The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [126]
Ramses exchanged bemused glances with Nefret. Her open-mouthed astonishment convinced him, had he doubted it, that she had known nothing of my scheme. He laughed a little, and shook his head.
“Mother, you never cease to amaze me. I hope you enjoy yourself. As the older wife you will be in a position to bully Nefret—and Father.”
“Ha,” said Emerson meaningfully.
Ramses was gone next morning. When Nefret joined us for breakfast she was a trifle hollow-eyed and pale, but that might have been a normal reaction to such a hard parting. I did not feel I had the right to ask what they had said to one another—my sympathetic imagination supplied a good deal of the dialogue—but I did venture to inquire whether Ramses had been angry about our following him.
“Resigned, rather,” Nefret said, toying with her toast.
“Eat something,” I ordered. “We are leaving in an hour and it will be a long, hard day. The first of many, I fear.”
“Not at all,” said Emerson. “The T Model Ford Light car—”
“I don’t want to hear about it, Emerson. Eat your breakfast.”
“I have,” said Emerson indignantly. “You are the one who is delaying us.”
To have left the hotel in disguise or in the vehicle Emerson had acquired would have aroused speculation. We went by cab to Atiyeh, the village where the northern branch of Abdullah’s family lived, and there we found no other than Selim awaiting our arrival. He was disappointed when I failed to register surprise at seeing him.
“It was logical,” I explained. “Once I learned of the motorcar. I am pleased, Emerson, that you didn’t insist on driving it yourself.”
“I had a number of reasons for bringing Selim along, all of them excellent, and all of them, you will claim, obvious to you. Let us not waste time discussing the subject. Is the car ready, Selim?”
“Yes, Father of Curses. It is,” Selim said enthusiastically, “a wonderful motorcar. It has—”
“What about supplies?” I asked.
“Everything is in order, Sitt Hakim,” Selim said. He looked doubtfully at the piles of personal luggage I had brought. “I think there will be room.”
There was, but just barely. Nefret and I would have to sit on some of the parcels and put our feet on others. There was not even space on top of the vehicle, where Selim had fastened several long planks.
The whole village gathered to wave good-bye and shout blessings. It would have been impossible to conceal our expedition, whose ostensible purpose was to examine certain ruins in the Sinai. Selim had asked them not to speak of it, and since they all knew about Emerson’s frequent disputes with the Antiquities Department, they assumed we were planning to excavate without official permission. Sooner or later someone would tell the story, as a good joke on the authorities, but as Emerson philosophically remarked, it didn’t matter much; by the time the gossip reached General Murray, it would be too late to stop us.
As an additional precaution we waited until we were well away from the village before we assumed our disguises. Emerson’s consisted of shirt and trousers, an elegant long vest and flowing robe, and, of course, a beard. Instead of a tarboosh or turban, he covered his head with a khafiyeh—the flattering headdress worn by the desert people that frames the face in folds of cloth and is held in place by a twisted cord. It shadowed those distinctive features more effectively than a turban and protected the back of his neck from the sun.
Nefret and I bundled ourselves up in the inconvenient and uncomfortable ensembles worn by Moslem ladies when they travel abroad. Ramses always said that if a disguise is to be successful, it must be accurate in every detail, so Nefret and I were dressed from the skin out in appropriate garments: a shirt and a pair of very full trousers, with a long vest, called a yelek, over them; and over the yelek a gibbeh; and over the gibbeh the additional layers of the traveling costume—a large loose gown called a tob, a face veil that reaches nearly to the feet—and on top of it all a voluminous habarah of black silk which conceals the head and the hands as well as