English; for them the two languages were as one. Less often they used
French, which was their third common language. They had both received
their education at universities in England and the United States, so far
from this very Egypt of theirs. Royan loved the expression "This very
Egypt' that Taita used so often in the scrolls.
She felt a peculiar affinity in so many ways with this ancient Egyptian.
After all, she was his direct descendant.
She was a Coptic Christian, not of the Arab line that had so recently
conquered Egypt, less than fourteen centuries ago. The Arabs were
newcomers in this very Egypt of hers, while her own blood line ran back
to the time of the pharaohs and the great pyramids.
At ten 'clock Royan made coffee for them, heating it on the charcoal
stove that Alia had prepared for them before she went off to her own
family in the villa . They drank the 9 sweet, strong brew from thin cups
that were half-filled with the heavy grounds. While they sipped, they
talked as old friends.
.. For Royan that was their relationship, old friends. She had known
Duraid ever since she had returned from England with her doctorate in
archaeology and won her job with the Department of Antiquities, of which
he was the director.
She had been his assistant when he had opened the tomb in the Valley of
the Nobles, the tomb of Queen Lostris, the tomb that dated from about
1780 BC.
She had shared his disappointment when they had discovered that the tomb
had been robbed in ancient times and all its treasures plundered. All
that remained were the marvelous murals that covered the walls and the
ceilings of the tomb.
It was Royan herself who had been working at the wall behind the plinth
on which the sarcophagus had once stood, photographing the murals, when
a section of the plaster had fallen away to reveal in their niche the
ten alabaster jars. Each of the jars had contained a papyrus scroll.
Every one of them had been written and placed there by Taita, the stave
of the queen.
Since then their lives, Duraid's and her own, seemed to have revolved
around those scraps of papyrus. Although there was some damage and
deterioration, in the main they had survived nearly four thousand years
remarkably intact.
What a fascinating story they contained, of a nation attacked by a
superior enemy, armed with horse and chariot that were still alien to
the Egyptians of that time. Crushed by the Hyksos hordes, the people of
the Nile were forced to flee. Led by their queen, Lostris of the tomb,
they followed the great river southwards almost to its source amongst
the brutal mountains of the Ethiopian highlands.
Here amongst those forbidding mountains, Lostris had entombed the
mummified body of her husband, the Pharaoh Mamose, who had been slain in
battle against the Hyksos.
Long afterwards Queen Lostris had led her people back northwards to this
very Egypt. Armed now with their own horses and chariots, forged into
hard warriors in the African wilderness, they had come storming back
down the cataracts of the great river to challenge once more the Hyksos
invader, and in the end to triumph over him and wrest the double crown
of upper and lower Egypt from his grasp.
It was a story that appealed to every fibre of her being, and that had
fascinated her as they had unravelled each hieroglyph that the old slave
had penned on the papyrus'
It had taken them all these years, working at night here in the villa on
the oasis after their daily routine work at the museum in Cairo was
done, but at last the ten scrolls had been deciphered - all except the
seventh scroll. This was the one that was the enigma, the one which the
author had cloaked in layers of esoteric shorthand and allusions so
obscure that they were unfathomable at this remove of time. Some of the
symbols he used had never figured before in all the thousands of texts
that they had studied in their combined working lives. It was obvious to
them both that Taita had not intended that the scrolls should be read by
any eyes other than those of his beloved queen. These were his last gift
for her to take with her beyond the grave.
It had taken all their combined skills, all their imagination and
ingenuity, but at last they were approaching the conclusion of the task.
There were still many gaps in the translation and many areas where they
were uncertain whether or not they had captured the true meaning, but
they had laid out the bones of the manuscript in such order that they
were able to discern the outline of the creature it represented.
Now Duraid sipped his coffee and shook his head as he had done so often
before. "It frightens me," he said. "The responsibility. What to do with
this knowledge we have gleaned. If it should fall into the wrong hands
He sipped and sighed before he spoke again. "Even if we take it to the
right people, will they believe this material that is nearly four
thousand years old?"
"Why must we bring in others?" Royan asked with an edge of exasperation
in her voice. "Why can we not do alone what has to be done?" At times
like these the differences between them were most apparent. His was the
caution of age, while hers was the impetuosity of youth.
"You do not understand," he said. It always annoyed her when he said
that, when he treated her as the Arabs treated their women in a totally
masculine world. She had known the other world where women demanded and
received the right to be treated as equals. She was a creature caught
between those worlds, the Western world and the Arab world.
Royan's mother was an English woman who had worked at the British
Embassy in Cairo in the troubled times after World War II. She had met
and married Royan's father, who had been a young Egyptian officer on the
staff of Colonel Nasser. It was an unlikely union and had not persisted
into Royan's adolescence.
Her mother had insisted upon returning to England, to her home town of
York, for Royan's birth. She wanted her child to have British
citizenship. After her parents had separated, Royan, again at her
mother's insistence, had been sent back to England for her schooling,
but all her holidays had been spent with her father in Cairo. Her
father's career had prospered exceedingly, and in the end he had
attained ministerial rank in the Mubarak government. Through her love
for him she came to look upon herself as more Egyptian than English.
It was her father who had arranged her marriage to Duraid Al Simma. It
was the last thing that he had done for her before his death. She had
known he was dying at the time, and she had not found it in her heart to
defy him. All her modern training made her want to resist the
old-fashioned Coptic tradition of the arranged marriage, but her
breeding and her family and her Church were against her. She had
acquiesced.
Her marriage to Duraid had not proved as insufferable as she had dreaded
it might be. It might even have been entirely comfortable and satisfying
if she had never been introduced to romantic love. However, there had
been her liaison with David while she was up at university. He had swept
her up in the hurly-burly, in the heady delirium, and, in the end, the