"She cannot help it. She has a natural affinity for murder."
"Hmm," Louise purrs unhappily, hunkering down for the show.
I settle down beside her. One by one the torch-topped poles lining the opposite shore in front of the Oasis Hotel's Karnak Temple facade are whipping into gas-fired life, the flames rippling and snapping like scarlet flags in the night.
The staffs of firelight play over the thirty-foot-tall statues glimpsed beyond the tall, fat pillars. Naturally, I have selected a
CAT ON A HYACINTH HUNT * 107
viewing spot on the wharf directly opposite my patroness, Bastet. She is a tall stately woman with arms crossed upon her proud bosom, and the dignified head of a Somali cat. The flames reflect like a wink from the gold earring in one erect ear tip.
"You realize," I comment to Louise, "that if you are my daughter, and I make no concessions by speculating, you are descended on the female side from Pharaoh's Footstool."
"Shhh! The show is starting!"
Louise is gazing ahead as if stalking prey, and I see why. Something low is glinting through the water. It looks like a crocodile, but it is the size of the Loch Ness monster. In the flickering torchlight, the head lifts out of the water, a predatory beak on an epic scale. We are talking a bird-headed reptile here. This particular combination of totems is very dear to the feline heart, especially the heart of the desert-dwelling feline. Consider it a feast of Godzilla with feathers.
Of course the entire show is an ancient-world version of the Mirage Hotel's famed pirate ship encounter in a man-made moat farther up the Las Vegas Strip. Let us face it; with all the fresh construction here, it is hard to come up with a new shtick.
Speaking of shticks, long gilded oars are beating the water into ripples, like on sand dunes.
The torch flames skim along every moving surface, turning the lagoon into a black bolt of moire taffeta that rustles with chilling movement.
Behind us, onlookers have crowded into a solid wall, despite the late hour. I would be nervous to have all those human feet straining toward my rear member, except I too am caught up in the spectacle.
Then drums erupt like the distant strikes of a giant. Hollow, echoing beats simulate the heart of the monster barge as its oars cut through the water like dull sheers slicing ebony silk.
A gasp in unison turns all heads in the opposite direction. Another low, dark gilded beast of the submarine night is surging toward its opposite number. Oiled galley-slave arms writhe like pit vipers as they propel the oars in their lumbering rhythm.
Suddenly a fireball erupts in the black sky over the lagoon. I am highly doubtful that the Egyptians had fireworks, but they could have had an unsung Chinese advisor ... or perhaps a well traveled cat who had the ear (and foot) of Pharoah, a cat who had preceded Marco Polo to China by several hundred centuries, a Midnight Marco, so to speak.
While the fallout of sparks showers down upon temple and water and wharf, Midnight Louise stirs beside me. "Hmmph. You would think with all the money for foolish spectacle in Las Vegas they could get a better carver for the figurehead."
Much as I revere Egyptian art, I would have to admit I find it a bit wooden, so I am not surprised that this mockup does not pass Miss Louise's connoisseuress's standards. Meanwhile, I am gazing left at the incoming barge as on-board torches flap into life like tethered birds of prey.
I recognize the jeweled glow of a splendid throne, and sitting on it is that splendid dame of Old Egypt, Miss Cleopatra herself, decked out to make any chorus girl take notes. Her barge boasts a busty figurehead with a jackal head that reminds me of the one at Cleopatra's Barge restaurant at Caesars Palace (the bust, not the jackal head). Since the Oasis is owned by the same lot that run Caesars, it is no surprise they reinforce each other's theme.
By now two sets of tom-toms are striking enough tympanum to raise the dead, which is not to be unexpected in an ancient Egypt-inspired spectacle. The jackal-headed god Anubis strides forth between two pillars, a limp human form dangling from his extended arms. Gore has been selling since Moses was knee-high to a Neanderthal.
I take a quick peek at the statue of Bastet to see if she is undergoing any changes, since not even statues in Las Vegas are permitted to just stand there anymore, but must do parlor tricks, or at least vaudeville turns.
Now Anubis's voice booms out, and he sounds an awful lot like the hairless fellow who does voice-over advertisements on TV ever since he quit captaining a starship. I guess the Brits had their sights on north Africa even back in ancient times.
"Beware the wrath of Osiris," Anubis hollers in hoity-toity tones. "Your kas will walk upon water before they sink beneath the anger of Cleopatra's warriors."
"Our 'whats'?" Louise hisses next to me.
"A 'ka' is a spirit. A soul. The animated remnant of a dead person."
"Oh, come on! The only thing animated about a dead person might be the parasites it attracts."
"Please! Must you be so graphic? Remember, we plan to eat dinner after this."
"People food," she spits with disdain. "You are getting too soft, old man."
I refrain from my usual reply to such lip: a smack in said lip. In this case, given our foggy genetic connections and gender differences, it could be construed as kit abuse, and I could be sued. It is getting in this country so that you cannot defend yourself against even your own (maybe) kin.
I avert my gaze to the forthcoming flash. The intruder barge lobs a fire-bomb over the low-slung bow that explodes above the water and sinks into it like a cargo of shattered stars.
By now the topside fireworks are shooting off in streaks of red, blue, green and pink. Those do not strike me as particularly Egyptian color schemes, except for the blue, and neither does the matching-hued neon hieroglyphs that light up the temple pillars and begin flashing on and off. I expect at any moment to read a neon crawl circling a pillar that advertises "Cleo's Dreadlocks Braided While You Wait" or "Ramses the Bookie" or "Sethos the Cabbie Charioteer."
Though I suppose it would be the Book of the Dead that Ramses would be hawking.
How very odd that when one thinks things Egyptian, one dwells on death. But, then, the culture set great store by death ... or, rather, by ritualizing the aftermath as well as the afterlife.
I find it also odd that only the figure of Bastet remains in the dark, so to speak. Except for the fugitive passage of the surrounding neon blinking over her stony, sarcophagus-shaped form, she lingers in the shadows, calm and dignified.
Then a vagrant shower of fireworks falls upon her shoulder, and her earring burns like a circle of molten lava.
"It is sinking!" an onlooker shouts behind me.
I glance to the water again. Of course the intruder barge is sinking. These water fights always end with the loser taking a bath in the briny deeps. By now the barge is a fiery pyre that slowly douses as it sinks. The galley slaves in their striped, sphinx-style headdresses dive into the spark-showered water like rather decorative rats.
Not long after no trace remains of the sunken barge, Cleopatra's majestic ship glides through the glittering water where it foundered, the queen herself nodding regally to the witnesses, her barge now ablaze with fire-lit gilt and tinsel.
The drums have reached a pitch that makes the wharf's heavy timbers shiver. I shiver myself in the cool January night, despite my heavy fur coat, despite the press of human body heat behind me, cheering the victorious queen, forgetting the fallen crew.
I eye Bastet again across the gaudy gulf of showboat and fireworks and agitated water.
She is shadowed and dark and calm. And ominous, very ominous. My whiskers twitch. I may not yet have a ka, Ra be praised, but I have a feeling that the other services of Pharaoh's Footstool will soon be called into action.
Something is rotten in the Middle Kingdom. And I think Midnight at the Oasis is about to become Murder at the Oasis.