Crocodile on the Sandbank - Elizabeth Peters [0]
AND CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK
“No one is better at juggling torches while dancing on a high wire than Elizabeth Peters.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Peters’s mystery series is such delicious fun.”
—Winston-Salem Journal
“Amelia Peabody Emerson, archeologist extraordinaire, and arguably the most potent female force to hit Egypt since Cleopatra, is digging in again!”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Plenty of interesting Egyptian and archeological lore, lots of danger.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Amelia is rather like Indiana Jones, Sherlock Holmes, and Miss Marple all rolled into one.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Elizabeth Peters is wickedly clever.… [Her] women are smart, strong, bold, cunning, and highly educated, just like herself.”
—San Diego Reader
“What’s more fun than an Elizabeth Peters book? Not much that’s legal!”
—Salisbury Post(NC)
“It’s always fun to go on safari with this crew.”
—Anniston Star(AL)
BOOKS BY ELIZABETH PETERS
Crocodile on the Sandbank
The Curse of the Pharaohs
The Hippopotamus Pool
The Last Camel Died at Noon
The Mummy Case
The Murders of Richard III
Naked Once More
Night Train to Memphis
Seeing a Large Cat
The Seventh Sinner
Silhouette in Scarlet
The Snake, The Crocodile and the Dog
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 1975 by Elizabeth Peters
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This edition is published in arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company
Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
www.twitter.com/grandcentralpub
First eBook Edition: February 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-57321-4
Contents
GREAT ACCLAIM FOR ELIZABETH PETERS AND CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK
BOOKS BY ELIZABETH PETERS
Copyright
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
To my son Peter
The love of my beloved is on yonder side
A width of water is between us
And a crocodile waiteth on the sandbank.
—Ancient Egyptian Love Poem
Author’s Note
ALTHOUGH my major characters are wholly fictitious, certain historic personages make brief appearances in these pages. Maspero, Brugsch and Grebaut were associated with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities in the 1880’s, and William Flinders Petrie was then beginning his great career in Egyptology. Petrie was the first professional archaeologist to excavate at Tell el Amarna and I have taken the liberty of attributing some of his discoveries—and his “advanced” ideas about methodology—to my fictitious archaeologists. The painted pavement found by Petrie was given the treatment I have described by Petrie himself. Except for discrepancies of this nature I have attempted to depict the Egypt of that era, and the state of archaeological research in the late nineteenth century, as accurately as possible, relying on contemporary travel books for details. In order to add verisimilitude to the narrative, I have used the contemporary spelling of names of places and pharaons, as well as certain words like “dahabeeyah.” For example, the name of the heretic pharaoh was formerly read as “Khuenaten.” Modern scholars prefer the reading “Akhenaten.” Similarly, “Usertsen” is the modern “Semiseri.”
1
WHEN I first set eyes on Evelyn Barton-Forbes she was walking the streets of Rome—
(I am informed, by the self-appointed Critic who reads over my shoulder as I write, that I have already committed an error. If those seemingly simple English words