a banshee and making a spectacle of myself.”

  “I agree,” Ramses said. “That’s the one area we can forget about. If he wants us to go there, it’s because there’s nothing to find.”

  The men all nodded. I hoped they were right, since I had not much enjoyed our excursions to that remote region, but I was not entirely convinced. Jamil obviously enjoyed taunting people, and youth suffers, among other weaknesses, from overconfidence. It might amuse the wretched boy to lead us to the general area and watch us wear ourselves out looking for a well-concealed entrance.

  I had to admit that thus far his confidence had been justified; he had outwitted us on every occasion.

  Emerson announced that we would return to Deir el Medina next morning. “We will finish that plan of yours, Bertie,” he said. “Fine job, my boy. There are only a few more details to be added.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday,” Cyrus objected. “My men have the day off, and you ought to rest, Emerson.”

  “We can finish the surveying without the men,” Emerson said dogmatically. “And I have no intention of allowing a minor injury to keep me from my usual activities – all my usual activities.”

  Nor did it. I wished Nefret had not made the cast quite so heavy.

  We managed to get off next morning without Sennia or the Great Cat of Re. Nefret did not accompany us either. I had suggested – tactfully, as is my habit – that she might want to give a little luncheon party
, since she had not had the opportunity to entertain our friends in her new abode. Under threat of losing our custom, Abdul Hadi had actually finished a dining table and several chairs. She readily consented, but added with a knowing smile, “I won’t ask what you are up to, Mother, since I know you enjoy your little surprises.”

  Early morning in Luxor, particularly at that season of the year, is always beautifully cool and stimulating. I was even more keenly aware of it that day, after those long hours in the stifling darkness of the buried chamber. Truth compels me to admit that I had wondered at times whether I would ever again behold the shining cliffs of western Thebes and feel the morning breeze against my face. Logic had informed me that Jamil could not continue pouring stones into the shaft indefinitely, but the space in the passage and the chamber itself was limited, and so was the air.

  I had not, and would not, confess this weakness to any other. After all, it had turned out right in the end.

  When we arrived at Deir el Medina, Bertie was working on his plan, and Selim had also turned up. He was not as devout as his Uncle Daoud, who always attended Friday services when he could.

  “That is very well done, Bertie,” I exclaimed. “Obviously you didn’t spend all the time staring at the cliffs! But where is Cyrus? Didn’t he come with you?”

  “Up there.” Bertie gestured. “I offered to go with him, but he said -”

  “Damnation!” Emerson exclaimed loudly. Cyrus was high on the hillside, north of the area where most of the tombs were located. Hearing Emerson’s shout, he straightened and waved.

  “What’s he doing up there?” Ramses asked.

  “He wanted to have a look at the tombs of the Saite princesses,” Bertie explained.

  “Why, for Heaven’s sake?” I demanded. “They aren’t the original tombs of the princesses – the God’s Wives, to be more precise – or even their reburials. Two of their sarcophagi were -”

  “Yes, yes, Peabody,” said Emerson. “Damned old fool climbing around up there…” He set off toward the slope with his usual brisk stride.