Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [62]
Nefret was getting acquainted with her mare, whispering into its pricked ear and stroking its neck. She was wonderful with animals and impossibly tenderhearted; every year she collected a menagerie of injured or abandoned creatures. Ramses hoped she wouldn’t want to adopt a few stray cats, dogs, and goats while they were in Luxor. He gave her a hand up, and mounted his horse, a massively built black with white blazes on forehead and chest.
They set off along the road that led through the cultivated fields toward the cliffs of the high plateau. The air was already warm. What with their unexpected visitor and Jamil’s nonchalance about time, they had been late in getting off, but it was necessary to pay a courtesy call on Jamil’s father before they went on with the day’s business.
The house his parents had built was near the hill and the village of Sheikh el-Gurneh. They had all lived there, in comparative harmony, for almost seven years; but Ramses had no particular desire to live there again. If we come back to Luxor for a long period of time, he thought, I’ll build another house—one that will be ours from the start. His mother’s energetic personality imprinted itself on every place she had ruled as mistress. At least he didn’t have to face that penetrating stare of hers whenever he walked into the saloon. Nefret must have felt the same; without discussing it or asking his opinion, she had replaced the portrait with another of David’s paintings, the copy he had made of the offering scene from Tetisheri’s tomb.
Word of their coming had preceded them by several weeks, and someone—probably everyone—had worked like the very devil to get the house in order. It had been freshly painted and reroofed. The flowers in the boxes on the veranda had a suspiciously youthful look, but they would show up nicely in the photographs he meant to take for his mother.
The whole family, men and women and children, poured out of the house to greet them. Then the women retired, leaving them on the veranda with Yusuf and the other men.
The years had changed Yusuf, and not for the better. He had got quite stout. A roll of fat framed his bearded chin, and when he smiled his cheeks swallowed up his eyes. After the usual compliments had been exchanged, they settled down on the veranda with coffee, cigarettes, and several platters of food, and Yusuf asked how he could be of service.
“Where will you be digging? I can find all the men you want, good men who have worked for the Father of Curses before.”
Ramses explained that they had not come to excavate and felt sorry when he saw Yusuf’s fat, affable face fall. Times were hard for the men of Gurneh.
“But the Father of Curses said you would be digging in the Valley of the Monkeys,” Yusuf protested.
“Oh, did he?”
Ramses didn’t verbalize the expletives he would like to have added. The Valley of the Monkeys was what the Egyptians called the West Valley, because of the wall paintings in one of the tombs. It was part of Lord Carnarvon’s concession, and nobody else had the right to excavate there. Emerson had mentioned in an offhand manner that they might just have a look at the tomb of Amenhotep III—as a favor to Howard Carter. Carter would probably not regard it as a favor. Emerson was up to his old tricks, trying to maneuver people into doing what he wanted them to do, by fair means or foul.
“We may go out there one day to have a look round,” Ramses said. “First of all I want to inspect Tetisheri