Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [16]
Another group of friends awaited us in the courtyard of the house. Sennia was immediately gathered up by Kadija, Daoud’s wife, who had been too shy to come to the railroad station. We had all learned to admire this very large, very dignified woman, who had the dark brown skin of her Nubian mother. She and Nefret were especially close; as soon as Kadija had given Sennia a hearty hug, she passed the child on to the others who were waiting to greet her and turned to Nefret.
“You are blooming like a flower, Nur Misur,” she murmured, as they embraced. “Is it happiness or some other cause that puts the light in your eyes?”
I had wondered myself. They had been married for eight months—not that I was counting—and one might have supposed that by this time . . . Naturally I would never have ventured to ask directly, so you may believe I awaited Nefret’s response with considerable interest. Unfortunately at that moment Fatima came bustling up to inform me that she had prepared a feast of all our favorite dishes and that the food would be cold if we did not come at once. I asked for a little time to remove the dust of travel, a request which was granted. Our rooms were in perfect order, as I had expected.
“She has put rose petals in the wash water again,” Emerson said resignedly.
Though it would have been difficult to fault Fatima’s arrangements, there were always a few household matters to be attended to before we could begin work. The house had not the charm of others we had inhabited—I still regretted the loss of our residence in Luxor, which I had had built to my own specifications—but it was comfortable and commodious, with numerous balconies and a flat roof which we used as an open-air sitting room. We were in the habit of taking tea there whenever the weather was fine, enjoying the views of the city and the Giza pyramids and watching the sun go down in a blaze of fiery color.
However, certain members of the family did not find the house commodious enough. Nefret had already spoken to me about her and Ramses taking up residence on our dahabeeyah, which we kept moored at the tourist dock near the house. I could think of no reasonable objection to the scheme; over the years the boat had served as living quarters for various members of the family, and although it had become somewhat cramped for all of us it was roomy enough for two—especially if the two were close. So when Nefret raised the subject again—the first morning after our arrival—I assured her I would do everything I could to facilitate the move.
Emerson was the biggest stumbling block. He always objects to “wasting time” on household chores. When I first met him he was living quite comfortably, by his standards, in an empty tomb chapel, and it took me quite some time (and a lot of argument) to overcome his preference for tents over houses and a splash in the Nile over a nice neat bath chamber. He had us out at Giza the day after we arrived.
The previous season we had begun excavating some of the private tombs at Giza, called mastabas because their shape resembled that of the benches outside Egyptian houses. These splendid tombs belonged to the nobles and princes of the Old Kingdom; laid to rest near their royal master, they hoped to share the eternity of endless bliss that awaited him.
The neatly drawn plans readers will find in volumes of excavation reports, including our own, give a misleading picture. The rows of precise rectangles representing the streets of tombs show them as they were laid out four thousand years ago. When modern explorers first visited the site, it was a wilderness of broken stone and undulating sand. Only the head of the Sphinx showed above the sand; temples and tombs had been buried deep. And, as subsequent excavation proved, the tombs had been robbed and the temples vandalized in ancient times. The same pharaohs who composed pious inscriptions praising their kingly ancestors tore the monuments of those ancestors apart in order