Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [135]
I’m rather proud of my literary skills, but I find it almost impossible to describe my feelings. Start with disbelief, excitement, triumph, confusion . . . and now, as the import of his words sank in, mounting apprehension.
I wouldn’t have known him. He was wearing the ubiquitous and usefully enveloping Egyptian dress; his galabeeyah was of fine quality and his beard was grizzled, and he wore the green turban restricted to descendants of the Prophet. He was the picture of the dignified holy man Sayid had described, except for his pale face and shaking hands.
“You are ill,” I said, moving toward him. “Let me—”
“Shut up.” He dropped to his knees and tugged at something on the floor. “We’ve got a few seconds. Maybe a minute. Damn, I can’t do this. Give me a hand.”
There had been no attempt to conceal the trapdoor; it covered the entrance to a small underground room that was used for storage. Between us we got it up, and I saw the top of a rough wooden ladder.
“You first,” he said. “Hurry.”
“But it’s a dead end!”
“You don’t take orders well, do you?” He was still on his knees. A violent fit of trembling seized him and his teeth began to chatter, and at that strategic moment the door shuddered under the impact of a heavy object.
I got down the ladder without touching more than three of the rungs and reached up to steady him as he followed me down. He pushed my hands away. I couldn’t see what he was doing, it was too dark; I heard scraping noises and a few muffled oaths, and then he fumbled for my hand.
“Through there. Get rid of your tob and habarah, you’ll have to crawl. Hands and knees. Keep moving. It’s about ten yards. When you can’t go any farther, wait for me.”
It was a tunnel, and I didn’t like it one bit. Though walls and ceiling had been braced with pieces of wood, sand kept trickling through them. It inspired me to move more quickly than I might otherwise have done, but I hadn’t gone more than a few yards before I heard his hard breathing and felt his hands pushing on the soles of my shoes.
“Forty-one, forty-two—can’t you move any faster?”
I said, “Ouch.” My head had just come into painful contact with a solid surface.
“Right-angle turn,” said my invisible companion. “Forty-six . . . Faster.”
He went on counting. When he reached sixty he grabbed hold of my ankles and pulled. I fell hard, flat on my stomach, and he fell on top of me.
I had once been in an air raid in London, when a shell landed within a hundred yards of the Underground station. It felt and sounded like that: a muffled blast and a horrible vibration. The slow dribble of earth increased to a steady rain.
“The ceiling’s coming down,” I said, through a mouthful of sand.
“Not just yet, I hope. Go on, we’re almost out.”
When I raised my head I saw starlight. The opening was only a few feet away. I squeezed through, encouraged by an occasional shove and a stream of muttered expletives, and found myself in the open air behind a tumble of mud-bricks that had once been a house or storage shed. Sethos followed me out. He was bareheaded; either he’d discarded the distinctive green turban or it had been pulled off. He sat down and wrapped his arms around his raised knees. “Go on.”
“Where?”
“Anyplace where there are bright lights and hordes of people. Or you might cast yourself on the tender mercies of my . . . of the Emersons. Their dahabeeyah is a mile away. In that direction.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be all right here.”
Dancing lights, the flames of candles or lamps, surrounded the pile of rubble where the house had stood, and a cloud of dust was still settling. People were shouting. The sound of the explosion would have brought the villagers out of their houses, and I had an unpleasant suspicion that they weren’t the only spectators.
“The devil you will,” I said. “Blowing up the tunnel will only delay them. They’ll spread out in all directions. Stand up.”
A mile isn’t really a great distance. It is very long when one is encumbered with an unwilling, increasingly helpless