A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [7]
"How did it come to you? And the box? That's surely not first century?"
"Heavens no. Renaissance Italian, from the style of inlay, but I'm no expert on modern stuff. The two came together, though I added the tissue paper to stop it from rattling about. Got it about four months ago, just before Easter. I was in Jerusalem— had just come back from a visit to Luxor, Howard Carter's dig. Quite a find he's got there, eh? Pity about Carnarvon, though. Any road, I had just been back a day or so when this old Bedouin came to my door with a bundle of odds and ends to sell. Couldn't think why he came to me. They all know I don't buy things like that, don't like to encourage it. I told him so, and I was about to shut the door in his face when he said something about 'Aurens.' That's the name a lot of the Arabs call Ned Lawrence— you know, the Arab revolt Lawrence? Right, well, I knew him a bit when he was working at Carchemish before the war, at Woolley's dig in Syria. Brilliant young man, Lawrence. Pity he got sidetracked into blowing things up, he could have done some fine work. Seems to have lost interest. Oh well, never too late, he's still young. Where was I? Oh, right, the Bedouin. Turned out this Bedouin knew him then, too, and rode with him during the war, destroying bridges and railway lines and what not.
"His English was not too great— this Bedouin's, that is, not Lawrence's, of course— but over numerous cups of coffee, with my Arabic and his English, it turned out that he'd been injured during the war and now was finding it difficult to get work. A lot of these people are being crowded out of their traditional way of life and have no real skills for the modern world. Sad, really. Seems that was his case. So, he was selling his possessions to buy food. Sounds like the standard hard-luck story to convince a gullible European to hand over some cash, but somehow the man didn't strike me that way. Dignified, not begging. And his right hand was indeed scarred and nearly useless. Tragic, that, for an Arab, as you know. So I looked at his things.
"Some of them were rubbish, but there were half a dozen beautiful things: three necklaces, a bracelet, two very old figurines. Told him I couldn't afford what they were worth but that I'd take him to someone who could. At first, he thought I was just putting him off, couldn't believe I was not trying to buy at a cut price, but the next day I took him to a couple of collectors and got them to give him every farthing of their value. Amounted to quite a bit, in the end. He was speechless, wanted to give me some of it, but I couldn't take it, could I? I told him that if he wanted to repay me, he could promise never to be involved with digging up old things for sale. That'd be payment enough. He went off; I went back to my sketches for the dig.
"About a month later, late one night, he appeared again at my door, on site this time, with another bag. Oh Lord, I thought, Not again! But he handed me the bag and said it was for me. There were two things in it. The first was a magnificent embroidered dress, which he said his wife had made for me. The other was this box. He told me it came from his mother, had been in the family for generations, since before the Prophet came. I knew it wasn't that old, and he must have seen something on my face, because he took the box and opened it to show me the manuscript. That was what his family had owned for so long, not the box, he said, which had been his father's. He told me, if I understood him right— he would insist on speaking English, though my Arabic's better than his was— that it had been in a sort of pottery mould or figurine when he was a child. It broke when he was twelve, and the whole family was terrified that something awful would happen— sounds like a sort of household god, doesn't it? They hadn't known there was anything inside the figure. Nothing much happened, though, and after a while his father put the manuscript into a box he had been given by some European. It came to this man when his parents were killed during the