He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [130]
“A war is something of a distraction,” Nefret said dryly. “You are probably the only man on that committee who knows what he is talking about, Professor; you are doing Egypt a great service.”
Emerson said, “Hmph,” and Nefret added, “This can’t last forever. Someday . . .”
“Quite right,” I said. “You will do your duty, Emerson, and so will we all; and someday. . . .”
Nefret and I spent several hours in the darkroom. When we emerged, both Emerson and Ramses were gone.
From Manuscript H
Ramses could remember a time when carriages and camels and donkeys transported tourists to the pyramids along a dusty road bordered by green fields. Now taxis and private motorcars made pedestrian traffic hazardous and the once isolated village of Giza had been almost swallowed up by new houses and villas. Baedeker, the Bible of the tourist, dismissed it as uninteresting, but every visitor to the pyramids passed through it along the road or on the train, and the inhabitants preyed on them as they had always done, selling fake antiquities and hiring out donkeys. The town relapsed into somnolence after nightfall. Its amenities were somewhat limited: a few shops, a few coffee shops, a few brothels.
The coffee shop Ramses favored was a few hundred yards west of the station. It was not as pretentious as the Cairene equivalents: a beaten earth floor instead of tile or brick, a simple support of wooden beams framing the open front. As he approached Ramses heard a single voice rising and falling in trained cadences, which were broken at intervals by appreciative laughter or exclamations. A reciter, or storyteller, was providing entertainment. He must have been there for some time, for he was deep in the intricacies of an interminable romance entitled “The Life of Abu-Zayd.”
A few lamps, hanging from the wooden beams, showed the Sha’er perched on a stool placed on the mastaba bench in front of the coffee shop. He was a man of middle age with a neatly trimmed black beard; his hands held the single-stringed viol and bow with which he accompanied his narrative. His audience sat round him, on the mastaba or on stools, smoking their pipes as they listened with rapt attention.
The narrative, part in prose, part in verse, described the adventures of Abu-Zayd, more commonly known as Barakat, the son of an emir who cast him off because his dark skin cast certain doubts on the honor of his mother. The emir did his wife an injustice; Barakat’s coloring had been bestowed on him by a literal-minded god, in response to the lady’s prayer:
“Soon, from the vault of heaven descending
A black-plumaged bird of enormous weight
Pounced on the other birds and killed them all.
To God I cried—O Compassionate!
Give me a son like this noble bird.”
Waiting in the shadows, Ramses listened appreciatively to the flexible, melodic voice. It was quite a story, as picaresque and bloodthirsty as any Western epic, and it was conveniently divided into sections or chapters, each of which ended in a prayer. When the narrator reached the end of the current section Ramses stepped forward and joined the audience in reciting the concluding prayer.
He and his father were among the few Europeans whom Egyptians addressed as they would a fellow Moslem—probably because Emerson’s religious views, or lack thereof, made it difficult to classify him. “At least,” one philosophical speaker had remarked, “he is not a dog of a Christian.”
Emerson had found that highly amusing.
Ramses exchanged greetings with the patrons and politely saluted the reciter, whom he had encountered before. Refreshing himself with the coffee an admirer had presented to him, the Sha’er nodded in acknowledgment.
Ramses edged gradually away from the attentive audience and into the single, dirt-floored room. Only two creatures had resisted the lure of the narrator; one was a dog, sound asleep and twitching, under