Lord of the Silent - Elizabeth Peters [79]
“So perhaps,” said Jumana, her eyes shining, “their tombs were also robbed, later, and their bodies were moved to a secret hiding place like the one at Deir el Bahri.”
She was a sharp little thing, and the gleam in her dark eyes aroused what his mother would have called strong forebodings. He hoped he hadn’t stimulated a hereditary interest in tomb hunting. Nefret was thinking the same thing; he heard her chuckle. He was glad she found it amusing. He had a horrible vision of Jumana scrambling over the hundreds of square acres of broken cliff on the west bank, looking for the “lost tomb of the princesses”—falling, breaking her leg, or fracturing her skull . . .
“That is what we call pure speculation,” he said sternly. “It means we do not know. Scholars do not waste time looking for something that may not be there.”
“Where?” Jumana asked, not at all disconcerted by his minatory tone.
“Anywhere! Didn’t you understand what I said?”
“He means you are not to go into the mountains alone,” said Nefret, corking the bottle.
“But we do it all the time! Don’t we, Jamil?”
She stretched out her leg and nudged Jamil with her foot. He glowered at her. “No. Not since we were children. You are not a child, you are a woman. Women do not climb the cliffs, they stay at home. Our father should have found you a husband before this. He will not allow—”
“That’s enough, Jamil,” Nefret said. Jumana’s eyes were bright with tears. She was a fine little actress, but Nefret thought her distress this time was genuine. She and her brother must have been good friends when they were young, before the conventional separation of the sexes and Jamil’s masculine ego destroyed their closeness.
They spent the rest of the day at the Ramesseum, climbing over fallen walls and columns and chatting with the local men who lay in wait for tourists. “Ramses the Great” was one of the few pharaohs known to most visitors, and the ruined colossus of that monarch was famous because of its association with Shelley’s sonnet.
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies . . .’ ”
Since the poet’s time, the legs had been shattered too. As they passed the tourists gathered round the pieces, they heard a plummy voice declaiming the only phrase the average person seemed able to remember—Shelley’s ironic commentary on the futility of human vanity: “ ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’ ”
The entire court was littered with statue fragments, bits of column and other debris; but the black granite head, which had been part of a smaller but even finer colossus of the king, was conspicuous by its absence. They hadn’t expected to find any evidence of how the thieves had managed to remove it—tracks of feet, carts, or animals had been well trampled by now—and Ramses’s attempts to question the “guards” were unsuccessful. Some melted quietly away when they saw what he was looking at; the ones he managed to corner expressed complete ignorance of the affair. They had all been somewhere else at the time.
“Some of them must have been bribed to be elsewhere,” Ramses said.
“No doubt,” Nefret agreed. “But they know we can’t prove anything.”
She led the way into the Hypostyle Hall. “At least the reliefs appear to be untouched,” she said.
“Yes, I don’t see any fresh gaps. Old Ramses was a combative bas—fellow, wasn’t he?” The scene they saw showed the Egyptian forces attacking a city in Palestine. Mounted in his chariot, the pharaoh drove over the bodies of the slain, while his sons thrust and struck at a row of kneeling enemies. “Even Thutmose III didn’t revel in fallen bodies so enthusiastically.”
“You’re aching to copy them, aren