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