Read Ebook: There was a King in Egypt by Lorimer Norma

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Ebook has 3623 lines and 174374 words, and 73 pages

"Getting hot" was expressive of getting close to a find. It was the old saying which they had used as children when they played hide-and-seek.

"Yes, I think we are on the right track and I want to get ahead, so if you will go down to the ferry and fetch her up here I'll be awfully obliged to you."

"Right you are, old chap. I'll be there at five o'clock, and if she's not punctual I'll do a bit of sketching. You're sure everything else will be all right?"

"I don't think she'll be late, because she is to be in Luxor by eleven o'clock. She is to rest there until it gets cooler and Abdul is to bring her over the river from the hotel. The donkeys will be at the ferry to meet her. Mohammed is very anxious for her to ride his camel" ; "he thinks it more proper and fitting for my sister to make her entry into his district on a camel, but I don't feel certain that Margaret would appreciate the honour. He is keen to 'do her proud.'"

"Good old Mohammed!" Michael said. "He has a great sense of dignity and convention."

"And of hospitality," Lampton said. "He never forgets that as the sheikh of the district he is its host as well."

That was all that was said about Margaret's arrival. The two men lapsed into silence until breakfast was over. If they had been two women discussing the coming of a man in their midst, there might have been more to say on the subject. In silence Freddy lit his cigarette and wandered into Margaret's room. It was as bare and plainly furnished as a convent cell or a room in a small log-hut in a frontier-camp in Canada--just the necessary bed and table, a washstand and one chair. It was scrupulously clean, and the white mosquito-curtain, which was suspended from the roof and dropped over the little iron bed like a bride's veil, gave the room a pleasant virginal atmosphere.

Freddy came back to the sitting-room, evidently satisfied. His quick eye had noticed that the "boy" had carried out his orders.

"Meg's an awful girl for books," he said, as he carried off a bundle of yellow-paper-bound French novels and one or two volumes of the Temple Classics to her room.

"A bit dry, isn't it, for a beginner?"

"Not for Meg," Freddy said. "She can tackle pretty stiff stuff. At college she used to suck the guts out of a book like a weasel sucking blood from a rabbit."

"Blue stocking!" Michael said to himself. He abhorred the type of ardent, eager, studious woman with whom he had come in contact during his university life. "Able and abominable" he called them.

In less than ten minutes the two companions had separated; the one, with his paint-box and camp-stool in his hand, made his way to the tomb where he was copying with delicate and extraordinary exactitude the exquisite figures and heads painted on the walls and pillars of the vast building; the other directed his steps to the site where the band of native excavators was already at work.

Nothing could look less inviting, less interesting, as Freddy approached it, for as yet there was little or nothing for the untutored eye to see but the debris of familiar desert rubbish. But Freddy Lampton knew otherwise. Only yesterday the most experienced of the workmen had struck something hard, something which told him that they had finished with loose sand and broken rocks and had struck the ancient handiwork of man.

The site chosen had been a mere conjecture on Freddy Lampton's part, a conjecture guided by scientific knowledge and careful research. He felt convinced that the tomb which they were looking for was close to the spot where they were working. Indications such as the excavator looks for had decided him to begin work on the site. The discovery yesterday had been nothing more or less than the first indication of a narrow flight of steps, cut in the virgin desert rock, a stairway probably built by the tomb-builders for the use of the workmen, in order to carry away baskets of sand and rubbish without slipping.

The moment that the expert workman had come across this staircase, they had suspended work until "Effendi" had been sent for and found. Under his eye and partly by his own pickaxe, the little flight of embryo steps, with a very steep gradient, had been laid bare. In the vast expanse which the work covered, it seemed a very small thing, but the greatest underground temples--for the tombs are veritable temples--of Egypt, and some of the most wonderful of her monuments, have been discovered by far fainter clues. The little staircase, about twenty feet below the surface of the sand, was enough to fill the young Englishman's heart with hope. He had come upon man's handiwork--no doubt they would soon come upon more important masonry.

After an inspection of the various points of excavation and a word of greeting here and there had been passed with upper workmen, those who had showed an intelligent interest in their work, Freddy returned to the exciting spot and with two or three men who had "fingers" and a "sense" of things, began his morning's picking.

While he worked away with youthful energy and an almost inspired intelligence, he could hear the toilers with the rubbish-baskets singing their monotonous chants. The word "Allah, Allah" came repeatedly to his ears. He had grown so accustomed to the words of their chants that he followed them subconsciously; the words "Allah, Lord of Kindness, Giver of Ease," rang out with monotonous persistence. Allah was to ease their burdens; Allah was to moisten their dry lips; the "Lord of the Worlds" was to hasten the time when the poor man might sit in the shade and smell the sweet scents of paradise and listen to the sound of running waters.

They chanted verses from the Koran as Jack Tars sing sea songs. In Mohammedan lands the song of Allah never dies.

"A lover says to his dove, 'Send me your wings for a day.' The dove replied, 'The affair is vain.' I said, 'Some other day, that I may soar through the sky and see the face of the beloved; I shall obtain love enough for a year and will return, O dove, in a day.' The night! The night! O those sweet hands! Gather of the dewy peach! Whence were ye, and whence were we, when ye ensnared us?"

When the meal was eaten, each man sought some vestige of shade, behind a mound of rock or an ash-heap of debris, or in the excavated channels of the site; there with full stomach and contented mind he would lay himself down to sleep, amid the heap of ruins which thousands of years ago had been the field of vast numbers of toilers, such as were he and his fellow-toilers, slaving for the glorification of an absolute monarch, whose kingdom was the civilized world. He cared not one jot nor tittle for what he had uncovered or what secrets the valley or hills had hidden from men for countless centuries. Filling baskets full of rubbish was his work, his method of earning a living, and it mattered nothing to him whether the rubbish was culled from the golden sand of the most wonderful valley in the world, or thrown out of the filthy ashbins in the native city of Cairo. Toil was all one thing to him; it had no interest, it suggested no varieties. Allah had willed it. The clear blue sky and the sunlit hills, with their tombs and tombs and endless tombs stretching further and further into the western valley, they, too, were Allah's will, as were the dark, evil-smelling streets of the city, with their noise and the crowding of human and animal beasts of burden.

As Freddy approached Michael Amory a look of satisfaction spread over his face. "Mike," as he called him, was so busily engrossed in his work that he did not look up. He was making a delicate and extraordinarily exact reproduction on paper of a figure of an Egyptian King making offerings to an enthroned Osiris. No other artist had ever done the same work with his delicacy of touch and exactness of detail. The picture on his easel looked as if he had cut a square block out of the polished limestone which held the tinted relief of the King making the offering to the god, and set it upon his easel.

Freddy was proud of Michael and not a little surprised at the rapidity with which he had grasped the nature of his excavation work, which was not only the opening up of fresh monuments for the pleasure of the public, but the search after missing links and the verifying of well-founded conjectures. He knew that Michael had read a fair amount of Egyptian history, that he had specialized in one period, and that he had studied, in his own fashion, something of the mythology of ancient Egypt, but he was quite unprepared for the "sense" of the more serious part of the work which he had shown.

Besides which, Freddy knew more than Michael thought he did of the new distraction which had disturbed his mind.

About once in ten days Freddy found it almost necessary to go to Assuan or Luxor and there throw himself heart and soul into the festivities of the foreign hotel society. For one night and half a day he played tennis and danced and was young again. These periodical outings and his private hobbies kept his mind and nerves well balanced. At his age it was scarcely healthy for a sport-loving, normal Englishman to spend his days and nights all alone, in the silent valley in the hills, his only companions the mummies of Pharaohs and the bones unearthed from subterranean tombs. But Freddy slept as happily and as soundly with mummies in his room and ancient skulls below his bed as he did in the modern, conventional bedroom of the big hotel at Assuan.

Michael had accompanied him to these dances, and Freddy had noticed that on each occasion he was very much engrossed by the company of an Englishwoman of whom he had heard a good deal that was ugly and unpleasant. He had long ago ceased to pay any attention to the scandals which were related to him each season about the English and American women who came to Egypt for the sake of the climate and for its hotel-society--ugly stories, generally greatly exaggerated, but often with a foundation of unsavoury truth in them. The sands of Egypt breed scandals as quickly as the climate degenerates the morals of shallow-minded tourists. But this woman Freddy knew to be as dangerous as she was charming; and he also knew the enthusiastic nature of Michael and how it was temperamental with him to place all women on pedestals and worship them as pure, high beings, far above mere men. Fallen idols never shattered his belief; they were simply forgotten.

Freddy "had no use" for the woman. His practical mind had summed her up at a glance. But he was afraid that his friend might drift into a very undesirable friendship with her. She would enjoy his simplicity, for he seemed to have been born without guile, while his intellectual fascination was not to be denied. Michael was generous, impetuous and reckless.

"I'm not going to disturb you," Freddy said. "We'll meet at lunch."

"Right-ho!" Michael said. "I've almost finished."

"Looks as if you'd blown the thing on to the paper this time," Freddy said. "Gad, it's topping!"

Michael said nothing, but he glowed inwardly. A word of enthusiastic praise from Freddy was worth all his morning's toil in the breathless, stuffy tomb-chamber of the Pharaoh whose embalmed remains it contained.

Freddy returned to his hut and flung himself down in a cane lounge-chair in as cool a spot as he could find. He picked up a French novel and lit a cigarette.

Meanwhile the simple meal was being laid with a neatness and convention which was a striking contrast to the wooden hut and scarcity of furniture in the room. The Arab who was setting the table was a perfect parlourmaid, a product of Freddy's teaching. The only thing Freddy was proud of was his ability to train and make good servants. Mohammed Ali's table-waiting really pleased him. He thought Meg would approve of him. He was an intelligent lad and proud of his English master, who seemed to think that telling a lie for the sake of being polite or kind was really a sin. In fact, the Effendi was very rarely cross, except when Mohammed forgot and told a lie. Sometimes it was very hard to tell the truth when a lie would, he knew, make his master happy. While he set the table he felt his master's eyes were on him, even though he was reading a love story which was so beautiful that he had seen, or thought he had seen, tears in the eyes of Effendi Amory, when he was reading it the night before.

Teddy was not finding the beautiful story of the Frenchwoman go interesting as Mohammed Ali imagined. He had allowed the days to pass, with all their engrossing interest, without giving much thought to Margaret's coming or what she would do with herself, or how her presence would affect their daily life.

Now in a few hours she would be with them. This was, in fact, his last meal alone with Mike. He had never bothered about the matter because Meg was such a good sort and so jolly well able to amuse and look after herself. The days had just passed, and now she was coming, Meg, who was his best friend in the whole world, Meg who in his eyes had the mind of a boy and the sympathy of a woman.

At five o'clock Michael Amory, true to his word, was down at the ferry, awaiting the arrival of Margaret Lampton. The ferry-boat was pulling across the Nile; he would soon be able to distinguish her. In all probability no other Englishwoman would be crossing to the western bank of the river at so late an hour. Tourists who came to visit the Colossi of Memnon, whose song to the dawn never dies, or to "do" the ruins of the Hundred-Gated city of Thebes, came much earlier in the day.

While the boat was drifting slowly across, Michael's eyes rested lovingly on his surroundings. If the girl was appreciative of Nile scenery, how greatly it must be impressing her!

Boats, like white birds with big crossed wings, flew past him on the pale blue river. Heavy, flat-bottomed barges, coming up from the pottery factories, laden with jars which were to be used for the building of native houses, drifted past, with their well-stacked, squarely-built cargoes piled high like stacks of grain. One barge, with a wide brown sail, was full of fresh green melons. Across the river, on the opposite bank, bands of women, enveloped in black and walking in Indian file on the yellow sands, carrying water-jars on their heads, were wending their way to their mud villages. The gleam of their metal anklets caught the sunlight.

But the ferry-boat was drawing close to the bank; the next minute he would be able to distinguish Freddy's sister, with Abdul in attendance. The other passengers, with native politeness, were already making way for the English Sitt and her servant to go ashore.

Michael hurried forward to greet her. Margaret's blue veil hid her features until he was quite close to her.

"I'm Michael Amory, I live with your brother," Michael said. "I have come to bring you to his camp. He was too busy, or he would have been here himself--he asked me to apologize to you."

Margaret's long firm fingers gave Michael's outstretched hand a grateful grasp. Michael, whose sensibilities were very near the surface, lost nothing of the girl's meaning. A feeling of relief soothed his anxiety.

"How awfully kind of you to come!" she said. "I knew Freddy would be busy, digging up something that was once somebody, four thousand years ago."

"That's about it," Michael said. "As I could be spared and he couldn't, he asked me to look to your arrival and bring you to the camp."

Abdul had hurried on to see that the donkeys were properly harnessed and all in good order for the long ride across the plain and through the immortal valley.

"Are you excavating too?" Margaret asked.

"I'm allowed to do a little 'picking' under your brother's eyes, but my real job is painting. I'm only dabbling in archaeology as yet."

"Painting in connection with his School of Excavation?"

"Yes. Sometimes it is necessary to make almost instant copies of the excavated paintings, while the colours are fresh and the text legible."

"Isn't it all awfully interesting?" the girl asked. "I feel almost afraid to come in amongst you, for I know literally nothing about Egyptology. I've only once been in the Egyptian section of the British Museum, and that's the sum total of my knowledge."

"Good old Freddy!" Margaret said, and as she smiled, Michael for the first time saw her likeness to her brother; it had escaped him before, because Freddy was very fair and Margaret was duskily dark. He could see that even through her blue veil. When she smiled and showed the same sharp-looking, well-formed teeth, as white as porcelain, Michael knew that if the girl had only been fair instead of dark, she would be almost the exact duplicate of her brother. But the expression of her grey-brown eyes was different; they were steadfast, calm eyes, which moved more slowly; they were softer than her brother's.

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