Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [28]
—WorldPal pamphlet
Chapter 4
PLANES AND PAPYRUS
On the way to the airport, the bus stopped at the officially sanctioned papyrus factory shop, another of our obligatory learning/shopping experiences. En route, Anni went to great lengths to explain that many places sold fake papyrus and that we should not buy papyrus just anywhere. She made it sound as though, left unsupervised, all of us would stampede away from the bus, cash clenched in waving fists, accosting bystanders and demanding counterfeit papyrus. By the time she had finished, we knew far more about papyrus than we ever wanted to know, but we left the bus with the smug feeling that at least we now had the inside scoop. No one could cheat us and pawn off inferior papyrus like they would to those unlucky schmuck tourists who were not on a WorldPal tour.
The door was located on the side of the building, down a flight of stairs guarded by a rickety metal railing that descended steeply below street level. Seedy hardly described it adequately. Had we not been part of a tour, I most definitely would not have gone into that shop, and as it was I could see Nimmi and Dawn both giving Anni questioning looks. However, the Peterson boys charged ahead, jumping down the last three steps with a loud slap of tennis shoes on concrete and vanished inside. The rest of us followed more slowly, held up by Charlie and Yvonne, who somehow reached the stairs and started down clutching each other’s arms. We waited more or less patiently for them to either descend or fall.
Once inside, we found ourselves in a long low room. The floor was covered with worn mint green carpet, the wood-paneled walls covered with dozens of framed paintings. Four relatively young Egyptian men and two young women stood in strategic positions around the room, waiting. They were wearing western clothes, although the women, like Anni, wore headscarves. In the middle of the room, a large flat table held pans of water and a variety of instruments. The fluorescent lighting was overly bright and, reflecting off the carpet, gave our faces an odd greenish cast.
As we drew near enough to get a good look at the papyrus paintings, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of disappointment. The paper itself was made of light tan strips of reed that reminded me very much of the bamboo shoots that came in a dish of almond chicken. They were pressed together in the way that kids wove strips of paper together at Easter to make little place mats. Of course, the Egyptians had figured out some way to press the reeds together strongly enough to form a solid sheet, but the strips were still visible. More surprising, the paintings themselves were in the most garish colors imaginable, and although there were many pieces with traditional Egyptian cartouches and icons, more than a few were painted with westernized subjects, including kittens and little birds. Some of it would have been right at home in a Gas ’N’ Go in Arkansas.
“Thank God this is the authentic stuff,” Kyla whispered to me. “Just imagine what the cheap crap would look like.”
She slipped away while the rest of us approached the table to watch a small middle-aged man demonstrate how to soak and pound papyrus reeds. After whacking on a piece of reed the size of a broom handle, he made a cut with a lethal-looking knife and then peeled off a long strip of wet fiber. The faint remnants of enthusiasm fluttered around his movements, but it was either too early or he’d repeated this performance once too often to summon anything more. Listlessly, he held out the