“I think Beasley got behind the crowd; somebody delayed him around the forecourt and bashed him. Whether the guilty person is found or not, I’ve got to put together a good story for the home office.”
“Well, good luck. By the way, when do we sail?”
“In the morning.”
“In that case I’ll get below and study my notes on the temple at Komombo. With interesting observations on mummified crocodiles.”
“This tour is creating its own candidates for mummification,” Van Alt said.
At the head of the companionway, Rogers turned and called, “Van Alt!”
There was no response from the tour director. He sat unmoving, looking across the river with a faint smile, a smile that reflected more than his usual self-approval.
“Van Alt!” Rogers called again, this time more loudly.
Again there was no answer. At that moment Rogers realized what lay beneath Van Alt’s machismo posture, his efforts to sustain a youthful appearance. He was also aware that added credence had been given to the story he had been told that afternoon concerning the events of the previous night, a story in which Van Alt figured but about which he was now understandably silent.
He went down to the main deck and headed for the gangplank, passing the bar where the tour was preparing for dinner. He climbed the waterfront steps to the boulevard, ignoring the hawking carriage drivers, whose animated faces offered sharp contrast to the despondency of their horses. “Halloa! Halloa! See temple in sunset. Cheap. See temple in moon. Cheap.” He walked under the palms of the boulevard to the temple area and entered the long avenue of the rams-headed sphinxes which ended at the forecourt of the temple. The obelisk stood opposite the forecourt steps and a dozen yards to the left, surrounded on three sides by a low ruined wall, its pointed top pink in the setting sun. He seated himself on a sun-heated fragment of the wall and studied the spot where Beasley’s body had lain.
The sand had been disturbed by many feet, official and unofficial. He tried to recall the scene as he had observed it that morning, with Van Alt testing futilely for vital signs. He remembered Van Alt’s swift gesture, his hand plunging into the sand. Getting down on his knees, he probed the sand, turning it over in furrows, lifting it and letting it sift back between his fingers.
At the end of twenty-five minutes he had dug up and felt through the entire area where Beasley’s body had lain, and found nothing except an empty box that had contained camera film. He sat down, resting his back against the obelisk, hoping that he offended none of the mighty whose cartouches were carved into the yellow stone, and examined the churned-up area. An inch of clear colorless wire projected from a furrow like some worm of the age of technology. Rogers carefully lifted it from the sand to find at the end of it a dime-sized, pencil-thick button. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he thought of the years of scientific progress the tiny object represented, and thought too that, in addition to its other capabilities, it would be enough to convict a man of murder.
When Van Alt had asked him about the trip to Abydos that day, Rogers had forgotten to mention that Mrs. Murray had at last begun to unbend.
“I wish my tours consisted only of women like Mrs. Murray,” Van Alt had once said to him. “Women who don’t get excited when minor setbacks occur, who don’t think all foreigners have designs on their bodies or their property, who don’t spread gossip, and don’t take up early in the tour with people they have to shun for the rest of the tour.”
Van Alt was right, Rogers remembered, in another aspect of his analysis of tourist behavior. There were always some tourists who would rather roam through the sleaziest of souvenir stores and subject themselves to the most brazen robbery in the bazaars than see an impressive temple or the most subtle and elegant hieroglyphics. Rogers had watched the tour split into two groups the day when the bus paused in its journey to Abydos. One group went into the roadside souvenir stand that offered the usual pyramids, finger cymbals, beads, and fly whisks. The other had gone into an adjacent shop where Abdulal-Amraz demonstrated the ancient art of making paper from the papyrus plant and used his product to prepare cartouches to sell to the tourists. These he made to order, working deftly with his brush and drawing ink to write the names of the customers in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Rogers knew from Van Alt, who prided himself on his extensive knowledge of the people he dealt with, that Abdul was a member of the faculty of the university in Cairo, his field being early Egyptian history. The souvenir shop and the papyrus-making establishment were owned by an uncle who fostered this sideline which employed his nephew’s knowledge and also provided him with a much-needed supplement to his academic income. It interested Rogers that so many tourists should be taken with this esoteric communication. True, it was an unusual souvenir, made more unusual in some instances by the words the tourists requested be sketched on their square of papyrus. One of the West Coast people, for example, asked Abdul to draw “California, here I come,” a request that caused Abdul to shake his head in good-natured resignation. But mostly they asked for representations of their own or their children’s names.
When the bus was preparing to resume the trip to Abydos, Mrs. Murray climbed aboard, holding out a wet sheet of papyrus inscribed with a cartouche.
“That’s my name in the cartouche,” she said to Rogers as she seated herself beside him. “Or so he says. The thing I like about it is that no one will ever be able to get it into a computer.”
Rogers examined the papyrus. Abdul had inked an oblong border within which a short horizontal zigzag line was drawn over what looked like the branch of a tree. This was followed by a flattened oval, resembling a mouth.
“I don’t know if it’s my name or not,” she said, “and I don’t think it matters, because when I get it home nobody will be able to prove it’s not.”
“Well, this is an R,” Rogers said, pointing to the picture of the mouth. “Certainly there are enough R’s in Murray to make you think Abdul is close.”
“My first name is Ruth.”
“This zigzag line means ‘water’ and this other figure, the branch, means ‘wood.’ Are you sure your name isn’t R. Waterwood?”
She laughed. It was apparent that she was becoming more relaxed in her relations with him and some of the others on the tour. For the first several days she had maintained a friendly reserve. She spoke when spoken to, responding politely, but did nothing to sustain conversation. In this he thought he detected a resemblance to the silent Trewin — possibly as a result of their common New England background. If he remembered the tour data correctly, they both came from Massachusetts. In any case, now that the group had been together for a week Mrs. Murray’s reserve was diminishing, especially insofar as Trewin was concerned. Twice they had had drinks together and several times Rogers had seen them chatting at the rail while the Cheops pushed upriver.
Mrs. Murray asked him a few questions on the nature of hieroglyphics and then led him into an account of how he had gotten into Egyptology. He found himself talking freely, and not for some time did he realize that she was informing herself about his life without revealing the slightest detail of her own. He determined to break the pattern.
“I suppose your husband was prevented from accompanying you?”
“My husband died fifteen years ago in a fall from a horse. We ran a riding school. We bought this horse we knew very little about and—” She fell silent.
“Do you still run the school?”