Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [44]
We took our seats and waited through the safety lecture and then the recorded prayer in Arabic. As usual, I tried to guess what the singsong words meant. “Oh, Lord, please do not let us burst into a million flaming pieces. Do not let us crash in the desert and then be lost and die of thirst and heat in the sand. Do not let us resort to madness and cannibalism.” Maybe I didn’t like flying all that much after all.
To my surprise, Mohammad appeared at the last moment and swiftly took a seat near the front of the plane, as though hoping not to be noticed. If so, it was a vain hope. His huge shoulders overhung the back of his seat, and I could see his arm protruding into the aisle.
“Hey, what’s he doing here?” asked Jerry Morrison. He was sitting behind me and he grabbed the back of my seat to pull himself up for a better view. My head jerked back, and I turned in protest, but he didn’t notice. “He’s supposed to be watching our luggage. It’s a good thing I didn’t let him keep my bag,” he added, with a scathing look at Lydia.
“Oh, Daddy. It’s all right. I’m sure he gave it all to the driver,” said Kathy. Her tone was just as patronizing to her father as it was to the rest of us. I saw him give her a swift glare, but she was already leafing through her magazine and didn’t notice.
No one else answered him. But he had a point. Why was Mohammad coming with us?
Chapter 7
MONUMENTS AND MURDER
I leaned back in my seat, hoping Alan and I weren’t going to have any more cryptic conversations, but as it turned out, he seemed to have forgotten about his odd comments on Elephantine Island and instead chatted at length about the project that lifted the temples. I knew only the bare facts myself, and he was entertaining.
“When they built the Aswan Dam, the waters on this side started rising and they realized pretty quickly that they were going to lose Abu Simbel if they didn’t do something. It was an extraordinary thing—no one knew how they could possibly move such an enormous structure, carved into the side of the cliff. But then one of the engineers got the brilliant idea to slice the carvings off the sides of the cliff and reassemble them in an artificial cave on top. They cut the statues, the carvings, the columns, everything into manageable pieces, carefully mapped and labeled everything, and then reassembled it all like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Honestly, that had to be almost harder than doing the original construction. And to top it off, the water was rising the whole time. They actually had to build a miniature dam around the monument to hold back the waters. Some of the pieces were even submerged entirely before they could get them out.”
He could have been talking about earthworm excretion, and I would still have hung on his every word just to watch him talk: the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, the way he moved his hands, the way his hair fell across his forehead. And he smelled good. By the time the plane landed, we had moved on to talking about other countries we had visited and traveling in general. I think it was the first flight in the history of flying that seemed far too short.
A coach waited to drive us up the steep hills from the airport to the temple. We did not see much of the town on our route. Only a few houses, a vast expanse of rock, and an empty sky. I thought of other deserts I’d visited. The Sonoran Desert in Arizona, dotted with saguaro cactus. The Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas with its prickly pear and yucca. Both seemed lush and tropical compared to this. A few straggly plants existed around some of the homes, but in the untended areas, white rock and dust stretched as far as the eye could see. I felt thirsty just looking at it.
The bus stopped in a gravel parking lot and we scrambled off. Our driver stood at the steps, offering his hand to the ladies, and just beyond him Alan waited for me, a smile on his face. My stomach did a little flip as I joined him. I could see Kyla ahead of us, walking beside Anni, who was holding Hello Kitty above her