Lion in the Valley - Elizabeth Peters [64]
“Did you ever see such absurd figures?” Emerson demanded. “Green umbrellas, flaps of cloth about their heads . . .”
Compared to Emerson, they did look ridiculous. Hatless, his bronzed throat and arms bared, he was in tune with his surroundings as few foreigners in Egypt could be. But then Emerson is a remarkable man. He has never suffered from sunstroke or sunburn or even from catarrh, though he absolutely refuses to wear a flannel belt, which, as every physician knows, is the only certain preventative for that common affliction.
The little caravan approached us. None of the riders was accustomed to donkeyback; they bounced up and down like jumping jacks on strings. Emerson pushed his sleeves to his shoulders. “I will just go and run them off.”
“Wait, Emerson. . . .” But I was too late. Emerson’s long legs carried him swiftly toward the enemy.
His raised hand brought the procession to a halt. One stout gentleman fell off his donkey and was hauled to his feet by a pair of grinning donkey boys. A lively discussion ensued. I could not make out the words, except for an occasional expletive from Emerson, but the gestures of the participants left no doubt as to their state of mind.
Enid chuckled. “I am reminded of Aunt Betsy, in Dickens’ charming novel,” she said.
“Like Aunt Betsy, Emerson will prevail,” I said, buttering another bit of bread.
Sure enough, after a while the caravan turned away, heading for the North Pyramid, and Emerson returned, refreshed and exhilarated by the encounter. We all went back to work except for the cat Bastet, who yawned and sauntered into the tent to take a nap.
I did not expect the discoveries of that first day to be momentous, and they were not—only the usual pottery shards and fragments of funerary objects. The whole area was one vast cemetery—a city of the dead whose population far exceeded that of any metropolis, modern or ancient. I showed Enid the proper procedure for dealing with such finds, for we kept scrupulously accurate records of every object, no matter how undistinguished.
There was little going on to occupy my mind, so I was able to devote part of my attention to working out an answer to the question people kept asking me. How indeed to attract the attention of the Master Criminal? I sympathized with Mr. Nemo’s disinclination to sit with folded hands until that gentleman decided to make his next move. Tactically and psychologically it would be to our advantage to take the initiative and encourage an attack. What I needed was a treasure—a cache of royal jewelry like the one that had attracted the M.C.’s interest the year before. Ramses had found one such cache at Dahshoor. (In fact, I was fairly certain he had found two; the treasure of Princess Khnumit, which M. de Morgan had produced with such fanfare at the end of the season, might have been his reward for promising to yield the site to us. I had not questioned Ramses about the matter and I had no intention of doing so, since confirmation of my suspicion would raise delicate ethical questions I was not prepared to deal with.)
Nor had I any intention of going, hat in hand, to my own son and asking him to help me find antiquities. I had even rejected the idea of interrogating the boy about the subsidiary pyramid. I meant to carry out my excavation according to the strictest scientific principles—but what I really wanted to find was the entrance. I yearned to squirm into that entrance and search for the burial chamber, and it would not have surprised me in the slightest to learn that Ramses knew precisely where it was located. He had a diabolical instinct for such things. However, great as would be the pleasure of entering the pyramid, the pleasure of finding it without Ramses’ assistance would be even greater, and as the morning passed, with no sign of an opening, I began to think I had overestimated the boy. The men were still digging out sand, and not even Ramses—surely, not even Ramses?—could have located a hidden