The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [115]
“The greater pity,” said Ramses, “is Jamil. If he had turned his unique talent to archaeology he might have been happy and successful. How does one account for such men?”
“Don’t start a philosophical discussion,” Emerson growled. “I cannot account for them and neither can your mother, though she will try if you give her half a chance. The family will get over this in time, and so will Jumana. Time heals . . .” Realizing he had been on the verge of committing an aphorism, he caught himself and went on, “Was he trying to tell us, at the end, where the tomb is located, or was he still taunting us? ‘In the hand of the god!’ ”
Yusuf’s funeral took place next day, as Moslem custom decreed. Naturally we all attended. When we saw the second shrouded body, Emerson muttered, “They wouldn’t have the audacity to put him in Abdullah’s tomb, would they? By Gad, the old fellow would rise up and forbid it.”
I didn’t doubt that he would. Had he not said, “Leave him to me”? Call it fate, call it accident; yet vicious as the boy had been, I was glad he had not met his death at our hands.
Selim had seen to the arrangements, as he told us later. Father and son were interred in another of the family sepulchres—an underground chamber where they could sit upright, awaiting the call of the angels of death. We took our departure before the opening was closed.
Cyrus got all fired up, as he admitted in his quaint American slang, by Jamil’s last words. “It was there, before our eyes? In the Cemetery of the Monkeys? What hand of what god?”
“One cannot place much credence in the words of a dying man,” I informed him. “Especially a man who spent his entire life trying to deceive.”
So we went back to work at Deir el Medina—all of us except Jumana. The horrors of that night had been too much. She took to her bed, and refused to eat or respond to my attempts to reason with her. The only person who could rouse her was Sennia. She knew that Jumana had lost both brother and father, though of course we had spared her the dreadful details, and the good little creature spent hours reading to her and talking with her.
It was on the Tuesday, if memory serves, that we received a message from Howard Carter, asking us to join him for dinner that evening at the Winter Palace.
“So he’s back in Luxor,” Emerson said. “We’ll go. I have a number of questions for him.”
It was a diversion we all needed, and I must confess that my spirits lifted as I assumed my favorite crimson evening frock and fastened on my diamond earrings. The pleasure derived from dressing in one’s best may be a weakness of women; in my opinion men would be better off if they could indulge in it.
No shadow of foreboding darkened my thoughts as the boat bore us smoothly across the shimmering water. It ought to have done. The first person we saw when we entered the elegant lobby of the hotel was the man we had known as “Smith”—the Honorable Bracegirdle-Boisdragon, who had tried on several occasions to get Ramses back into the intelligence services.
There was no way of avoiding him without downright rudeness. This consideration might not have deterred Emerson but for the fact that “Smith” was accompanied by an attractive lady of a certain age, wearing elegant mourning. Smith introduced her as his sister, Mrs. Bayes, who was visiting Egypt for the first time, and she immediately burst into raptures about the country, the antiquities, and the great honor of making our acquaintance. She had heard so much about us.
“Have you indeed?” I said, giving Smith a sharp look.
“She is reading the Professor’s History and has reached Volume Three,” said Smith blandly.
“It was Algie’s excitement about Egypt that induced me to come,” Mrs. Bayes explained. She gave her brother a sickeningly fond look. She is putting it on, I thought to myself; that cold fish of a man is incapable of inspiring such adoration.
“It was courageous of you to risk the sea voyage at this time,” I said.
The lady’s face took on an expression of gentle melancholy. “When one has lost that